Performance evaluations of Tennessee’s 64,000 public school teachers could be made public as early as this summer. However, the state’s Department of Education is doing what it can to keep the information from becoming water-cooler gossip.
While the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have recently published teacher performance numbers in online databases, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman says news organizations should lay off.
“We wouldn’t publish it ourselves, but we may have to give it over and my hope is that actually newspapers would think pretty carefully about what really is in the public interest when it comes to evaluation records.”
Evaluation data – which includes a controversial 1-through-5 ranking – will officially become part of a teacher’s personnel file. By law, that’s public information in Tennessee. But the state plans to require an open records requests to see it.
“If you’re a teacher, it’s great to get performance feedback. But that doesn’t mean you want the people you go to church with checking out what your performance reviews were. You don’t get to do that to them.”
While Huffman doesn’t feel everyone should see the report card of individual teachers, transparency was one of the original selling points of the evaluation system. Huffman testified to Congress that the state would create a database accessible to teachers, administrators and state officials.
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