Students in the Scottsdale Unified School District have been taking a lot of tests since school started as part of the state's new push for teacher accountability.

Next May, the students will be retested. For the first time, their scores will be part of their teachers' evaluations.

"I like it because we're finally going to get a starting point of where the students are," said Buck Holmes, head of the physical-education department at Coronado High School in Scottsdale. "We do tests all the time, and this is another way of looking at them."

School districts and charters must start using quantifiable proof of student improvement as part of teachers' evaluations starting with the 2013-14 school year. Many Valley districts have started using them this year.

Beginning in the 2014-15 school year, up to 40 percent of all Arizona teachers' performance pay will be tied to the new evaluations.

The state Board of Education set a framework requiring that one-third to one-half of a teacher's evaluation be based on student data, but beyond that, districts and charters can create their own assessments. So, there is much variety in what they will look like.

The Chandler Unified School District spent $164,000 to buy an assessment, the Marzano Teacher Evaluation System, which it will phase in starting next year.

The Fountain Hills Unified School District decided that buying a model was too expensive; so, like many districts, it is keeping its old evaluation system, based mostly on principal classroom visits, and adding student data to it. The district will pilot it this year.

The data must include scores from Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards test, or AIMS. But schools can include other tests, such as the Stanford 10 benchmark tests and the schoolwide "student growth" scores that were provided by the state Department of Education earlier this month.

One problem is that AIMS provides results for teachers only in some subjects in some grades.

Those who teach subjects such as art or music will use schoolwide AIMS results in their evaluations.

But the Scottsdale district wanted as many teachers as possible to have results from their own students.

So, teachers and administrators spent the past year developing their own tests for subjects including art, music, physical education, world languages and other non-AIMS classes.

The tests include a 45-question, multiple-choice pre-assessment -- which was administered districtwide the past two weeks -- and an end-of-year test.

The results will be compared to determine how much students learned. It will account for 33 percent of the teacher's evaluation.

Susan Leonard, lead middle-school PE teacher for Scottsdale, helped create the test questions, which will be given to fifth- and eighth-graders.

"We give them scenarios they have to analyze, such as a batting stance, and there's a lot of decision making," said Leonard, who teaches at Ingleside Middle School.

Eventually, all public-school teachers in Arizona will receive a score or a label from their evaluations, which will not be made public.

Starting in 2015-16, districts must set consequences for low-performing teachers.

"The goal of the evaluations is to help a teacher improve their practice to help students grow," said Karen Gasket, assistant superintendent of human resources for the Paradise Valley Unified School District, which is using the new evaluations this year.

"The goal is not to catch a teacher doing something wrong or to punish if the student growth isn't where we thought it would be or should be."

James Lee, Paradise Valley schools superintendent, said all good teachers frequently test their students for growth. But he worries about tying performance pay to test scores.

"When sanctions are placed on districts, on principals and on teachers, the focus instinctively becomes 'we have to teach to the test' at the expense of everything else that we should be teaching, like literature and the arts and teaching them how to think," Lee said.