Saying they lack the expertise internally, the Georgia Department of Education plans to spend $758,000 to bring in outside help to develop a system for evaluating teachers and administrators based on how their students perform academically.
As the state looks at linking students' performance to teachers' pay, the department wants a team of experts on teacher quality and evaluations to take the lead on creating the new and uniform system for evaluating Georgia's 143,000 teachers and school administrators. The team will be headed by James Stronge, professor of educational policy, planning and leadership at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
The new evaluation system is supposed to be piloted next school year in Gwinnett, Cherokee and 24 other school districts and then rolled out statewide at a rate of 60 districts per year. In the 2013-2014 school year, the pilot districts also will test a pay-for-performance plan that is viewed skeptically by some educators and lawmakers.
A contract that is slated to be presented to the state Board of Education next week would pay Stronge and his team $758,000 to spend 18 months working on the plan, providing intense training of teachers and administrators on it and then following up with school visits and focus groups to see how it's received.
Stronge is well-known as an education researcher and consultant on teacher and principal effectiveness and has worked on large-size teacher and leader evaluation projects with the federal government and several states, including Virginia, where the state Board of Education has recommended that student test scores start counting as 40 percent of a teacher's performance rating.
He's been working with Gwinnett County, the state's largest school district, since 2006 on professional development -- specifically teacher effectiveness, principal effectiveness and teacher evaluations.
Tying the evaluations of teachers and school leaders -- and in some cases, pay -- to student performance is a popular trend in education that's touted by President Barack Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan as a critical reform effort. Critics argue that it's hard to create a fair evaluation system because of variables, such as poverty and language barriers, that can affect some students' performances.
"In the current accountability reform effort, the development of statewide teacher and leader effectiveness initiatives is relatively new," Stronge said. "Many of the states that have embraced these initiatives are relatively close to Georgia's timeline in terms of design and implementation."
The contract says Stronge will bring in a team, ranging in size from six to 12 members, to create the new evaluation systems for teachers and school leaders. The contract breaks out costs for each part of the project and does not specify individual salaries.
Georgia won a $400 million federal Race to the Top award last year, in part, because the state committed to revamping its current and often-criticized teacher evaluation system that rates teachers' job performance only as either satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
The 26 school districts that partnered with the state on its Race to the Top application and split $200 million of the $400 million grant also had to agree to pilot the new evaluations and, starting with the 2013-2014 school year, a related pay-for-performance plan.
The agency doesn't have the expertise to develop the new evaluations and hiring staff "with the level of expertise needed to conduct a legally defensible revision would be cost prohibitive," a statement from the DOE says.
Jon Rogers, the state DOE's Race to the Top communications director, said federal dollars already coming to Georgia under the No Child Left Behind Act will be used to cover the costs of Stronge's contract, not Race to the Top money.
"Our consideration of Dr. Stronge was based on his experienced leadership and the fact that he and his team would bring with them an unbiased opinion and provide objective feedback," Rogers said.
Calvine Rollins, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, said: "We applaud DOE for investigating the hiring of a professional to determine the best method to implement pay for performance, but we maintain that teachers as the practitioners should always be consulted in the process."
She said GAE representatives are working with DOE officials on ways to improve student achievement without setting up a pay system that's "punitive to teachers."
Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, said he's concerned that educators in the 26 school systems don't know what's in store.
"Right now, we have many unanswered questions, chiefly about the evaluation system -- which we all agree needs radical improvement; the training that will be given to those who will use it -- which we hope isn't like the ineffective training plan for the new math curriculum; and the way student achievement will be factored into it -- value-added or some permutation thereof," Callahan said.
The 26 participating school districts had to set aside 30 percent of their Race to the Top money for 2013-2014, when they will implement a pay-for-performance plan for their teachers and administrators. State officials have said they hope the pay plan -- like the evaluation system -- can be taken statewide. But lawmakers, to date, have not backed that idea.
Stronge said he believes teachers recognize the importance of having proper evaluations of their effectiveness.
"To ensure a higher level of buy-in with a new evaluation system, especially one that is rigorous, it is essential to have teachers actively involved in the designing and planning for the new system," he said. "Additionally, teachers need and deserve quality professional development, clear evaluation handbooks and related material, and ongoing support as the new evaluation system is implemented."
Teacher/leader evaluations -- what the consultants will do for $758,000
1. Retool the state’s current evaluation system that currently rates teachers as satisfactory or unsatisfactory to have one uniform system with four components built around: classroom observations, walk-throughs, teacher lesson plans/portfolios; value-added scores that use multiple years of students’ test score data to estimate the effects of individual schools or teachers on student learning (affecting about 30 percent of teachers in tested subject areas); reductions to the student achievement gap; other quantitative measures such as student surveys and parent surveys. This will be piloted in 26 districts in the 2011-2012 school year.
2. Create uniform teacher and leader evaluation guidebooks and handbooks.
3. Develop training manuals to go with the teacher performance evaluation system, as well as with the leader performance evaluations.
4. Train the trainers who are helping to implement the plan. Survey district-level administrators, principals and teachers on how the teacher and leader evaluation systems are working and hold at least six focus groups for similar purposes.
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