Oregon Teacher Evaluation Process
Federal legislation replacing the No Child Left Behind act was recently passed. The new ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) has some changes affecting teacher evaluation that we shouldn’t ignore.
States now have the authority to decide about their evaluation systems. It is no longer federally required to use standardized test scores in the teacher evaluation process. Unfortunately, legislation was passed in Oregon (Senate Bill 290) that led to rule making that requires tying test scores to evaluations. The Oregon Education Association (OEA) participated in the process from the beginning. It hasn’t turned out well and we need to admit it, and then do what we can to fix the situation.
Most would agree that we were sold a bill of goods throughout the entire process of legislation and implementation of SB 290. Initially, teachers were led to believe that it would be a truly collaborative process and test scores weren’t even mentioned. Both teachers and administrators were to work on developing the evaluation system for both employee groups, but in most places teachers had very little input on the administrator evaluations.
Then all of a sudden test scores entered the picture. ODE said that they would consider various options, and so too could individual districts decide how they were to be used. The state eventually made it clear that in the end, they would be choosing the option(s) for evaluation, to be used by all districts. The state did ultimately do so, and they told the individual districts that they must use a certain model. In addition, instead of districts being able to say how student learning and growth goals (SLGGs) Oregon Save Our Schools: Oregon Teacher Evaluation Process: