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Accountability is the most popular buzzword in education, with state and federal laws designed to create a system with the highest education standards ever. So it’s natural that some parents might expect school districts to achieve those goals by hiring quality teachers.
But what if parents want proof? Or maybe just want to make sure their son or daughter’s teacher is the right match.
Even though school districts keep teacher discipline records, performance evaluations and classroom ISTEP+ reports, much of that information is not available for review by parents, or any other member of the public.
While nothing prohibits releasing such information, when requests were made by The Journal Gazette, all four Allen County school districts declined the requests.
There are Web sites that offer school-level standardized test scores, racial makeup, graduation rates and educators’ license information, but much of the information kept in a teacher’s personnel file remains off limits, at least in Allen County.
School and teacher union officials say evaluations, reprimands and classroom test scores help little in sizing up what individual teachers do in a classroom.
If a police officer or firefighter is disciplined, it is handled in public by a merit board, but teacher discipline is handled behind closed doors, and the end result is almost always a resignation, allowing teachers to relocate to another district.
In an age of technology where almost anything can be “Googled,” a parent seeking feedback on a teacher’s performance must rely on word of mouth.
“As a parent, I would want to know if my teacher has been aggressive in the past or has had any reprimands for various things in the classroom,” said Dawn Studebaker, parent of two boys at Deer Ridge Elementary School in the Southwest Allen County Schools district.
This summer, The Journal Gazette requested the complete discipline records for every public school teacher in Allen County for the past 10 years, including written reprimands, suspensions, demotions and terminations. Though the districts are allowed to release the information, ultimately, each of the four districts denied the request, saying it was too cumbersome for them to collect.
To gather the kind of information a parent might find useful, The Journal Gazette then randomly selected 15 teachers from each of the Allen County public school districts: Fort Wayne Community Schools, East Allen County Schools, Northwest Allen County Schools and Southwest Allen County Schools.
Citing Indiana’s Public Records Act, we asked for the experience level, salary and complete discipline record for each teacher; their class’ state standardized test scores from the previous year; and any other anecdotal information that would help us understand the caliber of the teacher.
The response was limited.
District leaders seem to agree that the public should not know about the trouble teachers have gotten into while at work, how they fare on evaluations or how their class has performed on the ISTEP+ exam.
NACS Superintendent Steve Yager believes the public should trust school administrators to do their job and take care of any discipline matters internally.
“If there’s a situation where a teacher needs to be disciplined, we handle it. We handle it from within,” Yager said.
Denny Sprunger, Summit Middle School teacher and president of the Southwest Allen County Schools Teacher Association, agrees that parents should not be able to see discipline records because the public knowledge does not benefit anybody.
“Does that make the person a better teacher?” Sprunger said.
Steve Brace, president of the Fort Wayne Education Association, believes publicly disclosing teachers’ discipline records could taint their images, especially if parents don’t know the background of why it was issued.
“We have some reprimands that shouldn’t be reprimands,” Brace said. “They’ve been given a reprimand for something that was beyond their control. I think it could paint a false picture.”
Teachers also don’t need the stress of having their discipline records released on top of everything else they do, Brace said.
“Our teachers are so overregulated and so overworked and so overwhelmed. I just can’t see it,” Brace said. “I would hate to think that if a teacher gets a reprimand it doesn’t mean they’re highly effective. That doesn’t even make sense.”
But some parents think this information would be useful when they’re gearing up for the first day of school and ready to entrust their child to a stranger.
If a parent has a problem with a teacher, it would help to know if the teacher has had prior incidents or poor evaluations leading up to the situation, said Theresa Brown, parent of a sixth-grader at Summit Middle School.
“As a parent, it would be helpful to know because … if your child has an issue with that particular teacher and you try to approach it with the principal … if you don’t know anything about their past it would be difficult to figure out if this is a common occurrence, and they won’t tell you that,” Brown said.
The same goes for performance evaluations, which are usually issued twice a year for newer teachers and become less frequent as they gain experience. Brown had a situation with one of her son’s teachers in the SACS district, where she felt he was not receiving the instruction he needed. She has dealt with the teacher, the head of the department and the assistant principal and is still not satisfied.
“I would be curious to know how this teacher had been evaluated,” Brown said.
Teachers might not agree.
“There’s so many intangible things that are hard to evaluate that to just throw out one aspect of a teacher’s behavior, I don’t think is fair,” said Delores Klocke, who worked at North Side High School in FWCS for 36 years and is now an administrator at the private Keystone Schools.
