First year New Mexico teacher evaluations under scrutiny

Seventy-five percent of the 16,000 teachers evaluated under a new system called NMTEACH Educator Effectiveness system earned a rating of effective or higher.

However, many educators are questioning the validity of the new system and whether important decisions like pay raises and lay offs should be based on it.

Teachers in Las Cruces are waiting to see how they fare, even though they were only evaluated on one of three portions of NMTEACH, the observation portion. A PowerPoint Presentation from the Public Education Department shows the system rates teachers based on six categories.

“We’re finding that it’s a fundamentally flawed system,” Patrick Sanchez said. He’s the president of the National Education Association Las Cruces.

Sanchez has been teaching for 25 years. He says the first year results of NMTEACH have a lot of people feeling like it’s not a good way to evaluate teachers. He says it focuses too much on standardized test results, but that’s not the only issue.

Sanchez says next year, teachers in Las Cruces are going to be surveyed by their students and parents, as part of the, “multiple measures” portion of NMTEACH.
If evaluations come back with negative feedback, a teacher will be given several years to make improvements. Sanchez adds it’s too premature to make any decisions based on results just yet.

“Here in Las Cruces we’re not going to make any employment decisions based on it,” Sanchez said.

When it’s fully up and running, NMTEACH will be a three-part system composed of observation, multiple measures and student achievement. It certainly has teachers aware of an extra watchful eye over them.

A Las Cruces Public Schools spokeswoman says the only one who’s had full access to the results released late last week at Superintendent Stan Rounds. He must have found some errors in it, because the district asked PED to review the data again.