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Legislative Testimony: Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellows Testify Before the Indiana State Senate

Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellows Sarah Zuckerman, Tina Ahlgren, and Lee Anne McKelvey request that the Indiana State Legislature add provisions to Senate Bill 1 that would eliminate “last in/first out” layoff policies in the state.

Download here.

 

 

Senate Testimony:  Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellows Request That the

Indiana State Legislature Add Provisions to Senate Bill 1 that Would

Eliminate “Last In, First Out” Layoff Policies in the State

 

Testimony by Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellow Sarah Zuckerman

Monday, April 11, 2011

As a teacher, and an ISTA member, and parent, I feel that the last in/first out system of staffing has run its course.

My job impact lives, and after working in the inner city for the past eight years, I have been able to see effect of teachers on my students’ ability to succeed in life and realize their goals. The responsibility I face is equal to that of a brain surgeon. What I do on a daily basis will have long term consequences or opportunities for my students.  I want to teach with other highly effective teachers in order to help my students reach their potential.  

All teachers are not equal.  Patrick Clark was the best PE teacher I have seen in my career.  He took a pay cut to teach in IPS, leaving a comfy township job, because he wanted to serve urban students and he believed in the mission of our project based curriculum.  The only male on the K-6 staff, our students were head over heels for him, not just when they were doing somersaults, but all the time.  He was an incredible teacher who made gym class a rigorous discovery into the human body and healthy lifestyle.  Everyone’s favorite class was his, he even had an “Olympic Sports Club” which was a savior for 18 high-energy-in-trouble-all-the-time boys who, with the help of that club, all suddenly started succeeding academically.  Patrick was also on a team with myself and two other amazing teachers who were planning inter-disciplinary curriculum focused on raising achievement through project-based learning for the following year.  We worked for six months on this, meeting during, before, and after school to prepare for the next year.

When Patrick received his pink-slip the students were heartbroken.  The students and parents tried to come to his rescue, writing petitions and letters to save his job. They would say, “Why does he have to leave? This is not fair.” Then they came up with a staffing solution, lay off Ms. H instead.  Ms. H was the more senior PE teacher.  If you asked anyone who was the worst teacher in the building, her name would almost always come up. It was no secret that she had been put on an improvement plan many times, but for some reason or another, she still remained in the profession.  The students could not understand why she kept her job and he was let go.  It was clear to everyone – students, parents, and teachers – who was the better teacher for the students.

The team of four effective teachers I was working with to create curriculum was dismantled by this RIF.  Patrick and another teacher were laid off.  Patrick took a job at a charter, while the other teacher took a job at the highest performing and most affluent school in IPS where she was provided more protections from future layoffs.  The third teacher who was not laid off still left IPS because she was tired of losing amazing colleagues and was so frustrated by all of our hard work being wiped out by this policy.  This left only me, one fourth of the instructional team, to continue to work for the next year.  

The three other teachers are all now serving more affluent students, where they are receiving more protections and their excellence is recognized.  These policies routinely hurt low-income and minority students the most.  Across my school, and other urban schools, more promising and effective early career teachers have been laid off based on their date of hire, destroying instructional teams and student dreams.

I have seen the damage that occurs when an ineffective teacher is allowed to remain in front of students.  I have felt the frustration from my students when they know a certain class is a waste of time, or when their test scores needed for their high school diplomas were a clear measure of a teacher who had been allowed to be ineffective for too long. It is heartbreaking to see a student work hard and still not be given an opportunity to succeed.  

I’ve also seen amazing teachers leave IPS or even worse, the profession, because it didn’t matter how great they were or how hard they worked. The only thing that mattered was the date of their hire. This isn’t celebrating and appreciating great teachers; it demoralizes and de-professionalizes all of us.  Can you imagine routinely firing all 1st-3rd year doctors?  What would happen over time to the profession of medicine?  Would you want to send your child to a doctor who was recognized only for how long they had been practicing, regardless of their methods of success or failure? Teachers are brain surgeons, and our job performance profoundly affects a child’s life and ability to succeed.

I know it doesn't have to be this way. The teacher in front of the classroom does matter, and is proven to be the most important factor in determining student success, which determines their opportunities in life.  To protect our children, we have to stop our obsession with fairness to adults, and instead look at job performance.  Students suffer because of these staffing policies, especially low-income children.  We must look at the quality of our teachers when making layoff decisions. Our children deserve nothing less.

