ESSA: Teacher evaluations and Pay for Success.
President Obama signs ESSA last December.
-From a report by Springfield NPR education reporter Dusty Rhodes. The entire report from Illinois Issues can be found here
Another reason Illinois teachers may not feel much difference under ESSA is that —barring a transformation in the General Assembly — the new law’s teacher evaluation guidelines won’t apply here. Unlike the NCLB waiver system, ESSA does not require state teacher evaluation systems to hinge on students’ standardized test scores. But when Illinois applied for a federal Race To The Top grant in 2010, it had to prove that it was ready to implement exactly that kind of evaluation. It did so by enacting the Performance Evaluation Reform Act, which was rolled into a broader Education Reform Act in 2011.
Fred Klonsky, a retired Park Ridge art teacher and education blogger, can’t envision state lawmakers undoing that measure.
“Now that they’ve passed ESSA, that law doesn’t go away,” he says. “Teachers are still going to be evaluated exactly in the way that they were being evaluated before the bill was passed.”
There’s a reason NCLB was passed in the first place: States weren’t doing a great job of educating all children. But after 13 years of NCLB, the federal government hasn’t proven to be much better at it, as it failed to close the achievement gap. And while ESSA basically throws the ball back into the states’ court, it bring in one other player: the private sector.
For example, ESSA contains a provision allowing “pay for success,” also known as “social impact bonds.”
One example of the bonds in action comes from Utah. Goldman Sachs and ESSA: Teacher evaluations and Pay for Success. | Fred Klonsky: