And Then There Were Ten

I wrote recently about Tipton County opting out of portfolio evaluation for Fine Arts teachers after participating the past four years. The move came in response to a letter a group of teachers sent to the Tipton County School Board.

Now, Nashville has also decided to opt out of Fine Arts portfolios for the 2018-19 academic year. While this had been raised as a possibility toward the end of last year, it wasn’t clear MNPS would move away from the portfolio model this year.

MNPS took the time to survey Fine Arts teachers and then used that feedback to inform their decision. The largest number of teachers responding voted to stop participating in the Fine Arts portfolio now and in future years. Another significant group wanted to at least pause the portfolio for a year and evaluate options going forward.

As a result, MNPS will now hold focus groups with Fine Arts teachers in the Spring to determine evaluation options for 2019-20 and beyond.

The move in Nashville comes as the portfolio evaluation model is losing favor around the state due to both poor implementation and lack of beneficial impact on instruction.

Prior to the start of this school year, five of sixteen districts participating in the Fine Arts portfolio indicated they would drop it for 2018-19. Now, Tipton and Nashville have opted out. This leaves nine districts who were previous participants plus Sumner County, a district that added portfolio evaluation over the objections of Fine Arts teachers there.

A line from the letter Tipton County teachers sent to their School Board explains why so many districts are moving away from this evaluation model:

While we appreciate the theory behind it, in real practice the portfolio process is not an effective one. What has occurred over the past several years is that portfolio has changed our lesson structures, negatively impacted our students’ classroom experience, and it has failed to provide feedback to help us improve as teachers.

It will be interesting to see if any other districts move away from this model ahead of the roll-out of the new portfolio evaluation platform from new (the third in three years) vendor Portfolium.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

Shining a Light

Since I published “Eric’s Story” last week on the issue of the new (and troublesome) Kindergarten portfolio, I’ve received a number of emails offering further insight.

These messages indicate that our state’s system of evaluating teachers is broken and that those making decisions are both disconnected from and indifferent to what happens each and every day in classrooms around our state. I’ll be sharing these (while protecting the names of the senders) over the next few days. If you have an evaluation or portfolio story to share, please send it to andy@tnedreport.com

Never felt more defeated in my life…

First of all, thank you for shining a light on some of the realities of this portfolio debacle. It was clear to me in August of this past year that this particular portfolio process was going to not only consume classroom time, but would take in excess of over 40 hours of uncompensated personal time.

Back in the fall, with the inconsistencies between the rubric for the portfolio and the state mandated standards glaring at me, I knew this was probably the beginning of the end of my teaching career. My colleagues and I were very concerned and decided to reach out to our local and state officials to make them aware of what we could already see was a train wreck. This was met with some mixed reactions. When I shared with a local board member that this was the type of thing that will drive good educators out of the classroom, I was told that is the ultimate goal, to see public education crumble and was somewhat dismissive of what I was saying in a way that made me believe nothing could ever be done to fix it. That tune changed once we had the attention of several people on the state level who came to our school to hear a presentation by my grade level about the problems and possible solutions.

It was through this meeting that two of us were invited to the capital to speak on the matter. While we felt this was a step in the right direction we still had to continue working on the portfolio because there was no word on what would happen. During this part of the portfolio process, members of my team reached out to “specialists” assigned to our school who responded with contradictory information, or rudeness, or not at all.

We are all still waiting to hear an answer to a question one of our colleagues sent by email 4 months ago. There has been NO support, NO encouragement, and NO input from teachers as to how this portfolio could or should even work. The very teachers who have to live these demands on top of teaching 5 and 6 year olds to read and write and a million other big and small things that no one even acknowledges are the ones who should be making decisions but that is certainly not happening. I

can honestly say I have never felt more defeated in my life. Frankly, I’m tired of feeling this way. I work hard. I go above and beyond because that’s how I was raised. I give my all in teaching because I believe the students entrusted to me deserve the best I can give.

For more on education policy and politics in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

Do you have a story about what’s happening in Tennessee schools? Get in touch at andy@tnedreport.com

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