Watch Out for Those Evaluators Coached by the Administration

Candy Olson Snootie Patootie and Her Cat Madelaine

Nick, I suggest the union must protect teachers from the subjectivity of the evaluators.

My inclination is to suspect the ones who volunteered for the evaluator job--or were encouraged to volunteer--were the go-along-to-get-along crowd that kowtows to the administration.

The collaborators are always with us. I pray you are not one.

If there are teachers in a evaluator's group that the administration wants targeted for dismissal, I think there will be persuasion sessions with the evaluators in which administrators let them know whom they would like to sack. A malleable evaluator would cooperate or become one of the targets.

You have to figure out a way not to let this unfairness happen.

Head-on action is my recommendation. My suggestion is to suggest to the administration out front that the administration is constructing this dastardly plan. Let the dear thugs huff and puff in their defense. The best strategy in battle is to always attack; never defend.

Ask Disraeli. lee

Hillsborough hires 100 peer evaluators for its $100 million Gates reforms

By Tom Marshall, Times Staff Writer
Posted: Apr 20, 2010 02:02 PM

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TAMPA — Around one hundred Hillsborough County teachers have been named peer evaluators under the school district's $100 million reform effort with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The winners were notified Monday, said spokeswoman Linda Cobbe.

"We've hired around 100 peer evaluators and will send another 20 to training this summer, so they can be hired as needed," she said in an email.

Those evaluators, culled from a pool of more than 600 of the district's top teachers, fill a critical piece in Hillsborough's seven-year reform strategy.

By next winter, they will evaluate each one of the district's 12,500 teachers on a new, five-point scale. By 2013 those ratings — in combination with principal evaluations and student test scores — will serve as the basis for both merit pay and termination.

And those ratings, from "below expectation" to "master teacher," will help demonstrate whether the district is serious about improving its record of rewarding strong teachers and firing weak ones.

Hillsborough was the only district in Florida that would have been shielded from the far-reaching tenure reform bill vetoed last week by Gov. Charlie Crist. Officials said the exemption was granted largely due to the similarities of the two efforts; the district's reforms would be carried out on a longer time frame, and veterans could opt out of a new, merit-based pay scale.

Last fall, Hillsborough told the Gates Foundation that their existing evaluation system had largely failed to identify both good and poor teachers.

In 2007-08, one third of all teachers in the district received a perfect rating, and 99.5 percent received a score of "satisfactory" or "outstanding." Just six tenured teachers have been dismissed for subpar performance since 2006, along with 139 nontenured teachers.

Some details in the Gates reforms must still be worked out, since they involve contractual issues that have not yet been negotiated with the teachers' union.

Each peer evaluator will serve for two or three years, before returning to their teaching duties.

"Mentor evaluators" will carry a reduced load of new teachers, and the rest will support and evaluate veterans.

All have been told they will earn a stipend of $5,000, but that could change.

"The rate of pay hasn't been negotiated yet," said Nick Whitman, executive director of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers' Association. "It's been advertised, but we haven't negotiated it yet."

For more details on this developing story, return to tampabay.com or read tomorrow's St. Petersburg Times.

Tom Marshall can be reached at tmarshall@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3400.

[Last modified: Apr 20, 2010 02:02 PM]

From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
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Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Thank You, Jesus, for Another Candidate in Distric....

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Thank You, Jesus, for Another Candidate in Distric...":

well, maryEllen will be going straight to hell with bill gates and kandy olson...
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-hires-100-peer-evaluators-for-its-100-million-gates-reforms/1088786

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