Huge Court Victory for School Boards Statewide

The word came late yesterday afternoon that the School Board had prevailed in a challenge to the utilization of  the Value Added Model (VAM) for computation of teacher evaluations.

In Cook v. Stewart, the Escambia County Teacher's Union and others challenged the VAM calculations for utilization as a factor that helped to determine teacher pay.  School Board attorney Donna Waters argued the case in April of 2014 in Gainesville before the Federal District Court.  The plaintiffs appealed to the Federal Circuit Court, and in April of 2015 the Board's attorney presented the appellate argument before this court in Montgomery Alabama.

Yesterday, the court issued their ruling--affirming the lower court decision in favor of the School Board and the Florida Department of Education.

This decision is another huge victory for students, parents, and taxpayers around the state.

read the complete ruling here

Interesting Insights into How We Evaluate Teachers Locally

...“Why would anyone work here with so much at stake?” one teacher related to me recently, a teacher who’s ranking went from “Effective” to “Needs Improvement” because her VAM was developed utilizing a small sample size due to a small stability group because she works in a high-poverty school with tremendous student mobility..

The formula for evaluating teachers is complex.  Not only is it intricate-it can be unfair to teachers in some locations and to those teachers that teach ESE students.

Previously in our district, we had an evaluation system that was a joke, it was horrendous.  And I discussed it frequently because it was so bad; it was almost as bad as a pass/fail civil service evaluation.  Everybody is great, everybody wins-you know the type...  But it was terrible, it did nobody any good, and needed to be scrapped.  Eventually the district put together a much better system that was much more objective.

Recently the state mandated that student test data become a component in the teachers’ evaluation—an idea I strongly support if it is done fairly and correctly.  Under this scenario, not only does the teacher get evaluated based upon the test scores of the students the individual teacher teaches-but this data also has huge consequences and can significantly impact a teachers’ overall rating.  

In some cases, the addition of the test score data (or VAM data),  can take a “highly effective” or “effective” teacher all the way down to “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory!” (Under state law now, two consecutive teacher evaluations that are “unsatisfactory” can lead to removal of a teacher from the profession—so the stakes could not be higher)

So how can this happen?  I was wondering that too so I had a long conversation with the district’s director of evaluation services so that I could understand how the process works.  Here it is in a