“I don’t know that it should be made public per se, but I certainly think people should be evaluated regularly and certainly working toward improvement,” Klocke said. “I know they’re being paid for by taxes. On the other hand, I don’t know it should be an open book for every little thing they do.”
Parents also can’t find much help at the state level. The Indiana Department of Education doesn’t provide any information on its Web site regarding individual teacher discipline or performance evaluations.
According to the state Department of Education, 48 teachers have been disciplined since 1999. There were more than 61,000 teachers working in Indiana last school year.
The DOE keeps track of discipline cases only in which criminal charges have been filed, spokesman Avon Waters said. It’s up to school districts to report such cases, but there are no penalties for districts that fail to report.
The state-provided list includes local high-profile cases such as former Homestead High School teacher Pamela Fulford, who pleaded guilty in 2004 to two counts of battery for slapping two students with disabilities, and Kimberly Kleber, a former East Allen County Schools employee sentenced in 2002 for having sex with a teen.
But the list doesn’t include suspensions, firings or reprimands.
FWCS Attorney Bill Sweet said if any of the 15 personnel files requested contained written reprimands, he would have disclosed them. FWCS made good on that promise when it released reprimands against two teachers for a separate story.
But reprimands in teachers’ files are rare, Brace said. It doesn’t mean that school officials are being lax on discipline – it just means teachers aren’t doing things that need to be reprimanded, Brace said.
“Teachers are out there doing their jobs, and they’re doing a great job,” Brace said.
SACS Human Resources Director Phyllis Davis said she wasn’t sure whether it was legal to disclose the reprimands in teachers’ files, which is why the district didn’t include them in its response.
In letters sent after The Journal Gazette’s initial public records request was made, SACS Superintendent Brian Smith and Northwest Allen County Schools Attorney John Bloom said they were only required to turn over discipline measures when final action was taken by the school board.
But most of the time, discipline doesn’t reach the school board level, NACS Superintendent Steve Yager acknowledged.
“In my 18 years we’ve never had a case where the board voted to discipline a teacher,” Yager said. “All of the time we’ve gotten a resignation from the employee, so it was taken care of before it had to go to the board.”
East Allen County Schools turned over only those discipline matters on which the school board voted, which amounted to three cases.
In a letter, EACS attorney Tim McCaulay said the district was required to disclose only disciplinary actions that had been taken as the result of a school board vote. The records included a settlement between EACS and former Woodlan Junior-Senior High School journalism teacher Amy Sorrell, who was given a written reprimand this year after the student newspaper published a column questioning intolerance toward homosexuals, and settlements with two other teachers.
Information on schools and districts is plentiful in Indiana. A simple trip to the Indiana Department of Education Web site, and parents can find almost anything they would need to know about their child’s school and the district it’s under, including ISTEP+ scores.
But for teachers – other than the number of years they’ve taught, the subjects they are certified to teach and the college they attended – the Web site offers nothing about individual performance. The ISTEP+ scores are not broken down by classroom, and there’s nothing to show how a certain teacher’s group of students performed the previous year.
Schools are allowed to disclose how a specific teacher’s class fared on the state proficiency test, but many don’t for fear they will violate student privacy laws, said Wes Bruce, assistant state superintendent for the Department of Education.
They could, however, black out individual students’ names and just give out the raw scores, Bruce said. But the scores wouldn’t indicate how good of a teacher that person is, Bruce and other educators said.
While schools do receive individual classroom reports, it’s unfair to give parents that information when many are not educated in how ISTEP+ works or the complexity of it, said Terry Spradlin, associate director for education policy at the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University.
Some teachers could have a bad year and have students in their class from disadvantaged backgrounds or who are not at the same level as their peers, he said.
“Do we judge our teachers unfairly when we’re provided that information? Do we have the full context for which those circumstances happened?” Spradlin said. “At what point do we provide too much information that could be detrimental rather than beneficial?”
Because ISTEP+ currently is issued in the fall, students are tested on what they learned the previous year, under a previous teacher. District and local leaders fear that releasing classroom reports would not be a fair picture of teachers’ performance because they did not teach the students the material.
But there are those who think disclosing this information is in the spirit of the standards set forth by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which holds schools accountable for their test scores and calls for high-quality teachers in the classroom.
Jack Jennings, who founded the Center on Education Policy in Washington, which provides opinions and research on education issues, said this is especially important because of what No Child Left Behind calls for and that if we’re going to hold schools accountable, teachers need to be held to the same standard.
“Since public schools are supported with tax revenue, I would assume the community should know,” Jennings said. “The public has a right to know the basic facts about public schools.”
ksoderlund@jg.net
