Report: Good, bad U-46 teachers go unaddressed

Teachers may not come off assembly lines like Fords. But school districts across the country, including Elgin Area School District U-46, treat them as if they do, one study claims.

"The Widget Effect," recently published by nonprofit think-tank The New Teacher Project, analyzed 12 districts' failure to correctly assess teacher effectiveness.

The two-year project surveyed 15,000 teachers and 1,300 principals, 1,755 alone from U-46.

Of those responses, the report found that poor performance often goes unaddressed, with less than 1 percent of teachers receiving unsatisfactory ratings, even in schools that fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress again and again. Six of the 12 districts in the survey, including U-46, did not dismiss a single tenured teacher for poor performance in the past five years.

On the flip side, excellence also goes unrecognized for both beginning teachers and tenured ones. "When superlative ratings are the norm, truly exceptional teachers cannot be formally identified," a release on the report said.

U-46 teachers' and principals' responses echoed the results of the report as a whole.

From the 2003-2004 to the 2006-07 school years, 2,035 tenured teachers in U-46 were given an "excellent" rating. Only 264 were seen as satisfactory, and only 11 as unsatisfactory.

No tenured teachers in those years were formally dismissed for performance, though school administrators admitted that about 2 percent should have been.

Elgin Teachers Association President Tim Davis called the report "validation for the work that we're doing with the new teacher appraisal plan."

A new appraisal system for U-46 faculty members, which will be phased in next year, will replace one used by the district for the past 25 years.

Davis called the old system "benign, at best."

Based upon Charlotte Danielson's book, "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework For Teaching," the system is structured around encouraging both professional dialogue and performance in the classroom evaluation, committee co-chairman Bill DuBois told the school board last fall.

Unlike the old plan, which evaluated teachers, school nurses, school psychologists and social workers with the same criteria, the new one will differentiate between positions, DuBois said.

Nontenured teachers will be evaluated every year, tenured teachers every other year. Professional growth, classroom observations, and conferences between administrators and faculty members are components of both types of evaluations.

Officials hope the system will be used throughout the district by the fall of 2011.

"We know teaching is incredibly complex," Davis said. "We need standards so that teachers can be supported."

Study: U-46 official says study results match goals of new teacher evaluation program