Teachers don’t like being graded on student test scores. Miami proposal may fix that

A change in how Miami-Dade’s public school teachers are evaluated on their students’ test scores could be coming.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools administrators on Wednesday introduced a proposal to partner with United Teachers of Dade to develop an alternative student performance measure to be piloted next school year.

In its fourth collective bargaining session, labor relations administrative director Dawn Baglos said the district has heard teachers’ unrelenting complaints about the value-added model, known as VAM. That model calculates a teacher’s performance based on the growth of their students’ standardized test scores in reading and math.

In Miami-Dade, that model counts for 34% of a teacher’s total evaluation score. It could affect what bonus a teacher is eligible to receive.

“There’s some anxiety revolving around VAM,” Baglos said.

She explained that the Legislature last year gave school districts more flexibility on how to assess teachers on student performance. Baglos proposed creating a joint task force to develop the model that would be piloted next school year.

“We think it would behoove us to work together,” she said.

United Teachers of Dade President Karla Hernandez-Mats agreed that VAM isn’t popular among the school district’s 19,000 teachers.

“The angst is still out there,” she said. “It makes no sense to educators on why we are being evaluated on a cow breeding model.”

The value-added model was created by a statistician who grew up on a dairy farm. He believed that the same statistics used for raising animals could be applied to evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness.

Hernandez-Mats was open to the proposal but worried about how teachers would be affected. She asked the district about the life span of evaluation models and questioned if the cost of revamping that model would be better spent in the classroom.

Baglos suggested that changes could be made without adding new tests.

Hernandez-Mats also took issue with the premise of the student performance measure, pointing out that it does not account for external factors, like trauma, that could affect a child’s test scores.

She pointed out how other professionals like police officers are not subject to similar evaluations, and that could be because of prejudice against a workforce that is predominantly female.

“At the end of the day, we want to do what’s right and make things better for the education workforce,” she said.

The union did not immediately counter the district’s proposal, but both parties are scheduling to meet again in December.

Hernandez-Mats also floated the idea of revamping or improving the principal’s evaluation of a teacher, which accounts for 50% of a teacher’s overall evaluation. She said that model hasn’t been modified in about 12 years. The remaining 16% of an evaluation is related to a teacher’s annual individual goals.

Hernandez-Mats also expressed interest in discussing the “life span” of the property tax referendum largely benefiting teachers during this year’s bargaining session. She wondered about how that would be doled out alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposal to raise the minimum teacher salary to $47,500 and how veteran teachers would be impacted.

She suggested shifting some referendum dollars or expanding the percentage of teachers eligible for more funding.

“We need to figure out how that would impact us locally... [to] help all those mid-career teachers,” Hernandez-Mats said. “I think we could be clever here at the local level because we do have the referendum.”

Also on Wednesday, the district and the union agreed to codify language in its contract preventing employees, other than a certified police officer or licensed private security officer contracted by the district, from carrying firearms on school property.

Although the School Board and school district administrators have already taken that stance, Hernandez-Mats explained that those policies could be at risk should board dynamics change in the future. Three School Board incumbents have announced that they will not run again in 2020.

This story was originally published November 27, 2019 at 2:03 PM.