Georgia has been warned it could lose $33 million of its $400 million Race to the Top school grant because of proposed changes to its cornerstone project, a new evaluation system for principals and teachers.
In a letter sent to the governor Monday, U.S. Department of Education officials said the $33 million dedicated to the new evaluations is “at high risk.” They asked the state to address the concerns by Aug. 1 and suggested monthly status reports on its progress.
Of 12 states that have been awarded Race to the Top grants, for proposed innovations in schools, only Hawaii had been given such a warning. In Hawaii’s case, the federal Education Department threatened to pull all of its money.
“We’re not Hawaii,” Brian Robinson, spokesman for the governor, said Tuesday. “We are committed to making sure we fulfill the mission of Race to the Top, and we are confident we will be able to work through this with the Department of Education.”
Federal officials are concerned that Georgia has strayed too far from its original plans to create a teacher/leader evaluation system with four key components: classroom observations, student growth, a reduction in the student achievement gap and student surveys. They also worry that the state is proposing changes before it finds out how well the proposed new evaluations worked. They were tried out in 26 school districts from January to May.
State officials have asked to shelve the idea of kindergartners through second-graders evaluating their teachers. They say ratings by children so young are likely to be mostly positive and not reliable. They also want surveys by older students to be informational instead of counting as 10 percent of a teacher’s formal evaluation, as earlier proposed.
The state also wants to rethink the way it had planned to measure reductions in the student achievement gap, Robinson said.
In the letter to Deal, Ann Whalen, who oversees the Race to the Top program for the U.S. Department of Education, said some of the state’s requests “may constitute significant changes to the educator evaluation system in the state’s approved plan.”
Yet, “The department is confident that with additional time and focus dedicated to this area, the state can get back on track,” Whalen told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday. She said, “Georgia’s work to strengthen teaching and school leadership lays out a bold vision and sets a high bar for taking this work to the next level.”
Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, said teachers believe it is more important that the evaluation system be done right than done fast.
“As we have said many times, the evaluation piece is one of the most critical aspects of the RTTT and getting it right will be both time-consuming and difficult,” Callahan said. “It may well be that the feds are operating under an unrealistic timeline, given the complexity and importance of the task at hand.”
Educators generally agree that the current evaluation system, where teachers are rated either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, needs replacing. They say it does little to root out bad teachers, especially since on average 99 percent receive positive evaluations. Finding a system fair to all has been the main concern.
Teresa MacCartney, deputy superintendent for Race to the Top implementation, said she is confident the state can meet the Aug. 1 deadline for addressing the U.S. DOE’s concerns.
“We don’t feel that” the high-risk designation of Georgia’s proposals “is going to have a negative impact,” MacCartney said. “We really are working with our districts to get the best product and resources to our teachers to drive student achievement.”
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