 

Testimony by Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellow Tina Ahlgren

Monday, April 11, 2011

My name is Tina Ahlgren, and I am currently in my sixth year as a secondary mathematics teacher at Thomas Carr Howe Community High School.  We serve grades 7 – 12 on the near East side of Indianapolis as a part of Indianapolis Public Schools.

In an ideal world, I would look forward to my annual performance evaluation.  I would work throughout the school year with a variety of individuals knowledgeable in mathematics pedagogy, analyzing growth data collected in my classroom and finding new strategies to better reach my students.  I would be an active participant in an ongoing, collaborative process to help identify and improve my weaknesses.  The evaluation process itself would encourage colleagues to work together toward a common vision. Unfortunately, the reality is far from ideal. 

In many cases, evaluations have become either a formality and annoyance, or something to dread because of politics within the school.  Teachers and administrators have lost all faith in the process.  I’ve witnessed good teachers pay the price after crossing their evaluator the wrong way.  One teacher at my school, who teaches advanced placement classes and serves on numerous district curriculum committees, was rated unsatisfactory in his lesson planning and preparation after a disagreement with his evaluator early in the school year.  When he attended the mandatory professional development required to improve his performance, his own lesson plans were presented to him as the ideal model.  Using multiple evaluators, as well as including more objective factors into the evaluation, will help protect good teachers from falling victim to evaluator bias.  This is a major step in restoring teachers’ confidence in the system as a whole. 

Using peers or outside individuals as evaluators will also help ease the burden on already overloaded administrators, who are often unable to complete a fair, accurate, and useful evaluation due to their overwhelming responsibilities. Once, my evaluation consisted of an assistant principal walking into the computer lab where my students were working, giving me two thumbs up, and immediately walking out.  The year before, my only observation came while I was administering a state mandated standardized test.  While my evaluations in both cases indicated positive performance, they did nothing to help me grow and learn as a teacher, which should be one of the primary goals of an evaluation.

It is evaluations such as this, as well as an unwillingness to counsel out the lowest performers, that allows ineffective teachers to remain year after year, climbing higher up the salary scale, causing harm to students along the way.  This school year I’ve had the experience of witnessing such a teacher up close.  In September, I was asked by my administration to assist another teacher who had recently been placed at our building by human resources.  Soon I realized their motivation – they needed to prove that they had done everything possible to support him so that they would be able to pass him on to yet another building at the end of the school year.

Day after day, I spent my only preparation period and/or my lunch in his classroom doing my best to help him, with the hope that his students might receive even the slightest education during their time with him.  Unfortunately, this was an exercise in futility.  While he would call and request assistance from me on a daily basis, he outright refused to implement any of my proposed strategies.  Every suggestion was met with a response of “I won’t be able to learn that,” or “That will never work.”  The time that I spent in his classroom was torture – watching him do absolutely nothing to advance the education of his students and be openly hostile to them in the process. 

After months of this, I came across a list of teacher salaries while doing research into district expenditures.  While scrolling through the list, his name jumped out at me.  I broke down into tears.  Never before had it occurred to me that this man was making over $25,000 more than me.  It was absolutely demoralizing to realize that no matter how much I worked for the betterment of my students and school, someone who actively hurt them would be out-earning me by such a significant amount. 

I don’t begrudge veteran teachers their higher salaries.  They definitely deserve every penny they make for their experience, hard work, and long-term commitment to our students.  What I cannot accept is an evaluation system that let this man get to this point.  He was bounced from building to building, year after year, only being occasionally evaluated by an overworked administrator who never wanted to hassle with actually finding a way to make him improve or let him go.  A more rigorous, objective, and well-implemented evaluation system would have saved an entire generation of students from falling farther and farther behind as they sat in his classroom.

With the current state of teacher evaluations, it is no wonder that the majority of school districts rely entirely on seniority to make their staffing decisions.  If you cannot accurately and fairly discern the quality of a teacher based on their evaluation, how can you make an informed decision on who to keep and who to let go?  The fallout from this, however, is detrimental to our public education system.  Despite costing the district $25,000 more and negatively affecting students, this ineffective teacher that I tried my best to help will never be touched by a reduction in force while I still sit precariously close to the chopping block in the event of large-scale cuts. 

