Frank Petruzielo, superintendent of Cherokee County Schools, on what he likes most and least about his district being a partner in Georgia’s Race to the Top program:
- In a high-performing district, one could argue that 75 to 80 percent of teachers and teacher leaders deserve bonuses. Why are we limited to 10 or 15 percent when there may be far more deserving educators?
- Mixed messages and confusion associated with ongoing … implementation also is frustrating. This may be a result of a lack of coordination and communication between and among the U.S. Department of Education, the Governor's Office of Student Achievement and the Georgia Department of Education.
- The state's decision for individual districts to develop their own SLO (student learning objectives), instead of creating statewide SLOs, makes no sense at all. It involves teachers throughout the state in a tremendous amount of busy work that will not lead to the logical conclusion of a standardized model to determine variations in performance. Georgia is adopting national performance standards for our students Why not at least have statewide performance standards for our teachers/leaders?
How teachers are to be rated
50 percent of their rating will be based on classroom observations by the principal or other administrator. The teacher’s performance is measured on 10 performance standards.
50 percent of their rating will be on student growth and achievement. In classes where students take end-of-course tests or the CRCT, the growth measure will be based on those tests. In non-tested subjects, student learning objectives – some still being created – will measure student growth.
How school leaders are to be rated
30 percent of their ratings will be based on their performance on eight standards as measured through classroom observations and documentation.
70 percent of their ratings will be based on student growth and academic achievement.
*All evaluators have to be fully trained and credentialed by the state. As of Oct. 10, 2013, there have been 7,095 evaluators credentialed in the Teacher Keys Effectiveness system and 3,128 evaluators credentialed in the Leader Keys Effectiveness System.
Source: Georgia Department of Education
A few thousand of Georgia’s top teachers and school principals are expected to receive one-time bonuses of at least $2,500 in summer 2015.
It will be the first time any sizable number of the state’s educators see a direct financial benefit from new teacher and leader evaluations tied to student improvement, after years of hand-wringing and nail biting over them.
Officials in 26 districts were expecting the payoff to come sooner — and be much bigger — for their best teachers and principals when they signed on in 2010 as the state’s partners in Race to the Top, President Barrack Obama’s education initiative. But creating new evaluations for educators has been complicated and is still a work in progress.
Georgia and its local partners, including Gwinnett, Cherokee, DeKalb and Clayton school districts in metro Atlanta, competed for a share of $4.3 billion that the Obama administration offered as an incentive to push education reform.
Georgia won $400 million by promising that within just four years, the state and local districts would tackle targeted reforms such as improving the use of data, intervening in low-achieving schools and making improving student achievement a major factor in teacher and principal evaluations.
Almost out of the gate, the state was behind schedule on the work. Longtime educators attribute that to top leadership changes: a new governor and new state school superintendent taking office soon after the grant award.
“We had one meeting, then all those changes started,” said J. Alvin Wilbanks, CEO and superintendent in Gwinnett. “So by the time we began to really work in earnest, I figure we’d lost 18 months.”
The state couldn’t meet the four-year deadline and recently was granted a one-year extension from the U.S. Department of Education. Florida and Tennessee also had to ask for extra time, and more states are expected to follow.
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An outdated teacher evaluation system, which rates their job performance as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, has made it hard in Georgia to recognize and reward top talent and to identify and push bad teachers out the door.
Coming up with a new evaluation system has been a long and sometimes rocky road. For example, state officials quickly backed off the idea of basing 10 percent of a teacher’s score on student surveys starting as early as kindergarten. They said surveys of the youngest children would likely be mostly positive and unreliable. They have since decided to eliminate all student surveys as a factor in the ratings.
In July 2012, the U.S. Department of Education put Georgia at “high risk” of losing up to $33 million on grounds that state officials had strayed too far from the vision originally outlined in their winning Race to the Top application. That application called for a teacher/leader evaluation system with four key components: classroom observations, student growth, a reduction in the student achievement gap and student surveys.
Two months ago, a top official with the U.S. Department of Education notified Gov. Nathan Deal that the department was withholding $9 million of Georgia’s grant money. Ann Whalen, director of policy and program implementation at the USDOE, said Georgia had failed to comply with “fundamental requirements” of the grant. Specifically, she said, the state had promised to create a sustainable performance-based teacher and leader compensation system but later shifted its goal to a one-time bonus.
“This change in strategy will significantly undermine Georgia’s commitment to achieve essential reform in one of the core areas of the Race to the Top program – increasing teacher and principal effectiveness and achieving equity in the distribution of highly effective teachers,” Whalen wrote Deal.
The state is considering its options for appeal of the U.S. DOE’s decision. Officials with the state Department of Education are moving forward with plans to award bonuses of $2,500 to teachers and principals in the 26 districts who rate in the top 10 percent, said Susan Andrews, deputy state school superintendent over Race to the Top.
Andrews said the new evaluation system is much better, in part because 50 percent of a teacher’s rating is based on “hard data on how far you took this child.”
“I think that’s much improved over our old system,” she said. “Is it perfect yet? No, it is not. But we will continue to work on it until we get it perfect.”
Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, said “the jury’s out” on whether the end product of Race to the Top will be a fair evaluation system.
Teachers who have been part of various trial runs have given it mixed reviews, Callahan said.
The classroom-observation piece hasn’t caused “any particular troubles,” he said. “When they start to apply student achievement in some yet-to-be-realized formulaic way, that could be when concerns manifest themselves,” Callahan said.
Cherokee's Petruzielo says he's concerned about whether the system will be valid and reliable for both the short and long term.
“Since we have yet to see a final TEM (teacher effectiveness measure) or LEM (leader effectiveness measure) score, the jury is still out in this regard, he said. “From my experience, every previous merit pay plan for teachers has failed because it lacked validity and/or reliability and no new source of recurring funding was identified to continue it after initial implementation.”
The planned system is “a small improvement” over No Child Left Behind, since it recognizes that student academic progress should be measured by more than a single test given on a single day, he said.
It’s shortcoming, Petruzielo said, is that it still does not give enough weight to a student’s growth from point A to point B.
“That has the potential to discriminate not only against students furthest from the target, but also teachers who work so hard to help at-risk students achieve,” he said. “It creates an incentive for teachers to avoid students, classes and schools with these challenges.”
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