Evaluating teachers, and paying them

Regarding "Evaluations add new wrinkle" [News, March 27], teachers will be rated as either highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective.

Lorna Lewis, East Williston's superintendent, said that the best way to maintain academic standards under the new system is to restrict the best rating. She states, "I would say that only 20 percent of teachers would be in that top class of master teachers."

How was this determined? A bell curve, a crystal ball, an epiphany? Let's take it one step further. Does this determination apply to the school administrators who will be doing the evaluations? Are there only 20 percent of administrators in East Williston worthy of the designation "highly effective" or are they evaluated under different criteria?

This brings up the thorny issue of teachers being evaluated by the 80 percent of administrators who are also, under this standard, less than "highly effective."

One last thought, who will evaluate the superintendents and their assistants? Let's not forget the problems in Roslyn, Three Village and William Floyd, just to name a few districts that would have benefited from a highly effective evaluation of their top administrators.

Antoine Butelli

Sayville

Editor's note: The writer is a retired teacher.
 

The casual reader of your article "New Lesson in Economics; LI teachers accepting lower raises as hard times hit school budgets" [News, March 27], and its chalkboard graphic (showing Suffolk County raises declining from an average of 3.5 percent before 2008 to 1.5 percent today), might assume that teachers are now receiving relatively low salary increases.

The same assumption occurs at our local board meetings when the teachers' union president tells us that the teachers "took a zero" in 2010-11, and this assertion is not corrected by our board members or administration. As a parent attending board meetings, I have been confused.

I have since learned that there are three components to teacher pay. These are the contractual increases referenced in your graphic and at our meetings, plus step increases (which run 3.2 percent a year in our district), plus column increases (which run an average of 1 percent per teacher per year). If I assume that other districts are like ours, the "lower raises" would really be 5.7 percent, not 1.5 percent.

In our district, this pay structure resulted in salary expenditure increases of 18 percent over the three-year life of our last contract and anticipated average salary increases of 17.1 percent over the life of our current three-year contract.

Todd W. Campbell

Bayport
 

I hope that the Board of Regents pays very close attention to the warnings of the state advisory panel that looked at basing teacher evaluations, in part, on student test scores ["Concerns of rating teachers," News, April 6.]

There are many problems. How will art, music, and physical education teachers be rated, or will they be exempt? Also, many students are taught by resource room teachers, reading teachers, or English as a second language teachers, in addition to their classroom teachers. By what means will we separate the contribution to the child's progress of the classroom teacher from that of the other teachers involved?

How will scores be calculated to determine whether the teacher is adequate or exceptional? A system in place now in New York City is so technical that it is understood only by statisticians.

And how will test results be verified? There have been many cases of tampering with results in recent years.

President Barack Obama spoke about education on March 28, and bemoaned the pitfalls of teaching to the test and of using only standardized tests for evaluation. He called for an assessment that "everyone agrees makes sense," possibly given every few years.

I urge the New York State Board of Regents to take his words into account.

Patricia Kenney

Whitestone

Editor's note: The writer taught English and reading in the New York City Public School System from 1965 until 2001.
 

I was dismayed by the fact that the state has decided to use results of state examinations in evaluating teachers and principals.

I have been a teacher since 1968 on both the secondary and college levels. I have taught in some very tough schools where a 40 percent passing rate for Regents examinations looked good. I have also taught advanced placement students where a 97 percent passing rate for Regents examinations was considered too low.

Those self-motivated honors and advanced placement students come from parents who make education their top priority and make the teachers look like Academy Award winners. Some of those same teachers would look like the deer in headlights while teaching in those tougher classes where so many of those students' parents are just not there.

We all know the old saying, "You should walk a mile in my shoes." I think we should place each member of the Board of Regents in some of the worst schools for one complete term and see how well they fare. After all, since they are considered the experts, would you not think that those scores would go up dramatically?

Harvey Karron

Coram

Editor's note: The writer is an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University.