APPR Update

Posted: 
Friday, September 23, 2022

by Levittown United Teachers APPR Chairperson, Joseph Romano

Teachers have not received a complete score for their APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) for the past three school years.  Due to the pandemic, many state exams were canceled or administered sporadically.  As a result, there was no student performance data that could be used to generate the student performance portion of a teacher’s APPR. 

The New York State Board of Regents has signaled its intent to return to a traditional administration of state exams for the 2022-23 school year.  With the return of state testing and the subsequent return of available test score data, we can also expect a return of the requirement for districts to report test results to NYSED (the New York State Education Department) for purposes of creating student performance scores for APPR.  This means we can also expect to receive a complete APPR score for the 2022-23 school year.

What exactly is APPR?

APPR has been a part of public education in New York State since 2010.  It was created due to the passage of a law prescribing changes to the annual performance evaluation of teachers and principals.  APPR does not apply to teaching assistants, teacher aides or pupil personnel titles.  Under the law, school districts and BOCES are required to conduct a review for teachers and principals, resulting in a rating of “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing,” or “ineffective.”  This rating is produced through an assessment of student performance on state exams and scores from teacher observations conducted by school administrators.

Over the past 12 years several stakeholders in public education have pushed back against aspects of the APPR law that were unfair to teachers and students and harmful to public education.  Using the strength that comes in no small part from our VOTE/COPE contributions, our state union, NYSUT, has been very strong in fighting in public and in the courts against the student growth measure and the use of the grade 3-8 ELA and math exams in APPR.  As many will recall, the grade 3-8 ELA and math exams were found to be highly flawed and over the years have been met a wave of opt-out requests from parents across the state.

The implementation of APPR was supposed include measures that would improve teaching.  However, since its inception, the law has done little more than provide a nuisance around which school districts must navigate.  NYSUT and several parent advocacy groups are currently lobbying our state congress to eliminate APPR altogether.  In the meantime, while the law remains in place, districts must continue to operate under this current system for teacher and principal evaluations.

What do you need to know?

On Friday, September 2, our district APPR committee met to discuss our APPR plan.  For this school year, our district will return to the use of a district wide Student Learning Objective (SLO) that will comprise the student performance score for every teacher in our district.  The SLO will use the 5 state Regents exams that all students must pass to graduate:

 

Common Core Algebra 1

Common Core English

Global History

Living Environment

US History

The target for the district wide SLO will be that 80% of the scores on all of the 5 Regents exams taken by all the students in the district will be a score of 65 or greater.

For the teacher observation section of our APPR, we will continue to use selected components outlined in the text by Charlotte Danielson, A Framework for Teaching.  The one change for this year is that the district APPR committee has decided to remove component 4a – Engaging in Reflective Practice – as one of the components that will be assessed.  Making this change reduces the number of assessed components to the 7 listed below.

1b. Demonstrating knowledge of students

1e. Designing coherent instruction

2a. Creating an environment of respect and rapport

2c. Managing classroom procedures

3a. Communicating with students

3b. Using questioning and discussion techniques

3d. Using assessment in instruction

For those who are unfamiliar with A Framework for Teaching, I would strongly recommend the website created by The Danielson Group - https://danielsongroup.org/the-framework-for-teaching/ 

This website is a comprehensive resource that covers all of the components in the framework and offers descriptions of what constitutes highly effective, effective, developing and ineffective teaching in each of the components.

Full details about our district APPR plan can be found on the Helpful Links page of our LUT website and by clicking the link below

https://levittownteachers.org/sites/default/files/levittown_district_appr_plan_2022-23.pdf

This document covers in detail how observations are conducted and scored as well as the rubrics used for tabulating observation scores and student performance scores and how those results are turned into an overall rating of “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing,” or “ineffective.”

If you have any questions or concerns about APPR, please don’t hesitate to contact me at josephromano@mac.com

 

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