No agreement on how to evaluate teachers

Regarding "Judgment day for teachers?" [Editorial, April 10], despite your solemn lament that "teachers are virtually alone in existing beyond meaningful evaluation," such an evaluative system already exists. It is called Annual Professional Performance Review, and has been required by state law since 2000. Notwithstanding Newsday's repeated fantasy otherwise, APPR evaluation is indeed a vehicle for school districts to meet your stated goals of rewarding good teachers, firing bad ones or helping those in the middle get better.

Teacher unions welcome well-considered, comprehensive and mutually negotiated evaluative systems, such as the one currently in effect in my district. Those to which we vigorously object are simplistic, practically unworkable and clandestinely economic-based ratings schemes that have little to do with improving student learning and everything to do with other agendas.

Frederic Stark

Oceanside

Editor's note: The writer is the president of the Hewlett-Woodmere Faculty Association.
 

It seems that there should be a scientific way for teachers' merits to be evaluated, but maybe the grades should come from the students' parents. Parents can work with their children to evaluate their teachers with questions like these:

Does this teacher motivate you and make learning interesting and exciting? Does this teacher provide an environment conducive to learning? Does this teacher care about students and their progress?

Has your child benefited from being in this teacher's class? Would you recommend this teacher to a friend?

Too many of my children's teachers talk to me as though I know nothing about children or education, dress like their job is not important to them, teach topics that have no purpose in today's world, and give homework assignments that neither teach nor inspire.

You will see that there will be several teachers with consistent high grades and low grades. As a bonus question, they can ask, who is the school bully?, and resolve that problem too.

Gene Towba

Plainview
 

I think that you are off target in your support for the proposed new evaluation system.

There is no objective way to evaluate teachers on measures of student achievement. Students are human beings and there are too many external factors, beyond the teacher's control, that can impinge upon a student's test scores.

Furthermore, the use of nonobjective criteria to evaluate teachers, increases the potential that politics will be injected into the evaluation system.

Harold Goldrich

Nesconset