States Escaping No Child Left Behind Can Get More Time On Teacher Evaluations
For years, the Obama administration has made tougher teacher evaluations a centerpiece of its education agenda, giving states incentives to grade educators partially in accordance with students' standardized test scores. But on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced most states will get a reprieve of sorts.
Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education, wrote in a Thursday letter to state school chiefs that states that have received waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act will be able to continue to evade the law even if they did not use test scores in this year's teacher evaluations. But states are still required to show the test scores to teachers.
"Testing should never be the main focus of our schools ... No test can ever measure what a student is, or can be," Duncan wrote in a blog post Thursday. "Testing issues today are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools."
Beyond the question of when states have to use test scores in teacher evaluations, Duncan said states can request other types of flexibility. "We want to make sure that they are still sharing growth data with their teachers, and still moving forward on the other critical pieces of evaluation systems that provide useful feedback to educators," Duncan wrote.
The letter built on previous incremental announcements about the administration's piecemeal changes to the waiver program. No Child Left Behind, the 2001 much-maligned George W. Bush law that mandated regular standardized testing, expired in 2007. After Congress failed to rewrite it, Duncan and President Barack Obama told states in 2011 that they could escape some of its components by agreeing to policies preferred by the Education Department. Since then, more than 40 states have garnered the waivers, but 35 states' waivers expire this summer. So far, 18 have received one-year extensions.
States that received the waivers were expected to fully implement their new teacher evaluation systems by this school year. But that deadline coincides with the first year during which states are supposed to be using tests aligned to their newer, higher States Escaping No Child Left Behind Can Get More Time On Teacher Evaluations:
