9486 in the collection  

Resolution in Support of Educator Effectiveness

What will they do to achieve --introduce the guillotine?



Educators who are consistently poor
performers despite opportunities to improve are
removed from their positions in a process that
is both quick and fair.




Note: Below you will find what states stoop to get a share of the Race to the Top dollars offered by the Obama administration.

Colorado State Board of Education

Bob Schaffer, chair: chairman of the Leadership Program of the Rockies, a corporation providing economic and political leadership training in Colorado. From 1997 until early 2003, he represented Colorado's Fourth Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. Upon his retirement from the Congress, Schaffer was awarded the Benemerenti Medal by His Holiness John Paul II.

Elaine Gantz Berman: Prior to serving on the state board, she served for eight years on the Denver Board of Education, and for four years as the DPS board president. She also helped found the Colorado Children's Campaign and the Adoption Exchange.

Peggy Littleton: She taught for 15 years in a variety of educational settings, including home-schooling her three children and serving as a faculty member at Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy and Colorado Springs Christian School. She was also appointed as the director for Colorado’s GEAR UP grant, which was administered by the office of Governor Bill Owens.

In her extensive experience as an educational consultant, Peggy has conducted professional staff development seminars for teachers nationwide. Her focus is training teachers to use both data-driven and differentiated instruction in the classroom.

Angelika Schroeder: Former tax CPA and college professor of accounting. For the past 20 years she has also been active in education issues at her children's schools, their district and at the state level.

Randy DelHoff: After earning a B.S. in Physics from the University of Virginia, he served eight years active duty as a Navigator and Mission Commander flying P-3 patrol aircraft throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans. He moved to Colorado in 1984, working as a Systems Engineer with Martin Marietta. In 1991 he joined XonTech, Inc., where he served as the program manager on several successful rocket launch programs for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. Mr. DeHoff left the aerospace industry to become the Executive Director of the newly formed Colorado Charter School Institute, a statewide alternative chartering authority. The Institute will be overseeing 12 schools with 4000 students throughout Colorado in the 2007-2008 school year.

Jane Goff: Both a graduate and a retired employee of Jeffco Public Schools, where she enjoyed a 34-year career as a classroom teacher, curriculum coordinator and association leader. . . . She coordinated the district's Teacher Performance Pay Pilot, served on the Jeffco PTA Board of Directors and helped to design the Links for Learning program, a teacher-employer partnership between the Jeffco Schools and the West Chamber of Commerce.

Marcia Neal: She has been a business owner of a bookstore, had a 21-year career in teaching, finishing at Grand Junction High School, where she taught U.S. history and world geography.


Staff

The State Board of Education approved a resolution encouraging districts to adhere to key principles when designing and implementing
teacher evaluation systems.

"The State Board of Education has a significant
interest in ensuring that educator evaluation
systems throughout the state are of high-quality and serve to improve student outcomes, and so should provide guidance to districts on the characteristics of high- quality evaluation systems and is authorized to do so under the Licensed Personnel Performance Evaluation Act," the resolution states.

"To have the potential to be considered fair,
transparent, rigorous, and relevant," the resolution states, "an evaluation system should
have the following features:

a. The standards for evaluating performance
are clear and relevant to the individuals' roles and responsibilities and advance the system's goal of improving student outcomes; and

b. Multiple valid and reliable measures are
used to assess performance against the standards, and multiple objective measures of
student growth serve as the predominant factor
in assessing performance for those educators
with direct responsibility for students; and

c. Evaluations provide useful information about the performance of the individual to both the individual and the system through the use of
multiple overall rating categories and personalized feedback on performance with respect to each standard used; and

d. Evaluators are well-trained with respect to the standards, appropriate assessment methods,
and resources available for improvement; and

e. The standards used to evaluate performance
are widely known, embedded in the culture, and
consistently used to provide frequent feedback
designed to improve student outcomes; and

f. Sufficient and meaningful resources are
available to assist educators seeking to improve their performance; and

g. The evaluation system is consistently
monitored for its fairness, transparency, rigor, and relevance, and its design and implementation are adapted as needed."

The resolution states that evaluation systems
incorporating the criteria above should result
in:

a. Educators who are consistently high performers are recognized and rewarded, and have multiple opportunities to develop their
leadership and share their knowledge and skills
for the benefit of students in the school,
district, and/or state; and

b. Educators who are solid performers are recognized and rewarded, provided with multiple
opportunities to share their knowledge and skills in their areas of strength, and provided
with ongoing high-quality professional development targeted to areas in need of
improvement as identified by evaluations; and

c. Educators who are consistently poor
performers despite opportunities to improve are
removed from their positions in a process that
is both quick and fair.

Commissioner of Education Dwight D. Jones said
the board is "rightfully taking its leadership role" by approving the resolution and that the
support for the language "sends the right
message" for Colorado's application for federal
Race to the Top grant dollars.

"I wholeheartedly support it and it's one more
example of Colorado leading the way," said state board member Marcia Neal, who added that the resolution is another example of Colorado's
strong position in the competitive federal grant process. "We're winning. We're ahead," she added.

"This is a pretty remarkable day for education
in Colorado and this is a big part of that,"
said state board member Jane Goff.

— Colorado State Department of Education
Press Release
2009-12-10


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