Here is another post from VAMboozled!’s new team member – Noelle Paufler, Ph.D. – on Ohio’s “new and improved” teacher evaluation system, redesigned three years out from Ohio’s last attempt.
The Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) can hardly be considered “old” in its third year of implementation, and yet Ohio Budget Bill (HB64) proposes new changes to the system for the 2015-2016 school year. In a recent blog post, Plunderbund (aka Greg Mild) highlights the latest revisions to the OTES as proposed in HB64. (This post is also featured here on Diane Ravitch’s blog.)
Plunderbund outlines several key concerns with the budget bill including:
- Student Learning Objectives (SLOs): In place of SLOs, teachers who are assigned to grade levels, courses, or subjects for which value-added scores are unavailable (i.e., via state standardized tests or vendor assessments approved by the Ohio Department of Education [ODE]) are to be evaluated “using a method of attributing student growth,” per HB64, Section 3319.111 (B) (2).
- Attributed Student Growth: The value-added results of an entire school or district are to be attributed to teachers who otherwise do not have individual value-added scores for evaluation purposes. In this scenario, teachers are to be evaluated based upon the performance of students they may not have met in subject areas they do not directly teach.
- Timeline: If enacted, the budget bill does will require the ODE to finalize the revised evaluation framework until October 31, 2015. Although the OTES has just now been fully implemented in most districts across the state, school boards would need to quickly revise teacher evaluation processes, forms, and software to comply with the new requirements well after the school year is already underway.
As Plunderbund notes, these newly proposed changes resurrect a series of long-standing questions of validity and credibility with regards to OTES. The proposed use of “attributed student growth” to evaluate teachers who are assigned to non-tested grade levels or subject areas has and should raise concerns among all teachers. This proposal presumes that an essentially two-tiered evaluation system can validly measure the effectiveness of some teachers based on presumably proximal outcomes (their individual students’ scores on state or approved vendor assessments) and others based on distal outcomes (at best) using attributed student growth. While the dust has scarcely settled with regards to OTES implementation, Plunderbund compellingly argues that this new wave of proposed changes would result in more confusion, frustration, and chaos among teachers and disruptions to student learning.
To learn more, read Plunderbund’s full critique of the proposed changes, again, click here.
