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Southern Lawmakers Reconsidering Role of Test Scores in Teacher Evaluations

By Emmanuel Felton — March 11, 2016 2 min read
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After years of fierce debates over effectiveness and fairness of the methodology, several southern lawmakers are looking to minimize the weight placed on so called value-added measures, derived from how much students’ test scores changed, in teacher-evaluation systems.

In part because these states are home to some of the weakest teachers unions in the country, southern policymakers were able to push past arguments that the state tests were ill suited for teacher-evaluation purposes and that the system would punish teachers for working in the toughest classrooms. States like Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee, became some of the earliest and strongest adopters of the practice. But in the past few weeks, lawmakers from Baton Rouge, La., to Atlanta have introduced bills to limit the practice.

In February, the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a bill that would reduce the student-growth component from 50 percent of a teachers’ evaluation down to 30 percent. Earlier this week, nearly 30 individuals signed up to speak on behalf fo the bill at a State House hearing.

Similarly, Louisiana House Bill 479 would reduce student-growth weight from 50 percent to 35 percent. Tennessee House Bill 1453 would reduce the weight of student-growth data through the 2018-2019 school year and would require the state Board of Education to produce a report evaluating the policy’s ongoing effectiveness. Lawmakers in Florida, Kentucky, and Oklahoma have introduced similar bills, according to the Southern Regional Education Board’s 2016 educator-effectiveness bill tracker.

By and large, states adopted these test-score centric teacher-evaluation systems to attain waivers from No Child Left Behind’s requirement that all students by proficient by 2014. To get a waiver, states had to adopt systems that evaluated teachers “in significant part, based on student growth.” That has looked very different from state to state, ranging from 20 percent in Utah to 50 percent in states like Alaska, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

No Child Left Behind’s replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, doesn’t require states to have a teacher-evaluation system at all, but, as my colleague Stephen Sawchuk reported, the nation’s state superintendents say they remain committed to maintaining systems that regularly review teachers.

But, as Sawchuk reported, Steven Staples, Virginia’s state superintendent, signaled that his state may move away from its current system where student test scores make up 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation:

What we've found is that through our experience [with the NCLB waivers], we have had some unintended outcomes. The biggest one is that there's an over-reliance on a single measure; too many of our divisions defaulted to the statewide standardized test ... and their feedback was that because that was a focus [of the federal government], they felt they needed to emphasize that, ignoring some other factors. It also drove a real emphasis on a summative, final evaluation. And it resulted in our best teachers running away from our most challenged."

Some state lawmakers appear to absorbing a similar message

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teacher Beat blog.