Submitted report.
Texas now has a conditional waiver from the “Adequate Yearly Progress” ratings and other requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, according to Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the waiver was conditional and good only for 2013-2014 at this point, because the state has yet to complete new guidelines for teacher evaluation. Duncan has been using the NCLB waiver option as an inducement to states to embrace evaluation policies that give heavy weight to the standardized state test scores of a teacher’s students in evaluating each teacher.
The entire process, including the use of the NCLB waiver to drive Texas schools toward test-based evaluations, will bear close monitoring. The legislature has declined to pass bills mandating a heavy emphasis on standardized state testing in the evaluation of individual teachers – a high-stakes misuse of state test scores that is not supported by educational research.
The TEA in its waiver request said the agency launched an effort to replace the existing Professional Development and Appraisal System (PADS), which has been in use since 1997 and is currently the appraisal option chosen by 86 percent of school districts, according to TEA.
The agency said it wants to replace PDAS with a model more focused on “increasing student achievement” through “continual improvement of instruction by teachers and principals” – and a key part of this agenda is the development of “both a campus-wide and individual teacher value-added metric.”
TEA says final judgments on the “appropriateness” of the value-added metric’s use in the evaluation system will be reserved until later in the process, after receiving the results of piloted use in selected districts during the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 school years. “Additionally,” TEA says, “we will begin exploring ways to provide districts with resources and guidelines for developing locally-based measures of student growth to be used at the district and campus levels.”
The current TEA timeline calls for the release of draft teaching standards for public comment in December of this year. The process would continue with piloting of new observation tools in 2014 and training on new rubrics and protocols in 2014-2015. At some point next school year, the commissioner would update his rules relating to teacher appraisal based on results of the pilot – presumably providing another period for public comment. Statewide rollout of a new state-approved evaluation model is slated for 2015-2016.
