Teacher Evaluation & PROSE

What is PROSE?

Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (P.R.O.S.E.) is a joint venture between the UFT, the CSA, and the DOE. It is designed to support innovations (aka contract waivers, regulation leniencies) in schools that can demonstrate worthiness through the design of their proposal and a high degree of collaboration between staff, administration, and parent constituencies.

What is our PROSE Proposal?

In designing our proposal for a PROSE version of Teacher Evaluation which considered student learning outcomes (MoSL), our priorities were:

• 1. It would be based on the type of authentic assessment practice that we considered essential, such as reviewing student work, narrative reports, low inference anecdotal records, NYC Learning Record, as well as whatever “standardized” assessments that a school preferred (TC, Words Their Way, etc.) The particulars would be flexibly decided at the school level.

  2. It would be formative. It would promote knowing children well in order to teach them better and to become better teachers. It would promote teacher growth through collaboration and inquiry.

  3. It would provide a structure and resources for supporting and growing authentic assessment and narrative reporting practices through collaboration within and beyond our school community.

  4. There would be a minimum of “make-work.” Authentic assessment practices are already labor intensive. Teachers should not have to spend inordinate amounts of time on tasks whose sole purpose is to translate their work to outsiders who themselves do not have the time to come and look closely.

  5. It would not automatically penalize teachers of low performing or struggling students. These students are often the ones that get most of a teacher’s and school’s resources. The idea that the system could penalize teachers for their efforts with their most challenging students based on one-dimensional indicators of growth seems highly unjust.

  6. It would provide evaluative data about a teacher’s work that was aligned with a school’s particular mission and preferred pedagogical practices.

We also sought to integrate the Federal/State requirements in ways that made sense to us.

• 1. The rating must be influenced by the amount of student learning progress.

  2. That the student learning outcomes must be considered in relation to standards including the CCLS.

To See What We Came Up With, Open File Below: "PROSE MoSL Dossier Guidelines"