ESSA helps ease teacher-test link

Teachers are happy that they will have greater control over the factors weighing into their own job evaluations, which ultimately factor into their pay, especially for the next school year.

The state Board of Education on Tuesday changed its policy on how student-achievement metrics could figure into teachers’ own performance reviews.

It’s part of the implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal education law enacted in December that no longer requires test scores to be used for that purpose.

Now the “student growth percentile,” based on student test scores, can’t be a weighted measure, even though the general principle of “student learning and growth” officially remains as a component to be counted.

Even though the system of folding student test scores into teacher reviews has been in place since the 2013-14 school year, the issue has remained a key topic of conversation among educators, said Tammi Oyadomari-Chun, the state Department of Education’s assistant superintendent of strategy, innovation and performance.

The DOE administration has recognized that because the standardized testing for the year misses the deadline for job evaluations set by teacher union contract, the scores used come from the previous year, Oyadomari-Chun said. She said all agreed this wasn’t a particularly fair or accurate measure of their current job performance.

Nobody’s happier about this than Amy Perruso, social studies teacher and member of the Governor’s Team on ESSA.

Perruso also pointed out that teachers whose subjects weren’t among those given standardized testing were judged at least partly by the progress (or lack of it) across the school’s entire student body — largely beyond an individual teacher’s control.

Next year, while the ESSA plan and future metrics are being worked out, the student factor in evaluations will be the student’s demonstrated ability to meet the learning objectives the teacher lays out.

The team chairman is Darrel Galera, retired school principal who has criticized the administration’s approach on various fronts. He was glad to see this policy change.

“While teacher evaluation is extremely important … the policy decision to use test scores for teacher evaluation was highly questionable from the beginning and such a practice was never supported by research,” Galera said.