David P. Cleary, chief of staff to Senator Lamar Alexander, responded to my questions about the Every Student Succeeds Act.
This is part 2:
The stakes attached to testing: will teachers be evaluated by test scores, as Duncan demanded and as the American Statistical Association rejected? Will teachers be fired because of ratings based on test scores?
Short Answer:
The federal mandate on teacher evaluation linked to test scores, as created in the waivers, is eliminated in ESSA.
States are allowed to use federal funds to continue these programs, if they choose, or completely change their strategy, but they will no longer be required to include these policies as a condition of receiving federal funds. In fact, the Secretary is explicitly prohibited from mandating any aspect of a teacher evaluation system, or mandating a state conduct the evaluation altogether, in section 1111(e)(1)(B)(iii)(IX) and (X), section 2101(e), and section 8401(d)(3) of the new law.
Long Answer:
Chairman Alexander has been a long advocate of the concept, as he calls it, of “paying teachers more for teaching well.” As governor of Tennessee he created the first teacher evaluation system in the nation, and believes to this day that the “Holy Grail” of education reform is finding fair ways to pay teachers more for teaching well.
But he opposed the idea of creating or continuing a federal mandate and requiring states to follow a Washington-based model of how to establish these types of systems.
Teacher evaluation is complicated work and the last thing local school districts and states need is to send their evaluation system to Washington, D.C., to see if a bureaucrat in Washington thinks they got it right.
ESSA ends the waiver requirements on August 2016 so states or districts that choose to end their teacher evaluation system may. Otherwise, states can make changes to their teacher evaluation systems, or start over and start a new system. The decision is left to states and school districts to work out.
The law does continue a separate, competitive funding program, the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Fund, to allow states, school districts, or non-profits or for-profits in partnership with a state or school district to apply for competitive grants to implement teacher evaluation systems to see if the country can learn more about effective and fair ways of linking student performance to teacher performance.
While the legislation does not attach test scores to teacher evaluation, does ESSA call for a statewide teacher evaluation system to be in place?
For-profit providers of teacher evaluation systems are permitted to compete for grants if they “partner” with a non-profit. That is one of eight “for-profit” provisions in ESSA, a reflection of the power of Pearson and others as lobbyists.
Not stated in this narrative about ESSA and teacher evaluation is the fact these “incentive” grants are designed to install pay-for-performance as the national norm in spite of abundant evidence from USDE funded research that these plans do not work, cannot be sustained over time, do not produce and sustain gains in student achievement, undermine the collaborative ethos of schools, and ignore the totally ignore the overwhelming influence of in-school resources for teaching and non-school factors on student achievement.
Reblogged this on education pathways and commented:
Teacher evaluations are no longer required to be associated with test scores. Now the question is “What will Skandara’s response be?”
Of course, ESSA is pushing their profits disguised. This is called marketing and packaging.
And at the expense of our young. ESSA is WRONG again.
“Chairman Alexander has been a long advocate of the concept, as he calls it, of “paying teachers more for teaching well.” As governor of Tennessee he created the first teacher evaluation system in the nation, and believes to this day that the “Holy Grail” of education reform is finding fair ways to pay teachers more for teaching well.”
Isn’t that just “merit pay”?
Hasn’t that been shown not to work?
Why do people keep chasing Holy Grails that don’t exist?
Merit pay has ever worked
It is a zombie reform
The living dead
Every law that states something about “student performance” should be required to restate it as “student performance ON STANDARDIZED TESTS” because that’s all the legislators seem to care about. Forget about creativity, character, and all the rest of what goes a child’s education. They only care about a child’s preparation to make a living, not his or her preparation to live a life.
SR Earl, standardized tests do not predict or measure the ability to make a living
…not unless you are David Coleman, in which case they predict with absolute certainty that you will make at least half a million dollars per year.
If that’s not a living, I don’t know what is,
“The law does continue a separate, competitive funding program, the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Fund, to allow states, school districts, or non-profits or for-profits in partnership with a state or school district to apply for competitive grants to implement teacher evaluation systems to see if the country can learn more about effective and fair ways of linking student performance to teacher performance.”
YEP, They might have moved the tent in which the camel so happily resided but they didn’t kick the camel out.