Contrary to what is going on in South Carolina and its House Bill 4419 (thanks in large part to Rhee and her “supportive” efforts, as posted also today here), in the state of Washington its State Senate just voted “No” against evaluating teachers in the state using student test scores.
Interesting that this happened in Bill Gates’s homestead state, given his current and widespread educational “reform” initiatives in support of the opposite, but I digress.
As per at least one of the articles capturing this story, Washington State Senate Bill 5246 failed by a 28-19 vote, even though Washington (like many other states) has a federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver requiring the state to mandate the use of such tests for such evaluation systems. The state could now lose an undisclosed (and likely unknown) amount of federal funding, by not complying with the aforementioned condition of the NCLB waiver.
One of the State Senators said that she voted the bill down because “using state tests to measure student growth has not been proven to be an effective way to judge teachers.”
It’s about time!!! Silver linings, perhaps, but something certainly to celebrate!
But not for another State Senator who voted for it, particularly noting that “Losing the waiver would mean nearly every school in the state would have to send a letter home to parents saying they are failing to meet the requirements of the federal education law.”
Is this not something else to celebrate? Depends on your stance as a leader, I guess.
Unfortunately now our governor is heading to DC to meet with the oh-so-eminently-qualified Arne Duncan to beg for our federal money and will probably end up doing an end run around the legislature somehow to force us to be judged by test scores. He already sold the Boeing (union) workers out, I’m sure teachers in WA State are next. But I guess it could be worse…we could have Huppenthal as our (latest) eminently-unqualified Supe of Public Instruction and have his robocall-voucher-sabotage-public-schools-plot going on. Not sorry to have left Arizona.