Harkin’s Put Me In Coach! Strategy
Harkin-Enzi’s ESEA reauthorization bill attempts to find a middle ground on teacher and principal evaluations. On one hand, you have the Senate Republican plan supported by Secretary of Education-turned-Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) that would give states the option to develop these kinds of evaluation systems. On the other, you have the Obama administration’s ESEA waiver package that requires states to not only develop such systems, but to use the results to “inform personnel decisions.” To follow through on this requirement in many states would require significant changes to union contracts. Senators Harkin and Enzi tried to land somewhere in between, requiring states to develop teacher and principal evaluation systems – based on both student achievement and classroom observations – and use the results to provide meaningful feedback and to inform professional development decisions … not high-stakes decisions about tenure and dismissal. (I’m not saying that the new teacher and principal evaluations won’t influence these types of decisions, but we’ll get into that in a later blog post.)
Even with this more balanced approach, the major teachers unions have expressed concern over the evaluation