At a session on teacher effectiveness at yesterday's Excellence in Action National Summit in Washington, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman offered some lessons learned for legislators and state leaders looking to implement revised teacher-evaluation systems. The information he presented may be instructive for educators as well, since Tennessee was one of the first states to go down this perilous road.
Tennessee is in its second year of using a new statewide system that bases 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation on observation ratings, 35 percent on student-growth measures, and 15 percent on other measures of achievement. Last fall, Education Week reported on that system, as well as the backlash against it from overwhelmed teachers and principals. More recently, the Teacher Beat blog covered a report finding that teachers' observation scores tend to be inflated under the new system.
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