Regarding a prior post about a recently filed “Lawsuit in New Mexico Challenging State’s Teacher Evaluation System,” filed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and charging that the state’s current teacher evaluation system is unfair, error-ridden, harming teachers, and depriving students of high-quality educators (see the actual lawsuit here), the author of an article recently released in The Washington Post takes “A closer look at four New Mexico teachers’ evaluations.”

Emma Brown writes that the state believes this system supports the “aggressive changes’ needed “to produce real change for students” and “these evaluations are an essential tool to support the teachers and students of New Mexico.” Teachers, on the other hand (and in general terms), believe that the new evaluations “are arbitrary and offer little guidance as to how to improve.”

Highlighted further in this piece, though, are four specific teachers’ evaluations taken from this state’s system along with each teacher’s explanations of the problems as they see them. The first veteran teacher with 36 years of “excellent evaluations” scored ineffective for missing too much work, although she was approved for and put on a six-month’s leave after a serious injury caused by a fall. She took four of the six months, but her “teacher attendance” score dropped her to the bottom of the teacher rankings. She has since retired.

The second, 2nd-grade teacher, also a veteran teacher with 27 years of experience, received 50% of her “teacher attendance” points also given a family-related illness, but she also received 8 out of 50 “student achievement” points. She argues that her students, because most of them are well above average had difficulties demonstrating growth. In other words, her argument rests on the real concern (and very real concern in terms of the current research) that “ceiling effects” are/were preventing her students from growing upwards, enough, when compared to other “similar” students who are also to demonstrate “a full year’s worth of growth.” She is also retiring in a few months “in part because she is so frustrated with the evaluation system.”

The third teacher, a middle-school teacher, scored 23 out of 70 “value-added” points, even though he switched from teaching language arts to teaching social studies at the middle-school level. This teacher did not apparently have the three-years needed (not to mention in the same subject area) to calculate his “value-added,” nor does he have “any idea” where his score came from or how it was calculated.” Accordingly, his score “doesn’t give him any information about how to get better,” which falls under the general issue that these scores are apparently offering teachers little guidance as to how to improve. This is an issue familiar across most if not all such models.

The fourth teacher, an alternative high school mathematics and science teacher of pregnant and parenting teens many of whom have learning or emotional disabilities, received 24 of 70 “student achievement” points, she is arguing, are based on tests that are “unvetted and unreliable,” especially given the types of students she teaches. As per her claim: ““There are things I am being evaluated on which I do not and cannot control…Each year my school graduates 30 to 60 students, each of whom is either employed, or enrolled in post-secondary training/education. This is the measure of our success, not test scores.”

This is certainly a state to watch, as the four New Mexico teachers highlighted in this article certainly have unique and important cases, all of which may be used to help set precedent in this state as well as others. Do stay tuned…