An Alternative To The Federally Mandated Teacher Evaluation Plans

All of the plans for evaluating classroom teacher performance in the public schools share a common flaw: failure to recognize that the present system of public education in the United States are incapable of providing children with the knowledge and skills necessary to be competitive in the 21^st century workforce or cast informed ballots on controversial political issues.

Insistence upon evaluating teacher competence by means of student performance on standardized tests is killing America's last chance to restore our public education system to world-class competitiveness in this new world of intense competition for limited opportunities for employment and wages sufficient to assure even a modest middle class standard of living in the industrial world.

Relying upon student standardized test scores in consecutive years as a measure of the competence of a teacher ignores the decline in knowledge and skills that occurs over the long summer vacation. This is particularly obvious in the elementary school where teachers are forced to open each school year in each grade with extensive review of material that was already learned the preceding year. This endless spiral of learning, forgetting, then having to relearn what has been forgotten before it is possible to learn anything new dooms our children and makes even the best teachers struggle to demonstrate even moderate “success”.

If a child is tested in June on the material learned during the school year just concluding, and then retested on the same material in September at the start of the next school year after eight or more weeks of holiday and vacation from education, much of the achievement demonstrated in the June test will have been dissipated by September. The solution to the problem should be obvious.

Restructure the School Year

Restructure the school year. Eliminate the eight week continuous summer vacation. Distribute those eight weeks throughout the year in two week segments. Plan for continuity in learning and progress in developing knowledge and skills rather than endless review and catch up.

Restructuring the school year is essential to success in elementary school, particularly for those children whose parents are unable to provide continuity of learning and education during school vacations.

Even if we retain the outmoded 180 day school year, we can assure continuity of learning by evenly distributing the remaining 80 weekdays of the year–16 weeks–evenly throughout the 36 weeks of the school year so that the children are never out of school for more than two consecutive weeks throughout the year.

Instead of a grade level based on the arbitrary standard of chronological age and the mythical school year, each segment of the year would be a learning unit. The elementary school education from what we now call kindergarten through eighth grade would consist of 162 well-defined “learning” units. The progress of each individual student will be measured in terms of how many of those learning units are completed within a calendar year.

Because the units are less than five to six weeks long, there would be no stigma attached to a student who needs to repeat a unit.

The restructured school year will provide even greater dividends in the secondary schools where more emphasis is placed on individual subjects.72 learning units over four calendar years, permits more intensive development of certain subjects, particularly the sciences, mathematics and technology, foreign languages, and intensive reading courses such as history and literature during shorter periods while allowing students who need it to obtain additional time for mastery of a particular subject without slowing the progress of other students who may not require the additional time.

The restructured school year assures the most efficient distribution of educational resources among a diverse student body which includes the most gifted and those in need of special assistance in their learning efforts.

With a restructured school year of more but shorter learning units, the progress of individual students can be more easily tracked and more reliably measured. The effectiveness of individual teachers can be fairly determined from the actual progress of their individual students in each individual learning unit without the confounding variable of how much each student may have forgotten over the summer vacation and how much review and remediation is required before an individual class is ready to learn new material.