Dade among pilot systems for teacher effectiveness measure

Dade County Schools will join three other Georgia school districts in piloting a "value-added" method of evaluating teacher effectiveness as the state vies for federal Race to the Top funding.

Schools Superintendent Patty Priest said she and top-level system officials are learning more about the program in meetings with state officials.

The pilot program is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Teacher Effectiveness Momentum Grant and overseen by the company Battell for Kids. It is being fielded in the Atlanta, Dade, Gwinnett and Peach school districts to establish a system to measure student achievement gains from year to year as way to determine teachers' effectiveness.

The "value-added" has been used in Tennessee for years, Priest said.

Standardized test scores show how well students know the material at hand but not how much they learned over the year under a specific teacher, Priest said. A measure of gains better reflects teachers' performance, she said.

Priest said a new teacher evaluation system probably is coming to Georgia, either by winning the Race to the Top competition or in the reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Georgia is among 18 states and the District of Columbia now vying for a piece of $3.4 billion in the second round of the Race to the Top competition.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed in 1965, established academic standards and accountability. It last was reauthorized in 2002 as the No Child Left Behind Act. The Obama administration is formulating some changes, including teacher effectiveness measures, to ESEA for its next reauthorization.

"They'd better get used to it," she said.

Matt Cardoza, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said Priest's prediction is probably right.

"It certainly looks like what's required in the future" by ESEA, Cardoza said.

Georgia is a Race finalist, and winners will be announced in September. If the state isn't chosen, the four systems will keep piloting the value-added programs for the time being. Battelle For Kids will collect and analyze the systems' data, Cardoza said.

No costs

He said there is no cost for cash-strapped Dade, which next week will hold a third hearing on a proposal to increase the millage rate by 0.5.

At the least, the pilot systems "will get professional development to learn how to interpret the data," Cardoza said.

A selection of middle and high schools from the pilot districts, about 60,000 students, will be used to represent implementation statewide, officials said.

The Professional Association of Georgia Educators said it's willing to look at the value-added approach.

In June, the association's executive director, Allene Magill, harshly criticized pay-for-performance efforts in the Georgia Legislature. Magill said a statewide tracking system will be hard to set up and run and that lawmakers are taking a "flavor of the month" approach to teachers' pay.

"Fairer way"

But PAGE spokesman Tim Callahan said the value-added system "has the promise of being a fairer way to look and see what has happened in the classroom."

"It's still kind of experimental. It'll be interesting to see what the results are," Callahan said.

Students and teachers "are more than just test scores," he said.

North Georgia teachers said they are leery of effectiveness measurements that consider only a few test scores when so many factors play into students' test performance.

Dade County High School teacher Susan Millican said the value-added approach is a better measure of teacher effectiveness than simply comparing scores on standardized assessments such as Georgia's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test.

And piloting the program is better than having it handed down after the fact, Millican said. She said she looks forward to working on the project.

"It's going to give me as a teacher a whole lot more feedback on what I'm doing good and what I need to work on," she said.

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