The Way Teachers are Evaluated is Absolutely INSANE!

One day this week, I was asked to be a substitute for a teacher in another part of the building. This is a pretty common occurrence. It can sometimes be impossible to get substitute teachers nowadays. In a pinch, which is pretty much daily, teachers are asked to cover the class of a colleague during their prep period. Some schools, like mine, pay a small stipend to teachers for giving up prep time to cover another class, but not all do.

As it happens, my large, urban middle school of over 1,000 7th and 8th graders, is broken into four separate small learning communities. On this day, I was venturing into a different community.

I might as well have been venturing to a different planet.

When I arrived at the classroom, I could sense right away that this was a bad mix of kids. Every community has their fair share of students with behavior issues, but when I walked into this classroom, I saw that it was full of students with behavior issues. It was as if every kid who had a hard time behaving properly in class in that whole part of the building had been funneled into that one small classroom. I’m a 22-year veteran in the middle school trenches. I’ve seen my share of tough classes. But this one took the cake.

I’ll spare you the details but suffice to say that by the middle of that period, I had tried every trick in my book to get compliance from these kids. Nothing worked. At one point, I thought I had gotten them fairly focused, and it got reasonably quiet. Within a minute or two, one student proclaimed that “it’s too quiet in here, let’s make some noise.” That was the end of the calm. My classroom management has never been a big problem. Granted, in my own classroom, I have the opportunity to build relationships with kids from day one and that makes a huge difference, but I’ve subbed in many other classes with kids I didn’t know and never experienced something on the scale of this. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that by the end of that class period, I was an emotional wreck. I felt myself going into the fight, flight, or freeze mode. I chose the freeze option. I basically shut down in an attempt at self-preservation. I made it to the end of the class and walked back to my classroom through the “fog of war.” Luckily, it was the last period of the day, and I had time to recover.

That experience made one thought scream in my head for the next few hours. The teacher I subbed for that day is held accountable for the performance of that class. He will be formally observed twice during the school year. His scores on those two observed lessons will be a major part of the formula used to decide if he will be eligible for a raise the next year. If his scores are too low, he could be put on an improvement plan and be forced to jump through all sorts of additional hoops to prove his worth as a teacher. What if his observer just happens to show up one day to observe that nightmarish class? After all, any class period is fair game for observations. What if that class was completely uncooperative during an observed lesson? You only get two scored observations in a year. Are you beginning to see my point?

This year, I don’t have any class period that I would be that worried about having someone come in and observe me, but that’s not always the case.

The way teachers are held accountable, the way we are evaluated, the way our salaries hang in the balance, and the way our very careers can be at stake, is absolutely insane.

It’s also the NUMBER ONE reason why so many young teachers are fleeing from the profession in droves.

Mark my words, if our state legislatures don’t wise up and focus on the disease they’ve created rather than the symptoms they say they are trying to treat, we are headed down a very dark road.

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What I Learned in School Today with Shane Phipps