legislative change in activity in states across the country than we ve ever seen before in this kind of period of time. and i think all of the states now are having important conversations about things like how do we more effectively evaluate our teachers. so i think it has absolutely been money well spent. critics do say the obama approach overemphasizes testing and crowds out arts and other subjects. what do you think about that? i think that s absolutely incorrect. you know, it s very clear that what the administration is saying is that when teachers are evaluated, they should be evaluated through multiple measures, meaning yes, how their students achieve academically should count as one portion of that, but they should also look more holistically at things like observations of classroom practice, what the teachers and kids say about how the teacher is performing, how the school does overall. and so i don t think that it s an overemphasis on one thing or another. we did mentio
reformers on the other side. but no one is listening to the voice of the teachers in the middle, the ones who are working on the front lines, the ones who are in the classrooms every day and the ones who really understand how policy would translate into classroom practice. uh-huh. what will you do with this funding from bill gates? we want to make sure we are representing the voices of as many teachers as possible. growing the organization and making sure that we re really elevating the voices of real classroom teachers in this policy discussion. interesting having this discussion with you again, sydney morris, the founder of educators for excellence. thanks for being here. thanks for having me. steve, brian? thank you so much. president bush criticized heavily for his freedom agenda. many say he was right when it comes to egypt. dana perino here to put it in perspective. he slipped and fell up the side of a mountain nearly 1,000 feet. how did he manage to survive? stick
but if you looked at performance evaluations, 95% of them were being rated as doing an excellent job. how can the adult think i m doing a good work and what we are producing is 8%. there are a lot of great teachers out there. but if we want those teachers to stay and we want more of them to come into the profession. we have to start treating them like professionals which means the best people seeing result should be paid more money. and the people not doing a good job shouldn t be protected. megyn: who dolts evaluation? who gets to decide? we are advocating teacher evaluation be done through multiple lenses. you have achievement levels that are measured. are the children in your classroom growing in terms of their skill level. the observation of their classroom practice done by principals as well as master
best interests of kids for that system to be based on how effective that individual is in attaining gains in student achievement for children in their classroom. it sounds simple, logical, and like an easy stole say why don t we put students first? then you get into two issues. one is seniority, teachers, and unions who say this isn t necessarily the most effective way to do it. the bigger issue is how exactly do you measure what we are doing that is in the best interests of students? what is that system that best measures that? right. well, a lot of people will sort of say there is no way to measure how effective a teacher is and we disagree with that. we think that there are multiple measures through which you can look at how a teacher performs. first you can look at whether or not they are growing the levels of student achievement for the kids in their classroom and that should be first and foremost. we also think that you should do observations of their classroom practice to se
you tried to get teachers to agree to forfeit tenure in exchange for better pay, better teaching, right? we actually succeeded in that. we signed a contract in washington, d.c. where tenure seniority and lock-step pay are no longer issues. and 80% of the teachers who voted for the contract voted in favor of that. how do you differentiate? you talk about differentiating good from not so good? the critical measures are what, numerical, tests? is it subject of evaluation? yeah, the number one factor in evaluating the teacher has to be whether or not they re effective at moving student achievement levels forward. and that means that you have to look at standardized test scores. now, that should be the only measure? no. but it should be the majority of what you look at. you also want to look at their classroom practice. so go into their classrooms and see whether they re engaging kids. you use tests. you pay the ones who are better more. you fire the ones who are no good. that s