Ldr 620 - Five Stars: Case for Critical Analysis

Five Stars: Case for Critical Analysis

Shemarkus Johnson

LDR-620

November 11, 2015
Dr. Kevin Barksdale

Five Stars: Case for Critical Analysis

        In order to comply with the demands of legislators, the department of state education began a rigorous hunt for an innovative system to gauge the level of teacher accountability. They joined several additional states in applying a revamped teacher evaluation method (Daft, 2008). The objective of this new system was to hold teachers responsible for the learning progression of their students in the classroom. With the supervisor of the National Council for Teacher Quality, in accordance with guidelines set be the various states. In this system, 40% of every teacher’s accountability score would be based on the principal’s evaluation and ranking based on personal observation, 30 percent would be based on personal observation by a master teacher from outside the district, and the other 30 percent would be based on student test score gains (Daft, 2008).

Feedback Control

The major strength of using this feedback system is that is the percentage of each evaluation is well balanced to the point that not doing well in one evaluation will not automatically result in failing the evaluation.  In this system teachers are ranked separately by the principal, a master teacher from outside of the district, and the test scores of their students. This gives them a chance to be thoroughly evaluated (Daft, 2008). The issue with this system that it is too subjective due to the fact that principal and out-of-district master teacher are very familiar with the personal history of the personnel they are evaluating. This results in their evaluations been too bias and personal, which can lead to inaccurate or falsified evaluation results (Daft, 2008). To resolve this issue, an impartial third party, such as a different master teacher and principal from outside the state should be used to conduct those portions of the evaluation process. This will give the teachers a teachers a chance to be evaluated without any bias.