© 2024 KRWG
News that Matters.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

A Closer Look At The Lawsuit Against The Public Education Department

Simon Thompson

They are calling it a war against teachers. Many New Mexico teachers say they are being demoralized by a rigid, one size fits all evaluation system that doesn’t accurately measure their performance.  Teachers are firing back with a national lawsuit filed against the New Mexico public education department by the NEA teachers’ union.

In the lead up to the election teachers, students and parents wielding banners and signs took to the streets in front of Las Cruces city hall in a display of defiance and extreme frustration over the changes being made to public education in New Mexico.

Protestors like Mesilla Park Elementary 3rd grade teacher Deborah Romero say the Public education department’s uniform evaluation system doesn’t lead to good teaching and doesn’t allow districts to address unique needs. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qFIQZPCHtc&list=UUOcGqEoruZ0xKIqu7D3bKYA

50 percent of Romero’s evaluation is based on how her students perform on high stakes tests.  And Romero who is a plantiff in the NEA case says all that time spent teaching to the test crowds out other parts of the 3rd grade curriculum.

“I cannot let that get in my vision, my philosophy of education I’ve just had to say I am doing  what I have always done and always will do, I am going to be a n excellent teachers, I am going to teach each one of those students as if they are mine  personal children"  she says "I just can’t get tangled up in the evaluation the punitive nasty feeling of being dinged for doing your job” 

Last year Romero’s performance evaluation came back minimally effective. Starting this school year teachers rated as minimally effective are required by the state to be put on professional development plans, whether they are terminated or not is left up to individual school districts.

The other 50 percent of a teacher’s performance evaluation is divided between multiple measures; like attendance or student surveys and administrators’ classroom observations.

Romero has been teaching for 18 years. She says the state guidelines are stifling and the evaluation system is out of touch with the realities of the classroom.

“I had an observer come in and I was told  that I didn’t move the lesson along appropriately  and that was the little boy that his  grandfather was a geologist and he was excited about that and I deviated from the written lesson plan to satisfy what he wanted to share with the class and that really struck me  as ridiculous first and then as punitive  because in my eyes  what I had done was reinforce  a students knowledge and reinforce their enthusiasm of sharing what they knew with the class. Eventually  I was  marked down on being off target in my lesson time and you know I had to deal with that I had to deal with the paradox of knowing what I did was  right" she says.

Romero says the old evaluation system was much more effective in measuring teacher performance. The Public Education department acknowledges that new system isn’t perfect but claims it is raising student achievement. Governor Susana Martinez says preference for the old system is not surprising given that it routinely found 99.9 percent of teachers to be proficient.

“Every professional is evaluated as to the performance of their job and as a school teacher. It is important that we have good teachers in every classroom for every child before there was an evaluation that said 99.9% of our teachers were at high proficiency, that is impossible" she says

The National Education Association New Mexico has questioned the validity of the 99.9% statistic and requested the supporting data.   

State Senator Bill Soules is an AP psychology teacher at Onate High in Las Cruces.  He says his performance evaluation suggests the system’s dysfunction may run even deeper.  

“The New Mexico system had me initially ranked as a minimally effective teacher. Yet during the summer I received a stipend from the state of New Mexico for the quality of my teaching the and the number of my AP students who passed the AP exam, there is a disconnect with that when the system rates me minimally effective, yet the performance of my students  indicates that I was one of the top AP teachers in the state" he says. 

Soules says the volatility in the evaluation system is due to an overemphasis on student test scores a concern also cited by the American Statistical Association.

Romero was rated as effective in her most recent teacher evaluation, though she says it has not shaken her resolve to stand up in the NEA case against the teacher evaluation system.

“One year you could be getting a bonus for exceeding expectations, the next year  you can be minimally effective” she says. 

The results of the teacher evaluation system are controversial but so is its methodology.  Las Cruces Public Schools superintendent Stan Rounds told KRWG about 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on student test scores rather than 50 percent.  Some states use an even lower percentage in New York, just 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation is based on test scores.