School Board Meeting: Union Members Fired Up!

March 2016

With FEA Secretary-Treasurer Luke Flynt waiting for the
School Board meeting to start.













OESPA and OCCTA members joined Orange County and state union leaders to speak out at the March 8th School Board meeting on a variety of subjects.

Felicia Pullman
First to speak was OESPA member Felicia Pullman who spoke about years of discrimination and serious problems at the Maintenance Office.  She stated that the District did not take action to address the ongoing problems. She also spoke about the Pathway to Dignity plan. School Board Chair Bill Sublette requested Superintendent Jenkins to prepare a report concerning management problems at the Northeast Maintenance Office for the next board meeting.

The Superintendent was scheduled to present "analytical data" to explain the reason that OCPS teachers had only 2.4% highly effective teachers as compared to the state average of 37.5%. However, the item was pulled from the agenda.

The topic of evaluation was discussed at the pre-meeting. Speakers included FEA Secretary-Treasurer Luke Flynt, Evaluation Co-Chair Wendy Doromal, and OCCTA members Phyllis Mills and Lisa-Marie Lewis.

School Board Chair Bill Sublette questioned why the District did not have the data for the presentation and said he expected it to be on the April 12th agenda. Still, it is difficult to understand what data could be gathered to explain the low scores. OCPS teachers believe that the scores were among the bottom three lowest in the state because the District ordered that they be intentionally lowered. School-based administrators told teachers that the "District directed them to give more developing and beginning scores and less effective and highly effective scores."

Sublette also questioned the OCPS ranking of 40 out of 66 Districts in teachers' salaries, finding it difficult to believe.

Executive Director Mark Mitchell spoke about the District's failure to enforce arbitrations that the union won. He said that the wins should be respected. He also stated that the District's practice of appealing and even lobbying for legislation to overturn union wins was a waste of taxpayers' money.  Chair Bill Sublette asked the OCPS attorney to prepare a spreadsheet to outline all of the grievances and arbitrations that OCCTA won for the last five years.

After the union members spoke there was a heated argument between Chair Sublette and School Board member Kat Gordon. FOX 35 News covered the pre-meeting:





Luke Flynt's Statement to the School Board
My wife is a middle school science teacher and whenever her students do a lab she reminds them of the importance of both precision and accuracy when taking measurements. She tells them that unless their measurements have both precision and accuracy, they cannot be considered valid.

Precision, of course, is the degree to which repeated measurements return the same results.

Accuracy is how close the measurement is to the true value of what is being measured.

When looking at teacher evaluations from the past two years, it is abundantly clear that there is no precision. If 81.2% of teachers earn HE one year, and then the very next year, only 2.4% earn HE, clearly there is an issue with precision.
And as even my wife’s middle school students know—without precision—measurements are meaningless.

There are also reasons to believe that the accuracy of teacher evaluations in Orange County is very poor.

First, Orange County teachers are rated highly effective at a rate 35% below the state average. I don’t think there’s anyone in the room who actually believes that Orange County teachers are that much worse than the state average.

Additionally, as of when teacher evaluation results were made public just over a month ago, more than 10% of Orange County teachers didn’t have a completed evaluation. At many schools like West Creek Elementary and Robert E. Lee Middle school—over 20% of teacher evaluations were not complete. We are now in March of 2016—and evaluation results from last school year are unavailable for one out of five teachers at some schools.

Even if the evaluations were precise and were accurate—which is an argument no rational person could make—there would still be little to no value to these evaluations.

If an employee doesn’t know how they were evaluated for a full 9 months after the school year ended—then what is the point of the entire evaluation process? It certainly can’t be to help teachers identify strengths and weaknesses and grow as a professional. It certainly isn’t about improving instruction and outcomes for students.

While it is understandable that evaluation results aren’t provided overnight, the time from the end of the school year until receipt of the evaluation shouldn’t be longer than the gestation period for a human.

So when I read in the newspaper that the district's director of evaluation systems, said her department did encourage principals to be "a little more careful" in their evaluations last year and she goes on to say that “teachers should view an "effective" rating with pride,” I am aghast.

Let me be clear: there is nothing in this flawed evaluation system to be “proud” of. The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging that one exists, and it is high time for OCPS to acknowledge that the current system for evaluating teachers is shameful.

The professional educators who have dedicated their lives to the students of Orange County deserve better than this. They are worthy of getting their evaluations in a timely manner, and they are entitled to evaluations that are both precise and accurate.

The Orange County Public School district has an obligation to work with the teachers and with the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association to rectify this situation immediately.
                      _____________________________________

W. L. Doromal's  Statement to the School Board
In the past few years OCPS has increasingly stressed data collection and analysis. Data can be valuable if it is accurate, but it is meaningless if it is manipulated.

Data and statistics cannot explain away bad decisions that resulted in OCPS teachers being ranked among Florida’s three districts that received the lowest teacher evaluation scores.  Only 2.4 percent of all OCPS teachers scored highly effective, as compared to a statewide average of 37.5 percent. Other Central Florida school districts exceeded our county’s number of highly effective teachers by leaps and bounds. Eight-eight OCPS schools did not have even one highly effective teacher, not even their teacher of the year! This is statistically improbable.

These scores were so out of step with other districts that OCPS teachers have been held up for humiliation. As a result of the low scores, 97.6% of the 12,315 OCPS classroom teachers are also disqualified from any state bonus plan, such as the Best and Brightest Scholarship Program.

Since we are viewing OCPS teachers through a statistical lens, I offer you some more disturbing numbers to reflect upon. Orange County teacher salaries rank 40th out of 66 Florida countiesThe only counties that ranked lower than Orange were all smaller counties. All of the other large Florida counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, and Palm Beach, placed among the top ten in the salary range. The nearby Central Florida counties of Seminole, Brevard, Volusia, and Osceola all have higher teacher salaries than OCPS. In fact, OCPS didn't even make it to the top half of the salary chart. Is it surprising that so many teachers are leaving the District?

Consider also the statistics related to the district and school grades that were recently released by the state. Orange County Public Schools received a 'B', with 58% of OCPS schools earning an 'A' or 'B' grade. Statewide, 56% of the schools were rated as 'A' or 'B' schools. OCPS stood at 2 percentage points above the state average as far as school grades, but it placed 35.1% below the state average as far as teacher evaluation scores. This makes no sense.

In fact, twenty-six of the OCPS schools that were rated as 'A' schools did not have even one teacher who earned a highly effective rating. How does a school earn an 'A' rating from the state when it has no teachers – not even one –who received a highly effective rating from the District? This is another statistical improbability.

Everything that teachers do to ensure student success is not evaluated. Teachers are not scored on how they inspire, motivate and instill the love of learning in their students. Teachers are not assessed on how they develop curiosity and unlock a students’ potential. Teachers are not rated on how many evenings and weekends they sacrifice to complete mandated schoolwork. Clearly, teachers should not be reduced to an evaluation score anymore than a student should be reduced to a test score.

The evaluation system is inconsistent and unfair. The District owes it to its employees to immediately work with OCCTA to fix this broken system, to restore the reputation of its teachers and to repair the broken trust.

                                  ________________________

Empress and Adriane

Lisa-Marie Lewis spoke beautifully from the heart.
Luke!


OCCTA member Phyllis Mills speaking on evaluation.



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