Kentucky may have the most maddeningly indecipherable teacher section of any state RTT application. It certainly has as weak a section as any of the finalists.
After reading it three times, I still can't figure out how teachers will be evaluated--and that's supposed to be the core of the entire section.
Apparently, there will be "multiple measures" of student learning and growth. But it's not clear what those will be. "The details of the specific measures of student learning for inclusion in the growth instrument will be developed in the first year of development of the growth model instrument with deep and ongoing participation by teachers and principals."
Whatever those measures are, their relative weight in the system isn't determined yet either (somewhere between 30 and 50 percent).
[quote]Once they are identified and given weight--and I still almost can't believe this--there will be no reliable, comprehensive, transparent system for integrating these into teacher evaluations:??Each teacher will be responsible for collecting a bunch of information and convincing his/her principal that he/she is effective.
Other elements of teacher evaluations will include the level to which teachers "reflect on their practice" and "establish a respectful environment for a diverse population of students."
So in total, it seems as though each teacher's evaluation will be comprised of an indeterminate number??of unidentified, non-uniform, and/or impossible-to-quantify factors, each of which having an unknown weight.
And it's not at all clear how these evaluations will play into personnel decisions from compensation to tenure to termination. One thing is clear: the state is NOT changing its tenure policy. It believes that the new evaluation system--which for the life of me I can't wrap my head around--will help the current policy work better.
I raised concerns when KY was on the finalist list because it lacks a charter law, meaning it lost up to 40 points out of 500. Some replied that its application must be extremely strong in other areas, compensating for that massive point loss. But now I'm finding that its teacher section--the section with the most points--is poor as well.
If a state with these two major weaknesses is a finalist, what does that say about the RTT's "very, very high bar"?
--Andy Smarick