APPR Update

From the inception of APPR in 2010, the LUT has been active in addressing the inequities and inconsistencies in the state law and has worked very hard to make sure that no aspect of the law resulted in any harm to any of our members. In addition to advocating for changes to the law on a state level, the LUT has negotiated within our district to modify our APPR plan in ways that would streamline the teacher evaluation process and make it as fair as possible for all our members. To that end, I’m happy to say that this year’s APPR plan is as equitable as any we have ever had.  

 

Over the past two years, school districts in New York were not required to submit scores for APPR. Because of complications resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the state tests used in producing scores were either not offered or offered sporadically throughout the state with a parent opt-out option. As a result, there simply wasn’t sufficient reliable historical testing data to use in the student performance section of APPR.

 

For the 2021-22 school year, it is expected that all state exams will be administered and that districts will be required to once again submit student performance scores for APPR. This year, for the first time, all members of the LUT will have the same score for the student performance section of APPR. Regardless of what the grade level or subject you teach, all LUT members will use a district-wide SLO (Student Learning Objective) which is based upon the district-wide student performance on the 5 Regents exams that all students are required to pass for high school graduation: Algebra 1, US History, Global History, Living Environment and English. 

 

To see our current district APPR plan, including the rubric used to determine scores on the Student Performance section, please find the “APPR Plan” link on the Helpful Links page of our LUT website.

 

The target score for the district-wide SLO will be to have 80% of the students achieve a passing score of 65 or higher on the 5 Regents exams. This passing rate is something students in the Levittown district have surpassed year after year. We certainly expect that under our guidance and instruction students will demonstrate a similar level of high achievement this year and result in every member of the LUT having a score of Excellent or Highly Effective in the Student Performance section of our APPR.

This change to a district-wide SLO should be a welcome one for teachers who teach classes that end with a state Regents or the Science 8 state exam.  In past years, these teachers had individual SLOs for students in their classes based on historical data from student performance in past years.  For 21-22, all teachers will be assessed in the same way.

From the start of APPR, the system that had been used in the past for creating individual SLOs and targets and the state growth score system that had been challenged successfully in courts of law, were flawed and fraught with inconsistencies.  For this school year, and, hopefully moving forward, we now have a single system that assesses all of our members using student performance on exams that represent the culmination of all of the work done by all of the LUT members they have worked with over the course of their education in the Levittown district.

In addition to major changes to the student performance section, the LUT members of our district APPR committee have worked over the past two years to make the teacher observation section of APPR more manageable and fair for our members.

For teacher observations, our district utilizes A Framework for Teaching by Charlotte Danielson as the basis for assessment.  It should be noted here that Danielson never intended her text on best practices in teaching to be used for teacher observations or evaluations.  In an article published in Education Week back in 2016, Danielson wrote, “I’m deeply troubled by the transformation of teaching from a complex profession requiring nuanced judgment to the performance of certain behaviors that can be ticked off a checklist.”  Ms. Danielson did not feel that each component in her framework could be assessed adequately in an observation of one or two classes.

With the wishes of the author of A Framework for Teaching in mind, the LUT and other local and state organizations have pushed for modifications to our APPR plan that would allow both the evaluator and the professionals they are observing to hone in on a few essential components rather than be overwhelmed by the totality of the entire framework.

For the 2020-21 school year, our district APPR committee modified our plan to focus on just a few components within each of the four domains in the Danielson framework.  For the 2021-22 school year we will once again be focusing on just a few components; components 1b, 1e, 2a, 2c, 3a, 3b, 3d and 4a.

As was the case last year, the removal of components within domain 4 means that LUT members are not required to “enter evidence” in the online system for items in domain 4 as they had been asked to do in the past.  The only component assessed in domain 4, 4a, is reflection on teaching.  This component is assessed in the pre and post observation conferences that take place during the announced observation process.

Overall, I am proud to say that through the hard work of the LUT members of our APPR committee and the advocacy work of our union on a state and national level, teachers have taken a poorly designed law that some feel was written to be a “gotcha” against teachers and have ostensibly neutered it to a point where it has little to no impact on the important work we need to do in our classrooms every day.  If you have any questions or concerns about APPR, please feel free to contact me at josephromano@mac.com