In an attempt to get funding from “Race to the Top”, the Obama Administration’s new educational reform initiative, the state of Michigan has passed several laws related to educational reform. One of the new laws requires that all teachers and administrators of K-12 public schools be evaluated every year. This has led the AAPS to decide to adopt a new pilot teacher evaluation plan, one that, unlike the current every three-year evaluation schedule, evaluates all teachers and administrators every year. This is one of the three top tasks for AAPS this school year.

“It’s inevitable,” said Ken McGraw, the Community High Ann Arbor Education Association (AAEA) representative. “It’s a national movement. To get out ahead of it, and maybe try to influence its direction, is probably a good thing.”

“The current plan was set around 15 years ago,” said Dean Hein. “Public education across the nation has an increased level of accountability and performance standards for teachers and students.”

Brit Satchwell, President of the AAEA, said, “American education is morphing from the industrial model that grew out of the 50’s and 60’s. The evaluation tools that we need to measure our progress, both as individual employees and as a district-wide system, need to morph to get us all to what we need to do in the 21st century.”

The new plan is based off of the Charlotte Danielson program. The Charlotte Danielson program, founded by Charlotte Danielson, an educational consultant based in Princeton, is a set of components of instruction grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching. It is a list of specific traits considered important for becoming an effective teacher.

“Now it’s more objective than the old system.” Satchwell explained, “In our old system, you had school administrators sitting in on a class and evaluating the teachers. This, while it worked, often led to teachers having large jumps in their evaluation scores whenever a different person evaluated them.”

These jumps were not typically due to the teacher’s performance. “Of course, sometimes a teacher had a bad year, and his/her score would change drastically. But usually, the jumps correlated with having a new principal. What happened was that the principal either had teaching style different from or similar to the teacher. And evaluation results changed accordingly,” said Satchwell.

The new plan works very differently in that the plan uses a checklist style rubric to grade teachers. “This is nice, because it makes it a lot more objective, as there’s no more personal opinion of the principal entering into the picture, but just the principal looking for specific things,” said Satchwell.

“The rubric has four different domains. Under each domain, there are five to six categories. In each of those categories, we have four to five specific evidences called elements, things like eye contact, signs that a teacher is doing a good job. The information is then taken and put on a scale from bad to excellent,” said Satchwell. The four domains of the rubric are Planning and Preparation, The Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities. For example, Communicating with Families becomes a component under Professional Responsibilites.

The tenure system, which many have worried will be affected by the new plan, will not be changed. Said Satchwell, “Currently, for the first four years, a teacher is on probation. They’re evaluated every year. Then either they get tenure or they have to leave the district. Once they get tenure, they are evaluated every three years by an administrator.” In the new plan, the schedule for evaluations will not be changed. Instead, said Satchwell, “Now [under the new plan], during the years that the tenured teachers aren’t being evaluated by the principal, they have to do a professional development style self-evaluation using the rubric.”

The plan did not arrive without obstacles. “At first, the union (AAEA) wasn’t too hot on it,” said Satchwell. “Then the teachers got a chance to look at it, and they saw the benefits of having an objective evaluation plan. So the union decided it was a good idea.”

So what exactly is in the plan for students? “The purpose and value of a good evaluation system is as much about a continuum of ongoing professional development as it is about scoring teachers at a single given point in time,” said Satchwell, who sees advantages of the new evaluation plan in how classes can now be run. “The really good thing is that teachers can now have a set of guidelines that tell them how to run class, even when they are not being evaluated,” said Satchwell. “Also, this could possibly help entire departments. For example, if science department saw that it needed more hands on activites, then they could schedule more labs, or something like that.”

“The current evaluation plan is a pilot that will be run for this year [the 2010-2011 year] and the next [the 2011-2012 year],” concluded Satchwell. “After that happens, the teachers will vote on wether they should keep it or not. If they like it, it’ll be incorporated into their contracts.”