Testing portion of Colorado teacher evaluations lagging behind

With less than two months remaining in the school year, Amanda Sharrow still doesn’t know how much of her performance evaluation will be based on student test scores or even what tests will be used to rate her effectiveness.

State law mandates that half of Sharrow’s evaluation be based on student growth, but each district gets to determine what factors it will use to grade teachers.

“We haven’t been given anything set in stone for how it’s going to work,” said Sharrow, a high school math teacher in the Boulder Valley School District. “I think they don’t exactly fully know themselves what it’s going to be. I know it’s a transition time, and they’re trying things out and trying to get it figured out.”

Sharrow is one of thousands of teachers across Colorado slated to get their first state-mandated evaluations under the 2010 educator-effectiveness law. Poor ratings will not count against a teacher this year, but effective or better scores will accrue.

Meanwhile, districts vary significantly on how they propose to use student growth to gauge teachers’ effectiveness — and some still struggle to even come up with a plan.

The Colorado Department of Education, whose evaluation model is the template most districts have adopted, notes that districts have much leeway on how to approach the half of the evaluation geared to student progress.

But some have lagged behind in developing the multiple measures demanded by law. The CDE will do research over the summer to examine the different ways districts have weighted various measures of student learning and then produce a collection of “high quality examples” that could be adopted by districts wanting to revise their system, said Katy Anthes, executive director for educator effectiveness.

“The idea is they keep practicing, moving forward, talking about it, trying out different measures,” Anthes said. “If they don’t have confidence in the data those measures are suggesting, they can make the determination how to weight that in the final rating.”

Administrators with the Boulder Valley School District said more time is needed to come up with a system for measuring student growth that fairly reflects teacher performance, especially as the state rolls out new standardized tests that have yet to be used in classrooms.

Legislation crafted by state Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, that recently passed in the legislature will give Boulder Valley and other Colorado school districts a one-year reprieve from the requirement that 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on student performance.

The bill allows local school boards to determine for the 2014-15 academic year what percentage, if any, of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on student academic growth.

Johnston, who crafted the teacher-evaluation law, said an extra year is needed so that districts can establish a baseline from the new tests and have sufficient time to review results.

“Students will still take the test. Teachers will still get to see what their data looks like, but districts have flexibility over how to apply that data to a teacher’s rating,” Johnston said.

For Terace Viney, who teaches language arts and social studies at John Evans Middle School in Greeley, the template for judging her students’ growth remains a work in progress.

But while Greeley-Evans District 6 continues to revise its metrics, most of the data will come from a combination of Transitional Colorado Assessment Program scores and results from ongoing Galileo assessments, which the district administers to students multiple times over the school year.

A little less than half of the student-outcomes measurement will be tied to the school-performance framework, a set of criteria that determines whether a school must adopt an improvement or turnaround plan.

Viney, a first-year teacher who already has been judged “effective” in the professional-practices half of her evaluation, remains uneasy about how accurately the testing portion will depict her performance.

She felt her kids focused well during the recent testing period, but some factors remain beyond her control.

“When it comes down to it, they really want to show what they know,” Viney said. “But I’m nervous because some kids just don’t test well and some don’t take it seriously.”

John Evans principal Dawn Hillman said she would welcome the breathing room called for in the legislation.

“We’re still trying to figure out what that 50 percent looks like,” she said. “We don’t want to rush through a process if it’s not a fair measure of what an effective teacher is.”

Although some districts have been slow to craft measures to gauge teachers on student growth, others have jumped ahead of the curve.

The tiny Centennial School District in San Luis, for example, benefited from being a pilot district that got early guidance from the CDE as well as help from the Colorado Legacy Foundation.

High school language-arts teacher Kimba Rael got to be part of the process that determined which tools would be used, and in what proportion, to judge her students’ progress.

Rael’s evaluation will be weighted with four equal parts ACT English test results; TCAP writing results; ACT combined average of reading and science; and TCAP reading growth model. Two smaller portions use scores from the STAR reading test and overall district score reflecting a combination of data including test scores and graduation rates.

Much of her evaluation will reflect a collective effort with teachers from other subjects. Only two of the criteria, the TCAP writing and ACT English scores, can be attributed solely to her.

“I’m very comfortable with it,” Rael said. “Don’t get me wrong. I think there’s always that little bit of apprehension when you consider that it’s based on other people’s work and professionalism. But isn’t that the whole purpose, that we work as a team? Isn’t that what our kids need?”

Denver Public Schools, which began implementing its new teacher-evaluation model three years ago, has broken down how it will rate teacher performance this school year.

This is the first year the school district will grade teachers based on student growth. Of the 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation that is based on student performance, about 60 percent will come from growth made by students on the state’s standardized test over three years. Another 30 percent will be based on growth made by the campus on the school-performance framework, and 10 percent is based on district growth. If educators do not teach a class that is tied to a standardized test, 45 percent of their total score would be based on campus growth and 5 percent would be based on district growth.

Grant Guyer, executive director of assessment, research and evaluation, said DPS officials understand that the breakdown may change over time. Guyer said the district has not had any formal conversations on reducing the weight of student performance in evaluations next year, an option that would be available with the passage of Johnston’s bill.

“The flexibility is nice, but I am not aware of any conversations in the district that we’re going to head one way or the other,” Guyer said. “We are still in the very early stages of what next year will look like.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, ksimpson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ksimpsondp