Common Core and Evaluations: Are Teachers 'Going Crazy'?
On the off chance people were looking for a lively discussion about the connections between the Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations on a mid-summer Sunday afternoon, they would have found it at the National Association of State Boards of Education's annual conference in Arlington, Va., on July 28.
The 2013-14 academic year is shaping up to be a hugely important year for both education policy topics, and a year when they will begin to converge in schools. For the upcoming school year, 17 states (including Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, and Oregon) will be asking districts to fully implement new teacher evaluations, Angela Minnici, the principal researcher in the American Institutes for Research's education program, told an audience during a NASBE panel on the new standards and evaluations. (Last school year, 11 states, including Illinois, New York, and Virginia, did so.)
With pilots of new common-core-aligned assessments also slated to be given to students in 2013-14, state board members and others should no longer consider the common core and educator evaluations on two different tracks, Minnici and that there is in fact a "broad