NEWS | EDUCATION
GREATER TUNA
Written by Ed Howard, Jaston Williams, and Joe Sears | Directed by Paul Roberts Recommended for audiences 13 years and older.
March 7th - 23rd March 7, 8, 14, 21, 22 at 7 p.m. March 9, 15, 16, 23 at 2 p.m.
225 E. 3rd Ave., Spokane, WA
Adults: $18 Students/Seniors $16
1-877-SIXTHST (208) 752-8871
sixthstreetmelodrama.com
Finch Elementary Principal Kim Harmon (left) and second-grade teacher Theresa Luciani work together using the district’s new, more rigorous teacher evaluation system. DANIEL WALTERS PHOTO
Grading the Teachers Washington teachers have adopted a brand-new teacher evaluation system — but it doesn’t have the one thing the federal government wants BY DANIEL WALTERS
F
18 INLANDER MARCH 13, 2014
or decades, Spokane Public Schools had a teacher evaluation system that did very little to evaluate teachers. Twice a year, the principal would come in and observe scheduled lessons. And for those lessons, typically, teachers put on a carefully crafted performance. “I wanted to get it just perfect,” Finch Elementary Principal Kim Harmon says about her teaching days. “I’d put on a great dog and pony show when they came in. And the next day I’d go back to teaching like normal.” Teachers were graded on a wide variety of factors, yet received only a “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” in those categories. And those ratings seemed practically rubber-stamped: For the 2009-10 school year, 99.2 percent of teachers were graded “satisfactory.” Even the minuscule fraction who failed rarely felt the consequences. But last year, Spokane Public Schools and schools across the state began shifting to a new “Teacher/Principal Evaluation Project” evaluation system, one far more complicated, in-depth and detailed.
It works on a four-point scale instead of just a binary one. “I pretty clearly understood that I probably would not be getting [all] fours,” says Theresa Luciani, a second-grade teacher at Finch Elementary. The top tier of the evaluation is intended to be relatively rare, something for teachers to shoot for. Teachers meet with principals before each observation to set out expectations and goals and are required to keep close track of their own performances. Principals conduct surprise observations. Today, the teacher evaluations have teeth: Even veteran teachers who fail repeatedly risk losing tenure. Yet now, as schools adopt the new system, the biggest debate is over an element Washington state doesn’t require in its evaluations: state standardized-test scores. The federal government has demanded that standardized tests play a role in evaluations, but teachers unions across the state fervently oppose that idea. “That, to us, is a no-go,” says Jenny Rose, president of the Spokane Education Association. Despite Gov. Jay Inslee’s pleas, the legis-