Wednesday, August 31, 2011

NM Effective Teaching Task Force Recommendations

Here are the recently released NM Effective Teaching Task Force Recommendations for evaluating teachers and school leaders. I haven't had the chance to read them thoroughly yet, but they seem fairly reasonable.  The one thing I'm wondering about, though, is that teachers in un-tested (by a Standards Based Assessment) grades have 25% of their evaluation based on their school's letter grade A-F.  I guess that has the potential to get teachers to care about how their school does as a whole, but it seems more likely to de-incentivize working in traditionally low-performing schools.  I definitely think, considering how many low performing schools there are in New Mexico, that we need to create incentives for our best teachers to be working in our most difficult schools - and not the other way around.

3 comments:

  1. Ditto. The grade itself though is not as important as the net grade change from year to year. So theoretically if you go into a failing school, teach an untested subject and help the school rise to a D, that helps your eval (or at least 25% of it).

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  2. Thanks for the comment. So, now that the recommendations have been made, do they just go into effect in 2013-14? Are there any votes that need to happen? I'm pretty unsavvy about how changes actually get made to state-mandated public school processes.

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  3. It's actually not state-mandated (yet). It's just a set of recommendations for the governor. We think much of it will go into policy via executive order (which is what was used to initiate the task force itself) though some might go through the legislature (especially policies that cost the state money, I would think).

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