Pennsylvania to try teacher evaluation pilot program
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Every spring, assessment letters appear in educators' mailboxes across the state.
Theoretically, a negative performance review could change the course of an instructor's career. But from a statistical standpoint, there is nothing to fear: A whopping 99 percent of Pennsylvania teachers and principals learned this year that reviewers think their work is satisfactory.
But as Jeannine French, Pittsburgh Public Schools' chief of performance, puts it, where does a teacher go from there?
"What a letdown to know you're 'satisfactory' after all that hard work," Ms. French said at a best-practices-in-education conference for teachers and principals in Allegheny Intermediate Unit No. 3 on Friday. "It doesn't tell you how to get better."
Federal officials, state governments and school districts from coast to coast agree that current teacher evaluations, which are usually administered by principals, are missing the mark. Last week, Pennsylvania became the latest state to express interest in a serious overhaul of the system used to determine which teachers are making the grade and which are under-serving students.
Tim Eller, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said the state is engaging schools in a three-part pilot program of a teacher evaluation system that relies heavily on value-added measures -- a controversial yardstick that uses student test scores to determine the "value" teachers add to student knowledge over the course of a year. The idea has grown in popularity since President Barack Obama expressed his support for the system during the federal Race to the Top education funding competition last year.
Twenty percent of state school districts, career and technical schools and intermediate units will participate in the pilot program starting this fall. By the following school year, Mr. Eller said, a revised version of the program will be up and running in every Pennsylvania school.
Current legislation forbids schools from using student test performance to evaluate teacher effectiveness, but Mr. Eller said state lawmakers will consider a bill to overturn that restraint during the coming legislative session.
First Published August 8, 2011 12:00 am
