Will Georgia’s new teacher evaluation system do more harm than good for students?

Over the course of my career in education, I have worked in charter and non-charter public schools (by the way, if you are not exactly sure what a “charter school” is, click here for an explanation).  I got my start in teaching at so-called “traditional” public schools (I say so-called because just because a school isn’t a charter school doesn’t always mean it is traditional in its practices), but for the past decade I’ve worked solely at two charter schools.  The main reason why?  The autonomy granted to most charter schools means I’ve been able to avoid the types of well-intentioned but severely misguided mandates that can often come from a district office or state Department of Education.  Like most people, I have a very low tolerance for being asked to do things that seem to be getting in the way of me doing what I consider to be my real work—in my case, educating students.

Unfortunately, the Georgia state legislature, through its passage of HB 244 back in 2013, is bringing me—and my school—back into the bureaucratic trap.  The legislature was only doing what it thought it had to do at the time by requiring via HB 244 that student test scores be used in teacher evaluations at all public schools, one of the conditions Georgia and other states had to accept to receive a waiver from the No Child Left Behind act provision that 100% of students pass the state reading and math tests this past spring (though, as it turns out, there may be some flexibility on that—more in a moment).  And so now, as we begin the 2014-15 school year, all public school teachers and leaders—including charter schools like ANCS—must be evaluated using the Georgia Teacher Keys (TKES) and Leader Keys (LKES) evaluation systems, which stipulate that a teacher’s students’ performance on standardized tests must account for 50% of his or her evaluation, and for a principal, 70% of the evaluation score is based on the standardized test performance of students in the school as a whole.

I wrote last year in my blog about some of my concerns after my initial TKES and LKES training.  A year later, those concerns remain high for me, and now that we are in the midst of actually implementing all of the components of TKES and LKES, I’ve got some new ones to add to the list:

Tying evaluations to test scores when the tests themselves are changing and haven’t even been developed: When the legislature passed HB 244, it seemed likely that Georgia would be one of many states using the PARCC assessment aligned with the new Common Core standards in language and math.  But just a few months after the passing of HB 244, Georgia opted to drop out of using the PARCC assessment in order to develop its own assessments for less money.  That was over a year ago.  Georgia will now be using a new testing system called the “Georgia Milestones”—but the test hasn’t even been developed though it will be used in just a few months.

To me, it’s highly problematic to be using a testing system based on new standards immediately for teacher evaluation purposes, doubly so when the testing system hasn’t even been created and the school year is underway.  And has been shown over the past year, Georgia would seem to have some flexibility available in how (and how quickly) it ties test scores to teacher evaluations.  Several places—Tennessee, Connecticut, D.C., among others—have backed out of plans to link student test performance to teacher evaluations, a major research study suggested that test scores and teacher quality may not go hand-in-hand, and even the Gates Foundation—which has funded the development of the Common Core standards and tests tied to them—has urged a delay in including test scores in teacher evaluations.  In light of all of this why can’t Georgia follow the common sense approaches other states have taken and delay including test scores in teacher evaluations?  Good, professional teachers will likely have their doubts about sticking with the job when the system upon which they’ll be judged seems so quickly slapped together. Update: Since posting this blog, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that states may delay using student test scores as a significant part of teacher evaluations.  Now Georgia really has no excuse not to press pause on this aspect of HB 244.

Spending lots of time on training and implementation of a system that may have little positive impact on student learning: As I wrote in my blog last year, the research on how using “growth” and “value-added” data from statewide standardized tests on school and teacher accountability influences student learning is mixed at best.  But it’s flat out wrong-headed to think that Georgia’s “student learning objectives” (SLOs) component of TKES and LKES will have any positive impact on students.

SLOs assessments are developed by teachers and districts ostensibly to measure student growth in “non-tested subjects” like art, foreign language, and P.E.  But the statistical validity of such assessments is incredibly flimsy, something even a researcher with the Atlanta Public Schools has made clear.

Ok, you might ask, so these SLO assessments (like the P.E. one I saw that asked students to label a stick figure drawing of a volleyball serve) are pretty useless—they’ll only take a little bit of class time to give, so what’s the big deal?  The “big deal” is that this aspect of TKES and LKES has already cost me alone about 23 hours of my time.  That’s trainings and workshops all related to SLOs in which I have had to participate over the past year.  Now, as we get ready to do the same to our teachers of “non-tested subjects”, I am deeply troubled that time that could be spent creating great lessons to inspire students’ artistically, to help them develop into healthier young people, or to master a new language will instead be spent on an electronic platform learning how to upload and analyze data from a Scantron form based on a crappy test.  And students as young as 1st grade will take as many as 7 different tests this school year to comply with the requirements of TKES, time that could be spent on real learning.  If you’d like to argue that these are worthwhile trade-offs, please feel free to do so.

The state dictating not only how evaluations should be completed but also what the consequences are based on them: As I wrote in my blog last year, when done sensibly, I have no problem whatsoever in using student testing data as a part of how teachers are evaluated.  But the approach to how test data is used is a decision that should be made by individual schools and districts.  I’m not aware of any other profession for which the state government determines and requires precisely how managers must evaluate their employees.  Certainly there are processes that must be followed, but to say that x% of the evaluation must be based on this criteria and x% on another is not something I’ve ever seen or heard of for other fields.  Even worse, though, is that the results of these prescribed, formulaic evaluations will be used to determine whether a teacher can maintain his or her Georgia teacher certification.  This arrangement virtually assures that the focus in the classroom will be on placing greater emphasis on what is to be tested—through Milestones or SLO tests—even when there may be additional skills and knowledge beyond what is on those tests that are important to a school community.  Again, what is important to include in an evaluation and who is the best fit for your organization are decisions best made by that organization.  If the stakeholders the organization serves aren’t satisfied with the outcomes, they’ll make their dissatisfaction known–in schools, by electing new school boards or changing principals.  We dilute efforts at personalized learning and school accountability and autonomy by making everyone use the same evaluation system.

If, like me, you are concerned about how these changes will impact your student’s teachers and school experience, I urge you to contact those on the state’s education committees and board of education who can make changes.  Let them know of your concerns and what other states have done to address them:

• Georgia House Education Committee members
• Georgia Senate Education Committee members
• Georgia State Board of Education members