By Dave Fidlin
Correspondent
It has been nearly two years since the introduction of a state-mandated system aimed at gauging teachers’ abilities to engage students in the classroom, and tweaks and refinements continue to take place.
At Waterford Union High School, Principal Dan Foster said the district has been complying with the provisions within Educator Effectiveness, which was a requirement set forth by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction at the start of the 2014-15 school year.
DPI’s program is a performance-based evaluation system that state officials say is designed to improve the education of all students across the state as teachers’ own professional growth plans are reviewed routinely.
At a School Board meeting Feb. 29, Foster provided an update on WUHS’ compliance of Educator Effectiveness this year. The process has included classroom observations, focus group meetings of what has and has not worked thus far and regular meetings among administrators to strategize possible tweaks.
“We want to look at what we need to eliminate and what we need to clean up,” Foster said. “We want to get some local data to help us with decision making.”
Educator Effectiveness has drawn controversy in the past within WUHS because of its perceived “one size fits all” approach, based on DPI’s mandates, to examining teachers’ classroom performance.
Speaking to revising processes within Educator Effectiveness, board member Dan Jensen, who has frequently criticized DPI mandates said, “We shouldn’t be doing busy work. If it’s just a fruitless thing, we shouldn’t be doing it.”
To that end, Foster said the goal is to remove any processes that could fall into that busy work category.
“We will remove some things that are hoop-jumping,” he said.
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