CA: Court Rejects Test-based Teacher Eval
While astro-turf group Students Matter, a front for the reformster activism of Very Rich Man David Welch, is most famous for concocting and then losing the Vergara case, they have been trying to skin the reformy cat with other knife-like lawsuits as well.
With Doe v. Antioch, Welch's group set out to compel thirteen California districts to include Big Standardized Test results in teacher evaluations. To do so, they dragged out the Stull Act (a law old enough to have been signed by Governor Ronald Reagan). The law (also amended in 1999) was supposed to require districts to base teacher evaluations on student test scores-- but it has the words "reasonably relate" which are, depending on your point of view, a necessary bit of slack to allow schools to handle the problem of alllllll those teachers who don't teach tested subjects (how exactly do you tie the evaluation of your phys ed teacher to the results of a math and reading test).
School districts have made use of that wiggle room, and reformsters have periodically waxed cranky over the wiggling.
We have actually been down this Via del Lawsuit before-- back in 2010 Doe v. Deasy was filed in Los Angeles by EdVoice, the group used as a front by Eli Broad, Reed Hastings and Richard Merkin. The CURMUDGUCATION: CA: Court Rejects Test-based Teacher Eval: