The Educated Reporter: Fifty percent, and reporters who don’t comment.

The Educated Reporter: Fifty percent, and reporters who don’t comment.

Fifty percent, and reporters who don’t comment.

by Linda Perlstein

After I blogged on the topic, several reporters wrote me personally about how policy makers in their states decided that student test scores should count toward at least 50 percent of teacher evaluations. In some places consultants insisted that would be a do-or-die threshold for Race to the Top money, though it is not clear that is the the case. (Of the winners, Tennessee policy is 50 percent, while it looks like Delaware has not come to an exact figure.) Under Florida law, teacher evaluations have to be based “predominantly” on student achievement. Achievement means test scores, and apparently 50 percent means predominantly. Nothing fancier than that.

You may have noticed that on a blog dedicated to education journalism, education journalists rarely comment,