Tuesday night the state teachers’ union agreed to proposed changes in the way the state assesses teacher performance. Governor Phil Bredesen has said such changes are vital to positioning the state to receive hundreds of millions of federal ‘Race to the Top’ dollars.
The changes will allow up to half the assessment of a teacher’s work to be based on how students are learning and improving according to test results.
The Tennessee Education Association had been slow to sign off on using such data for a full half of a teacher’s evaluation. TEA President Earl Wiman says that’s because how students perform isn’t entirely up to one teacher.
So Wiman says the TEA is basing its support on a couple of conditions.
“We wanted to make sure that in a teacher’s evaluation if they felt like they data was inaccurate or the process for the evaluation had not been followed that there would be a way for the teacher to point that out, and some kind of redress around that.”
TEA also wants educators to be part of the group that develops new teacher performance evaluations.
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