HUNTINGTON – By a near unanimous margin, the Gateway Regional School Committee approved a modified model by which to evaluate teachers, a measure that is sweeping across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
New evaluation standards as created by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education passed by a vote of 13-0, with one abstention.
“It switches us from our current four-year re-evaluation, where you only have to do essentially 25 percent of your staff plus new staff, to fifty percent of our staff every year,” Gateway Superintendent Dr. David Hopson said of the new standards. “It’s going to increase the number of staff we have to evaluate formally each year.”
School Committee members were given a 33-item superintendent evaluation, which Hopson informed the committee was set by the state and is a “complicated, in-depth process” which will become “more complicated and in-depth as the state adds their other issues and items to it.”
“This is the basis of which we’re going to build the process that will match or at least meet the state’s requirements for supervision and evaluation,” he said.
When asked as whether the new evaluations would require more work on behalf of administration, Hopson didn’t hesitate in response.
“It’s much more work,” he said. “Thirty teachers times ten informal observations – that is two a day off the bat.”
When asked by a committee member about the state’s intent for implementing the new standards, Hopson proceeded to explain that the new standards add clarification.
“The current system was adapted and approved by the school committee and GTA (Gateway Teachers’ Association) probably 30 years ago,” Hopson said, adding that it was based on the “Principles of Effective Teaching” that were the all the rage at that time. “But there are fewer principles of effective teaching than there are the 33 items that are (in the new evaluations).”
“The state is looking at standardizing the rubric, so before you had ‘prepares lesson plan’, and there wasn’t anything about what a good lesson plan is. This rubric is good, and has better standards and definitions.”
He also touched upon differences between the current evaluation structure versus the new standards.
“Our current system is, a teacher who is professional status, who’s already got their tenure, is evaluated with three formal evaluation clinical cycles, with pre- and post-observation evaluations,” he said, adding that the tenured instructor then goes into a three year cycle of planning and goal setting of their own. “A new teacher has three mandated clinical evaluations each year for three years before they start a four year cycle.”
“The new cycle says you’re on one year and off one year, so long as you’re making sufficient progress,” Hopson said.
When asked how the new standards would be impacted by collective bargaining with the Gateway teachers, Hopson said he and a group of administrators and teachers sat together last year and went through model contract language, and came up with minor changes and now have language going forward which is in compliance with the new standards.
Prior to the committee’s executive session, Hopson said the new model will benefit the district’s students.
“Having a rubric we can agree on will help us focus on instruction techniques that’ll benefit our classrooms,” he said.
Due to the upcoming winter break signalling the end of the fall semester, and thus half the school year, Hopson confirmed in a call this morning that the district would be implementing the new evaluations for the 2014-2015 school year.
