Texas Hangin’ its Hat on its New VAM System
A fellow blogger, James Hamric and author of Hammy’s Education Reform Blog, emailed a few weeks ago connecting me with a recent post he wrote about teacher evaluations in Texas, titling them and his blog post “The good, the bad and the ridiculous.”
It seems that the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which serves a similar role in Texas as a state department of education elsewhere, recently posted details about the state’s new Teacher Evaluation and Support System (TESS) that the state submitted to the U.S. Department of Education to satisfy the condition’s of its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver, excusing Texas from not meeting NCLB’s prior goal that all students in the state (and all other states) would be 100% proficient in mathematics and reading/language arts by 2014.
While “80% of TESS will be rubric based evaluations consisting of formal observations, self assessment and professional development across six domains…The remaining 20% of TESS ‘will be reflected in a student growth measure at the individual teacher level that will include a value-add score based on student growth as measured by state Texas Hangin’ its Hat on its New VAM System |: