The New York State Department of Education has a new method of evaluation that will be used to adjudicate all of New York’s teachers this year. The program is titled Annual Professional Performance Review, or APPR, and it is causing a great deal of controversy.
According to the NYSUT (New York State United Teachers, a professional union for teachers in New York) website, NYSUT President Dick Lanuzzi believes that APPR is “good for students and fair to teachers.”
However, English Teacher Molly Fagan feels that “The system makes education a lot less personal and a lot more like a business. It may hurt students by taking away some of our ability to be creative in the classroom.”
This decrease in creativity is probably due to the amount of test preparation teachers will now have to force upon students. As their jobs now depend on students’ performance on exams, many feel they may have to teach to the test and give up more abstract or interesting lessons.
New York State Department of Education’s website states that under APPR, school districts are mandated to base teacher evaluations on a rigid scale: 20 percent according to the performance of their students on state assessments, 20 percent according to the performance of their students on district-wide assessments, and 60 percent according to in-class observations. The evaluation system rates teachers as highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective; two ineffective ratings in a row means a school district can begin procedures to fire the teacher.
The first question on the public’s mind, though, is how this wide-reaching education reform will affect students.
“I’m not planning on changing my teaching,” AP and Applied Chemistry Teacher Dr. Paul Hesleitner said. “APPR is supposed to be proving the effectiveness of teachers in teaching students. If I’m accomplishing that, I don’t believe that I’ll have to change the way I teach.”
Mrs. Fagan largely agreed. “My teaching will not be changing very much — it’s still going to focus on college and career readiness.”
As an extension of Barack Obama’s Race to the Top Education Reform, it is clear that the intention of APPR is to help students as much as possible. However, educators and administrators across the state are questioning whether the program benefits students as much as it is meant to, especially considering the program’s heavy weighting on test scores.
Massapequa Federation of Teachers President Tomia Smith indeed thought that one of the most dramatic changes is the “system’s concentration on state assessments. There’s too much testing on the students—it is a lot of time out of the school year that could be dedicated to much more meaningful education.”
MHS Principal Dr. Barbara Williams agreed that if there were anything she could change about the program, it would be the amount of importance it places on student test scores. “One test score cannot reflect everything that a teacher does or a student does throughout the course of a school year. This overemphasis on testing bothers me.”
Nevertheless, after a long legal battle to make the legislation something that both the State and NYSUT could live with, both sides are officially supporting this legislation as a positive revamp for our public schools. That means APPR is probably not going anywhere—at least for this school year.
Educators and administrators are trying to remain optimistic despite the obvious flaws they see in the system. “I like the professional discussion that a teacher and I have when I observe lessons. APPR requirements give me more of an opportunity to have them,” Dr. Williams said accordingly.
“The program could help teachers improve, acknowledge what they’re doing, and reward them for it, which will definitely help both teachers and students.”