RVC teachers rank high

The majority of Rockville Centre educators were ranked highly in teacher evaluations recently released by New York state for the 2012-13 school year.

The state-mandated Annual Professional Performance Review is part of the rollout of the Common Core State Standards. Teachers are scored on a variety of factors, and are rated highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. All 304 of the district’s other teachers were rated either highly effective or effective, and only four were deemed ineffective. They have since resigned from the district.

Nonetheless, Superintendent Dr. William Johnson said he believes that numerical ratings are a poor reflection of the capabilities of Rockville Centre teachers. The evaluations are based mainly on students’ test scores and how much they improve from year to year.

“I think that the numbering system gives the impression that a teacher is accountable for all that happens in their classroom, and they are not,” Johnson said. “All of the research on the amount of influence that a teacher has on the overall performance of kids in schools shows that only about a third of what kids actually do and know in school can be accounted for by instruction in the classroom. There are so many other variables that come into play that need to be taken into consideration: family, family circumstances, socio-economic status, city vs. rural vs. suburban, your ethnicity. Every single little variable.”

Johnson also pointed out what he saw as another flaw in the system: the fact that children don’t all learn and grow at a steady pace. “There’s an assumption built into this that there’s an evenness to growth over time that can be reflected in these scores,” he said. “Anybody who’s raised children knows and understands that they’ll plateau for a while and then grow a little bit, and then maybe the next year grow a lot. It happens physically, too.”

The APPR scores for the 2013-14 school year have not yet been publicly released, though they have been given to the district. Johnson said that all of the teachers were rated either highly effective or effective this year.

The district does not use the APPR evaluations in making decisions about teachers, Johnson said, explaining that it conducts its own evaluations, as it has done for the 28 years that he has been superintendent. The district’s evaluations, he said, are based in large part on classroom observation.

“Our goal in evaluation is not necessarily to hold a teacher accountable,” he said. “It’s to hold us accountable for making the system better in serving this educational community.”

Teachers, too, said they feel that the state evaluations paint an unfair picture. “We take pride in what we do as educators in our community,” said Viri Pettersen, president of the Rockville Centre Teachers Association. “It’s not representative.”

The teachers’ union supports the district’s system of evaluating educators. “The evaluation that we do locally is an amalgam of many hours of hard work and discussions, with our children and our community and our educators in mind,” Pettersen said. “Every year, we modify anything that we feel might be awry. We discuss [evaluations] thoroughly, because we care about our children and how we’re working with them.”