Tenn. Teacher Evaluations to Be Made Public This Summer

The job review scores of thousands of Tennessee teachers will be made available to the public, starting this summer.

The data, a 1-5 ranking based on student test scores and principal evaluations, has not been released in the past. The move puts Tennessee in a league with places like New York City, where an appellate court last month ruled that teacher-effectiveness data on 18,000 teachers must be released to the public.

"If you put my information on the World Wide Web saying I am ineffective, that means the teachers and professors who taught me are also ineffective," said Martha Hearne, a librarian at Kirby High School in Memphis.

"Where will their names go?"

Requests for the data in Tennessee will have to be filed through the state Department of Education.

"As is our current procedure, we will assess each open-records request that we receive," said Kelli Gauthier, department spokeswoman. "The analysis we do will be with our lawyers to determine what the law requires us to provide."

Tennessee teachers have been scored using a new multimeasure evaluation that includes student test scores (35 percent), principal observations (50 percent) and other measures of student success, such as ACT scores or graduation rate (15 percent).

Because the data will be part of a teacher's personnel file, it is public information, even though a 1992 law prohibits sharing teacher-effectiveness data derived from student test scores.

But exactly what should be shared on teacher performance has generated controversy since 2010 when The Los Angeles Times published the scores of its public school teachers.

"I think there are so many unanswered questions around this data system, we should not make it the be-all and end-all in the way we judge teachers," said Jerry Winters, lobbyist for the Tennessee Education Association, which represents more than 60,000 teachers in the state.

"If parents and others put too much weight on this data, it will very certainly lead to teacher shopping, which is not in the best interest of teachers or the students they teach," he said.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools must share the teacher-effectiveness information. Critics, including Bill Gates in an editorial in The New York Times on Feb. 22, say sharing data is punitive and works against reform.

"But publicly ranking teachers by name will not help them get better at their jobs or improve student learning," Gates wrote. "On the contrary, it will make it a lot harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that work."

Sonja Currie, whose son attends Central High School, says the public has the right to know how their children's teachers rate.

"Our focus is to make sure our children are in a conducive learning environment so they can learn as much as they can to be successful in life. I think it would really be helpful to parents and students and the teacher as well to know how well they are doing at their craft."

RELATED BLOG

Visit this blog.

Craigmont Middle School parent Tori Murrell says that even more information about a teacher's performance should be made available, pointing out that the Health Department gives more information on restaurant cleanliness.

"You actually see the actual form and reason why the place lost points.

"I want to know everything about the person educating my child. If she got a 3, I want to know why she didn't get the extra two points. I want to know what is critical for getting a 5."

Tennessee is collecting this data for the first time this year. By the midway point in the year, Memphis City Schools' principals were so far behind in observing teachers, the union threatened to file complaints and potentially have all the data thrown out.

The use of test data is also contested because only a fraction of teachers actually teach tested subjects. In Tennessee, the rest will receive a composite of other teachers' scores, which means a majority of teachers could be graded on students they have never taught.

Vol. 31, Issue 24