The State Board of Education voted yesterday against tying teacher licensure decisions to TVAAS data. This reversed a controversial decision from last August which tied teacher licensure to TVAAS scores. Here’s a little more from the TEA’s statement, who was the self proclaimed primary mover behind this push:
The State Board of Education voted this morning, Friday, Jan. 31, to rescind the portion of the licensure policy that would use TVAAS as a factor in license renewal and advancement. The vote only applies to the portion of the policy related to the use of TVAAS. It does not affect the entire policy the board voted on in August of last year. The vote to rescind the use of TVAAS came after TEA President Gera Summerford and General Counsel Rick Colbert shared the association’s “The Trouble with TVAAS” presentation.
As a teacher, I support the use of TVAAS data in teacher evaluations in a limited fashion. This data can allow us to track individual student growth on purely academic content through testing in certain contents. For example, math, my content, lends itself very well to testing. You can either do the problem or you can’t, end of story. And taken as a whole, a collective group of correct or incorrect answers on a test tells us something about what a student has learned in a classroom that year.
However, TVAAS is not perfect. The smaller the number of children taught by a teacher, the higher the potential that one or two poor scores can skew the entire data in one direction or another. For that reason, I do believe it should be a much smaller number than it is (no more than a third).
When it comes to licensure, however, I believe the board’s decision to completely delink TVAAS from teacher licensure represents the correct policy because it gives teachers the opportunity to devote our time and energies to fully implementing the challenge presented by the new common core state standards without the fear of repercussions for our careers.
With full common core implementation coming up this year, coupling licensure to data could result in large numbers of teachers worrying primarily about losing their credentials even as they are still learning how to appropriately teach the new standards. I’ve been working to implement common core geometry in my classroom this year, and let me tell you, it is HARD. Common core requires teachers to push their students to new levels of thinking and independent operation that we didn’t previously see under the old Tennessee State Standards and their accompanying TCAP and EOC assessments. I still struggle push my kids to the appropriate level of thinking required by the new standards and I’ve been working for over a semester on implementation.
My experience tells me that these standards are indeed an improvement over the old because I’ve had time to struggle with them and see their strengths. But many teachers across Tennessee likely haven’t had this opportunity because we won’t fully move to common core until next year at the high school level along with the new PAARC assessments. These educators should be given the time and the opportunity to have the same experience that I have without the fear of repercussion.
If this policy is implemented, I believe it would likely lead to even more backlash against common core as teachers begin to fear for their jobs under new state standards that the are still working to implement. Struggling with common core will inevitably lead to struggles on PAARC assessments, which would be the new source for TVAAS data. This struggle would inevitably lead to increased negative feelings as teachers begin to fear for their very careers as the new state tests approach. But by decoupling scores from licensure we’ve taken a step in the right direction to allow common core to be fully and appropriately implemented before teachers are truly judged on how well they’ve implemented the new curriculum.
Once we’ve fully implemented common core a few years down the road and teachers and students have had time to acclimate themselves to the new curriculum, there might be potential to reconsider this policy on a limited content basis. But for now, I applaud the decision by the Board of Education to reverse their policy from last August as it gives teachers a chance to devote their time and energies to properly implementing common core without repercussion.
By Jon Alfuth
Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiam and #TNedu to find more of our stories. Please also like our page on facebook.
Posted on February 1, 2014
0