Other teachers here today have testified to the effect that this has on our newest members of the profession.  Every year, urban students are losing their phenomenal young teachers to more affluent districts that can provide the educator with a higher level of stability.  If we want public education to succeed, our current system of last in/first out must go.  Once the necessary changes have been made to the evaluation system, and we can accurately and fairly distinguish between the high and low performers, it is morally and fiscally irresponsible for such a system to continue.  We, as educators, must finally follow our own mantra of “children come first,” and be willing to embrace change that will ultimately help our student students succeed in school and in life.

Testimony by Indianapolis Teaching Policy Fellow Lee Anne McKelvey

Monday, April 11, 2011

My name is Lee Anne McKelvey, and I have had the opportunity to work in a few different schools, both public and charter, throughout my time in education.  When I first started teaching, I knew that I had room for improvement and was excited by the prospect of developing as a teacher.  However, it was disturbing to watch a few teachers around me operate in a very different manner as they sat at the front of their class talking on their cell phone while students did random work.  It was hard for me to understand how those teachers could still have a job while I was working so hard for my students.

There is a standard in most professions and all employees are expected to meet that standard.  If they don’t, they are supported and managed to become better – and ultimately if they are unable to increase their performance, then they are let go.  We would hardly ever see a salesman or a doctor who is consistently underperforming continue in their position, but a teacher who doesn’t teach is often allowed to stay.  We need performance-based evaluations to legitimize the profession of teaching.  We can’t let ineffective teachers continue to shape the future of our kids.

Despite what we may think, our students know everything.  I could ask any student to list the best and worst teachers in our school and they would be pretty accurate.  Students knew that I was helping to schedule classes as part of my role at the school.  When Amanda found out who her Earth Science teacher was for the spring semester, she begged the other instructional leader and I to put her with another teacher.  We didn’t have another option though because this was the only Earth Science teacher for the spring semester.  It was known by students and staff that this teacher was not the most effective.  We knew she cared about the kids, but that wasn’t enough to assure Amanda that she would be pushed and challenged in Earth Science.

Amanda isn’t the only student who has begged me to place her with a different teacher, which just shows that our students want to learn from effective teachers and deserve that as part of their education.  I am fortunate to work with students who can and do tell me exactly what they think.  It scares me to think about a kindergarten student who doesn’t even realize how detrimental it is to his future to have an ineffective teacher.  I am infuriated when I think about Darian, one of my Chemistry students, who despite passing the Algebra I ECA still cannot read, and lacks basic phonic skills.  He is 17 years old and can’t read, but it isn’t from a lack of ability or motivation.  I would love to know who his former teachers were and how they let this happen.  If performance-based evaluations along with the rule about not placing a student with an ineffective teacher two years in a row had been in place, then Darian would not be facing this reality despite his desire to be successful.

One part of my job is to actually evaluate teachers based on their performance.  I am a fellow teacher and was given this additional role when there was a shift in our leadership this spring.  We are preparing to launch the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in the fall, but we knew we couldn’t wait until then to start evaluating our teachers.  TAP gives teachers the opportunity to take on additional roles to support the instructional goals of the school while evaluating teachers to increase their performance.  The other instructional leader and I were nervous at first about evaluating our peers and we can relate to the concern associated with that. 

After completing our first full round of evaluations, I can say with full confidence that we should not be concerned about that aspect of evaluations.  Our teachers were eager to have us in their classrooms providing feedback and want to learn and grow.  They were incredibly receptive to our feedback and have already started to change things in their classrooms based on our debrief conversations.  One teacher who has been in education for over 20 years said that this was his third evaluation – despite working at our school for seven years.  He was so appreciative of the feedback and primarily because it came from two teachers who were also working with the same students that he was working with and truly understood the challenges he faced as a teacher.

There are, of course, many factors to consider as we implement performance-based evaluations in schools across the state.  Evaluations are should not be a quick thirty-minute observation once a year with an emailed document sent afterwards.  Evaluations need to include multiple observations of the teacher, feedback and next steps aligned to the rubric, and opportunities for professional development based on the evaluation.  This isn’t an easy thing to do well, but we cannot let that hold us back from making the right changes for our teachers and our students.  There has to be a shift in how we evaluate our teachers and the ways in which we support them as professionals for the sake of our students and their futures.  We cannot sit idle while ineffective teachers are either unsupported or allowed to continue teaching our kids.  Not only do our students deserve better, but our teachers do as well.