Governor urges better teacher evaluations

By Deirdre Fernandes And Matthew Bowers
The Virginian-Pilot

Virginia’s students have sat in the cross hairs of the accountability movement for the past few years. Now, the state’s new governor is targeting their teachers.

Gov. Tim Kaine is urging school divisions to better evaluate all teachers and has made the issue central to his education agenda.

Businesses typically review employees’ performance each year. Virginia requires the same for the first three years of a teacher’s career or for teachers new to the state.

Kaine said that he was surprised to find a wildly inconsistent pattern of evaluating more senior teachers in his travels across the commonwealth.

In fact, there are no state rules.

“That just struck me as a very unusual thing,” he said in a recent interview.

Even among South Hampton Roads’ divisions, which regularly evaluate their teachers, the standards vary.

In Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, teachers with more than three years’ experience are supposed to be evaluated at least every two years. In Norfolk, it’s every four years – or once in the time a typical student spends in high school.

Elsewhere in Virginia, evaluations may be even less frequent, sometimes only when someone lodges a complaint against an instructor, Kaine said.

Still, some teachers and their advocates question the necessity of oft-repeated, checklist-type reviews for long time teachers.

“I think there should be regular evaluations,” said Rob Jones, the director of government relations for the Virginia Education Association.

Still, he added, “We believe if a teacher has demonstrated a high level of competence year after year, that the principal probably would be better off spending time working with the new teachers, rather than devoting a great deal of their precious time to frequent evaluations of proven teachers.”

Some teachers said they don’t object to extra attention.

“Teaching is a fairly isolated profession,” said Elizabeth Harris, an 18-year history teacher at Great Bridge High School in Chesapeake.

“You come in your classroom, shut the door, and you don’t always see other ways to attack a problem.” She called evaluations “actually very helpful.”

Teachers also say that they are informally evaluated in different ways throughout the year: Some principals might pop in to watch classes, check lesson plans, analyze student grades or check records of contact with parents.

Official evaluations typically call for classroom observations – some announced, some not – that last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more.

In Portsmouth , principals have a one-page evaluation form, said Margaret Buxton, the division’s human resources director. Other cities have the same.

They grade teachers “satisfactory,” “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement” on criteria including planning, managing the classroom, knowing the subject and successfully teaching it, and professional responsibilities such as good attendance and communicating with parents.

“Even though they seem kind of general,” Buxton said, “you’re going to know whether the students are engaged when you walk into the classroom.”

Meredith Garrett Jr., principal of Hickory Elementary School in Chesapeake, said he tries to catch a variety of lessons, and at least the beginning and end of a lesson. He tries to determine whether students are being taught critical thinking skills.

“It has become probably one of the hardest things we have to do,” Garrett said, “and it’s probably one of the most important.”

Principals review their observations with teachers, who sign them. Formal evaluations are placed in teachers’ personnel files. The state doesn’t monitor them.

Buxton said her staff alerts her to only poor evaluations.

Kaine acknowledged that his evaluation campaign faces challenges. In the past few years, bills that have addressed teacher evaluations have languished in the House of Delegates.

A strong teachers lobby and some complex requirements generally account for that. For instance, evaluators – usually principals or their assistants – must be trained. If teachers are evaluated partly by their students’ test scores, student achievement should be compared at the beginning and end of the year. That isn’t currently done.

School administrators warn that it would be almost impossible for them to follow the typical business model and conduct annual performance reviews.

“Principals can’t get to 100 teachers if it’s a large school,” Portsmouth’s Buxton said. “You have a lot of people you are responsible for.”

Kaine said he has no specific plan on what the more uniform evaluations would look like. Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple,

D-Arlington, has introduced a bill – SB324 – that calls for increasing Virginia’s teachers’ salaries to the national average but at the same time requires that principals evaluate teachers at least once every three years.

The bill recognizes that Virginia needs money to recruit good teachers to the state, Whipple said.

She added, “It says we’re going to make sure they’re good.”

Reach Deirdre Fernandes at (757) 222-5121 or deirdre.fernandes@pilotonline.com.

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