Eval data helps students improve in proficiency

There’s something about fall that brings fire to New Mexico — roasting chile, burning Old Man Gloom, torching El Kookooee, and tossing your teacher work eval into the flames.

And while the first three celebrate the bounty of our land and the prospects of a better year ahead, the last is a depressingly familiar stage-managed photo op to try to divert attention from the fact too many of New Mexico’s kids are not making the academic advancements needed in an increasingly competitive world.

Two days after a dozen or so educators tossed their annual teacher evaluations into a burning trash can in front of Albuquerque Public Schools headquarters, New Mexico’s K-12 public school system is still struggling.

There are the pathetic proficiency levels (just 27.7 percent of students can read at grade level, just 19.9 percent can do math at grade level), poor graduation rates (students have just better than a 60-40 shot at a diploma compared to 80-20 nationally) and around a 50 percent need for remedial coursework for those high school grads who manage to get into college.

And just like most middle-schoolers learn quickly that “losing” your report card doesn’t make the reality of their grades go away, so should teachers realize neither does burning your eval (even if they are in AlbuCore, a caucus of “rank and file educators” within the Albuquerque Teachers Federation that orchestrated the event).

Mary Kelly, a social studies teacher at Albuquerque High School, kicked off the trash-can stunt “because I think the (Public Education Department’s) system is punitive and arbitrary.”

Really? Because teachers and school leaders who have spent the last three years using their eval data to better tailor lessons and interventions have seen marked student improvement.

Real student-performance data is used in those evaluations and school letter grades, and it shows clearly that 18 New Mexico schools with low-income minority student populations improved their kids’ academic performance so much that they improved their school standings three full letter grades.

APS’ 2016 schools showed a significant decline — 89 got Ds and Fs this year, up from 65 in 2015. And the number of A and B schools in APS fell from 55 to 37. It’s a statistical fact that because the largest district in the state refuses to embrace data-driven reform, it is in great part responsible for the state’s low student proficiency rates.

As for blaming PED for a test, evaluation or grade you don’t like:

Using the much-criticized Partnership for Assessment for Readiness for College and Careers test better aligns New Mexico with the new national Common Core Curriculum, which is designed to ensure students at each grade level have a solid knowledge and skills foundation and are prepared for “college, career and life.”

The Obama administration supports annual standardized tests as a necessary assessment tool, and end-of-course exams are required by state statute.

Basing teacher evaluations on student progress has been a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s schools policy, and it bears repeating that New Mexico’s evaluations focus only on student improvement, not proficiency.

The bottom line: Shouldn’t every child leave every grade better off academically than when they started it?

— Albuquerque Journal