The state Board of Education voted Thursday to spend $758,000 to hire a team of experts to help develop a system for evaluating teachers and administrators based on how their students perform academically.
The state committed to developing new teacher/leader evaluations and a pay-for-performance system when it applied for and was awarded $400 million through President Barack Obama's education reform initiative, Race to the Top.
The team, headed by James Stronge, a professor of educational policy, planning and leadership at the College of William & Mary, will retool the state’s current teacher and leader evaluation systems.
The plan is to pilot the new evaluation systems during the next school year in 26 local school districts that signed on to Georgia's Race to the Top and will share $200 million of the $400 million state award.
The evaluation systems later will be rolled out across the state. Those 26 school districts also will pilot a pay-for-performance plan in the 2013-14 school year, but it's unclear yet whether it will be implemented statewide.
Stronge, who has helped put together teacher and leader evaluation systems in several states, will have a team of six to 12 people working with him in Georgia for about 18 months, creating the new system, providing training to staff and then evaluating how it’s working.
School board member Larry Winter said he and other board members had been taking phone calls from people concerned “we sure are paying this one man an awful lot of money.”
Stronge’s contract doesn’t specify how much he will be paid, but does specify that several other people will be involved.
DOE officials said their agency doesn't have the expertise to develop the new evaluations. They've also said that hiring additional full-time personnel with the level of expertise needed to conduct a legally defensible revision would be cost prohibitive.
Stronge is well known as an education researcher, author and consultant on teacher and principal effectiveness. He has worked on large scale 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 also been working with Gwinnett County, the state's largest school district, since 2006 on professional development, specifically teacher effectiveness, principal effectiveness and teacher evaluations.
About the Author
