Editorial: House votes for status quo on teacher evals

New Mexico pays its teachers based on a three-tier licensing system that rewards longevity, advanced education and impressive dossiers. It has spent more than $330 million for extra remuneration under this system since 2003. And in its 10 years, this system has delivered:

♦ Just 43 percent of students able to read at grade level.

♦ Just 36 percent of students able to do math at grade level.

♦ Just seven out of 10 students able to graduate high school in four years.

A 2009 Legislative Finance Committee analysis said three-tiered licensure has “not resulted in significant gains in student achievement.” After a 2012 LFC report reiterated the findings, LFC Chairman Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, said, “We’ve rewarded, in many cases, mediocrity, and really haven’t accomplished what we set out to do.”

He isn’t alone in his dissatisfaction. A statewide Journal Poll last year found 53 percent of respondents supported “basing salaries of public-school teachers and their job performance evaluations partly on their students’ improvement in test scores.”

Yet Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton, an administrator in Albuquerque Public Schools, the state’s largest district, thinks putting a new coat of paint on this defective door to the future will make everything OK.

In an amazing tip of the hat to the status quo, her House Bill 481 would simply allow teachers, who currently must submit dossiers to move to the next level, to alternatively submit video attesting to their competence or their high teacher evaluations.

FYI, 99.9 percent of the state’s teachers are rated as satisfactory under the current system. And teacher evaluations based partly on student achievement are a requirement to get out from under the federal No Child Left Behind failing-school rankings. New Mexico has that waiver and must comply to keep it.

Nevertheless, Stapleton insists that value-added models (that help control for poverty and other factors) must not be used in the evaluation of teachers. She says the current system is working well and the state should “work with what we have, and improve it.”

Of course the one thing she insists on not using is whether kids actually learn anything and grow academically.

If you’re a teacher whose students aren’t better off academically a year after entering your classroom, the Stapleton approach works just fine. For that teacher. The kids, of course, don’t matter.

But if you’re a teacher who is bringing students up one, two or even three grade levels yet not getting recognition or merit pay, or if you’re among the more than half of the state’s students who can’t complete school work at grade level, the Stapleton system isn’t so good.

Stapleton’s bill has passed the House. The Senate should not join in this assault on great teachers, struggling students and the Obama administration — which has led the national efforts to improve this system with student growth as the priority. It should focus instead on getting bills like Sen. Sander Rue’s SB 316 out of committee so the state finally rewards excellent teachers, mentors those who need assistance and complies with federal Education Department guidelines.

Of course partisan politics is always an issue. It shouldn’t be. And it isn’t for the kid who doesn’t learn to read and whose prospects are bleak.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.