Do-or-die time for teacher evaluation bill

After lying dormant for a yr, a bill to overhaul the state's teacher evaluation police will resurface Mon, subject to continuing negotiations over its cost and some disagreements over its content.

AB five author Assemblymember Felipe Fuentes

AB five's prospects accept improved with the support of the California Teachers Association. CTA expressed reservations a year agone, merely the bill's author, Assemblymember Felipe Fuentes, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, agreed concluding summer to a few primal changes, and so now the union favors it, CTA lobbyist Patricia Rucker said this week. I amendment would require training administrators to do uniform and knowledgeable evaluations.

The nib, which would require that all districts evaluate every teacher based on a set of attributes and practices outlined in the neb, is like to an evaluation framework that the wedlock adopted before this year, Rucker said. AB 5, she said, "is a clear and good policy document."

A Superior Court conclusion with statewide implications earlier this twelvemonth may too be prompting CTA'south support of AB 5. In June, Estimate James Chalfant ruled in a lawsuit brought by a half-dozen Los Angeles Unified parents that the current evaluation law, known every bit the Stull Act, requires school districts to utilize pupil scores on country standardized tests as a measure of teacher effectiveness. CTA and United Teachers Los Angeles have fought tying evaluations to scores on the California Standards Tests, or CSTs, to any extent, aguing they were not written for that purpose. AB 5, by permitting but non requiring districts to use state test scores as a measure of student progress, would undermine Chalfant'south ruling. (Whether his ruling would still utilise to Los Angeles Unified may depend on when AB 5 goes into upshot.)

Rucker said that the CSTs are scheduled to be replaced past assessments aligned to the new Common Cadre standards, and information technology's premature to decide whether those tests would be suitable for teacher evaluations. So the effect of tying land tests to AB 5 is overblown, she said.

Still, the failure of AB 5 to require that evaluations incorporate objective data from student assessments to a significant degree is i of several criticisms of the bill raised past student advocacy groups, including Public Advocates, Didactics Trust-Due west, EdVoice (which underwrote the Stull Act challenge confronting Los Angeles Unified), and StudentsFirst, the Sacramento-based organization created by onetime Washington, D.C., superintendent Michelle Rhee. StudentsFirst detailed its reservations in a letter of the alphabet this week to Christine Kehoe, chair of the Senate Appropriations Commission.

Focus on costs of land mandate

Fuentes spokesman Ben Golombek declined to say whether Fuentes remains open to farther irresolute the pecker, which was last amended in June 2011, but the attention now is on "looking at ways to reduce cost pressures the  bill creates." Rick Simpson, deputy chief of staff for Assembly Speaker John Perez, agreed that's where the focus is. The pecker will be heard at 11 a.m. Monday earlier Senate Appropriations, which is then expected to put it on hold, while legislative leaders figure out how much new money should exist allotted to which of hundreds of bills before them.

The iv decade-old Stull Human action pre-dated the requirement that the state reimburse local governments for mandated programs, so districts are responsible for about of the costs of doing teacher evaluations. AB 5 would create new responsibilities for school districts, so the land would be on the hook, at a minimum, for reimbursing districts for training administrators to practice observations, the time spent in the multiple observations and pre- and post-meetings with teachers to hash out findings and set goals for improvement. AB 5 would cost the land tens of millions of dollars, co-ordinate to Simpson; how much will be better known Monday, when a fiscal analysis is available.

Every bit currently written, AB 5 wouldn't go into effect for at least vii years – until the state has totally repaid school districts for money owed to them from budget cuts and missed annual cost adjustments defined in Suggestion 98. That amount, known as the deficit gene, is at present over $ten billion. And then the claiming is to reduce the costs of the mandate and enact it sooner – though Simpson wouldn't describe the ideas beingness discussed.

Measuring against model standards of practice

Fuentes has said that the strength of his neb would be to use evaluations every bit a tool to better the education skills and techniques of the vast majority of teachers, instead of focusing exclusively on weeding out an unsatisfactory five percent. To that end, it requires districts to develop standards like the half-dozen detailed in California Standards for the Pedagogy Profession. They include:

• Engaging and supporting all pupils in learning, including setting high expectations;
• Creating and maintaining "constructive environments for pupil learning, to the extent that those environments are within the teacher'due south command";
• Understanding and organizing field of study affair for pupil learning, evidenced past knowledge of content standards and "curriculum competence";
• Planning instruction and designing learning experiences for all pupils, such as using differentiated instruction and multicultural information;
• Using pupil assessment data to inform instruction and to improve learning;
• Developing as a professional educator, including building expert relationships with parents and students and working collaboratively with other teachers.

The nib adds a 7th standard: "Contributing to pupil academic growth based upon multiple measures, which may include, but are non limited to, classroom piece of work, local and state academic assessments, and student grades, classroom participation, presentations and performances, and projects and portfolios."

Objections and recommendations

Groups like Educational activity Trust-West and EdVoice praise the use of the California standards as the footing for evaluations, but they argue that without requiring objective data – student exam results – evaluations could be based on softer measures that wouldn't become to the bottom of how much students and educatee subgroups, from gifted students to English learners, are really learning.

Amidst their other criticisms:

• Lack of parental participation. Public Advocates in item is calling for a clear role for parents in teacher evaluations, both in setting criteria that districts will utilize and in the use of student and teacher surveys. Rucker said teachers would be concerned virtually breaches of confidentiality.

• Erosion of school board authorization. Under AB five, all aspects of evaluations would be subject to bargaining with local teachers unions. Los Angeles Unified, which is moving alee with a new instructor evaluation system, has taken the position that it has the authority nether the Stull Act to prepare the criteria for evaluations and the weights given to various factors. Groups like EdTrust-West contend that's how it should exist under AB five as well.

• Multi-tier rating system. The Stull Act requires but a laissez passer-fail arrangement. As a result, in most districts between 95 and 98 percentage of teachers receive satisfactory ratings, rendering moot talk of improvement. Whether it's Elevation, Good, Fair, and Poor or Meets All, Most, Some, or Rarely Any Expectations, evaluation systems by and large accept several categories, with plans for improvement required. AB 5 is silent on this issue. Rick Simpson, a one-time trustee of the Sacramento County Office of Instruction, said information technology should left to districts, through negotiations, to determine rating categories.

• Tying evaluations to dismissals. AB 5 doesn't spell out what happens afterwards teachers receive an unsatisfactory rating. Should at that place exist a i- or two-year menstruation in which they're given aid in improving? Advocates say and so; Simpson says this event goes beyond a teacher evaluation nib and gets into personnel law.

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Source: https://edsource.org/2012/do-or-die-time-for-teacher-evaluation-bill/18913