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In Alabama, the Grand Old Party (GOP) has put forth a draft bill to be entitled as an act and ultimately called the Rewarding Advancement in Instruction and Student Excellence (RAISE) Act of 2016. The purpose of the act will be to…wait for it…use test scores to grade and pay teachers annual bonuses (i.e., “supplements”) as per their performance. More specifically, the bill is to “provide a procedure for observing and evaluating teachers” to help make “significant differentiation[s] in pay, retention, promotion, dismissals, and other staffing decisions, including transfers, placements, and preferences in the event of reductions in force, [as] primarily [based] on evaluation results.” Related, Alabama districts may no longer use teachers’ “seniority, degrees, or credentials as a basis for determining pay or making the retention, promotion, dismissal, and staffing decisions.” Genius!

Accordingly, Larry Lee whose blog is based on the foundation that “education is everyone’s business,” sent me this bill to review, and critique, and help make everyone’s business. I attach it here for others who are interested, but I also summarize and critique it’s most relevant (but also contemptible) issues below.

For the Alabama teachers who are eligible, they are (after a staggered period of time) to be primarily evaluated (i.e., for up to 45% of a teacher’s total evaluation score) on the extent to which they purportedly cause student growth in achievement, with student growth being defined as the teachers’ purported impacts on “[t]he change in achievement for an individual student between two or more points in time.” Teachers are also to be observed at least twice per year (i.e., for up to 45% of a teacher’s total evaluation score), by their appropriate and appropriately trained evaluators/supervisors, and an unnamed and undefined set of parent and student surveys are to be used to evaluate the teachers (i.e., up to 15% of a teacher’s total evaluation score).

Again, no real surprises here as the adoption of such measures is common among states like Alabama (and New Mexico), but when these components are explained in more detail is where things really go awry.

“For grade levels and subjects for which student standardized assessment data is not available and for teachers for whom student standardized assessment data is not available, the [state’s] department [of education] shall establish a list of preapproved options for governing boards to utilize to measure student growth.” This is precisely what has gotten the whole state of New Mexico wrapped up in, and currently losing their ongoing lawsuit (see my most recent post on this here). While providing districts with menus of preapproved assessment options might make sense to policymakers, any self respecting researcher or even assessment commoner should know why this is entirely inappropriate. To read more about this, the best research study explaining why doing just this will set any state up for lawsuits comes from Brown University’s John Papay in his highly esteemed and highly cited “Different tests, different answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures” article. The title of this research article alone should explain enough why simply positioning and offering up such tests in such casual (and quite careless) ways makes way for legal recourse.

Otherwise, the only test mentioned that is also to be used to measure teachers’ purported impacts on student growth is the ACT Aspire – the ACT test corporation’s “college and career readiness” test that is aligned to and connected with their more familiar college-entrance ACT. This, too, was one of the sources of the aforementioned lawsuit in New Mexico in terms of what we call content validity, in that states cannot simply pull in tests that are not adequately aligned with a state’s curriculum (e.g., I could find no information about the alignment of the ACT Aspire to Alabama’s curriculum here, which is also highly problematic as this information should definitely be available) and that have not been validated for such purposes (i.e., to measure teachers’ impacts on student growth).

Regardless of the tests, however, all of the secondary measures to be used to evaluate Alabama teachers (e.g., student and parent survey scores, observational scores) are also to be “correlated with impacts on student achievement results.” We’ve also increasingly seen this becoming the case across the nation, whereas state/district leaders are not simply assessing whether these indicators are independently correlated, which they should be if they all, in fact, help to measure our construct of interest = teacher effectiveness, but state/district leaders are rather manufacturing and forcing these correlations via what I have termed “artificial conflation” strategies (see also a recent post here about how this is one of the fundamental and critical points of litigation in Houston).

The state is apparently also set on going “all in” on evaluating their principals in many of the same ways, although I did not critique those sections for this particular post.

Most importantly, though, for those of you who have access to such leaders in Alabama, do send them this post so they might be a bit more proactive, and appropriately more careful and cautious, before going down this poor educational policy path. While I do embrace my professional responsibility as a public scholar to be called to court to testify about all of this when such high-stakes consequences are ultimately, yet inappropriately based upon invalid inferences, I’d much rather be proactive in this regard and save states and states’ taxpayers their time and money, respectively.

Accordingly, I see the state is also to put out a request for proposals to retain an external contractor to help them measure said student growth and teachers’ purported impacts on it. I would also be more than happy to help the state negotiate this contract, much more wisely than so many other states and districts have negotiated similar contracts thus far (e.g., without asking for reliability and validity evidence as a contractual deliverable)…should this poor educational policy actually come to fruition.