New Teacher-Evaluation System to be Tested Anonymously (AZ)

December 20, 2010

Scottsdale schools will test a new teacher-evaluation system anonymously this spring, using sets of student-achievement data to measure teacher effectiveness.

Starting in 2012, all Arizona public school teachers will be evaluated in a new way – including measurements of how well students have progressed academically under a teacher. Currently, the evaluations include Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards test scores, but they only compare scores from year to year, using different groups of students. The new system will analyze individual student growth over the year.

The Scottsdale Unified School District has been working on its own evaluation model for six months and is ready to begin testing it. But before applying it in real time to active teachers, the district will test it on a sort of "virtual" teacher, gathering sets of data, accounting for different variables, layering on other measurements, such as AIMS scores, and rigorously assessing the model. The data will be from real teachers and students, but they will remain anonymous.

Ildi Laczko-Kerr, director of accountability and student information, said the goal is to use data from about 100 teachers who are no longer with the district, touching several subgroups such as teachers who worked with special-education students, who taught subjects that are tested in AIMS and who taught non-AIMS subjects. If the district can’t gather enough data from teachers who have left, it will pluck data from current teachers using anonymous identification numbers, she said.

The data will be from the Career Ladder program, a performance-based compensation plan that provides incentives to teachers in 28 districts, including Scottsdale. Teachers in that program must track student achievement and report it, so the data are suitable for the new evaluation method. About 1,000 Scottsdale teachers are in the program.

"The bottom line is that we’re using a source of information about student achievement that comes directly from the classroom that we have available to us," Laczko-Kerr said. "The primary goal is that we didn’t impact teacher workload and without causing any stress or anxiety to teachers at this point."

The evaluation model is being designed by Katy Cavanagh, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, and Anne Hanson, a teacher who is on assignment as the president of the Scottsdale Education Association teachers’ group. They have been working on it since June and gave a presentation to the governing board last week.

Hanson said the pilot program this spring should be considered exploratory research.

"We’ll look for patterns and information and data results that seem to be reasonable on how we want to move forward," she said.

Next fall, the model will be tested on actual teachers who volunteer.

Laczko-Kerr said that all teachers will create assessments to be used in evaluations, not just those in Career Ladder.

Last spring, the Legislature passed SB 1040, which requires the state Board of Education to create a framework for teacher and principal evaluations that uses quantitative data on student academic progress for at least 33 percent and up to 50 percent of the evaluation.
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That model, called "value added," is emerging as an important component in education reform. When the federal government enticed states to compete for millions of dollars in the Race to the Top program, extra points were given to states that already used student-achievement data in teacher evaluations.