Close look: Teacher evaluation provisions

The “tenure bills” signed into law by Gov. Snyder on 19 July captured a great deal of attention. But one aspect of the bills, and arguably the most important, was rarely discussed: a radical re-writing of the rules on teacher evaluation, including state mandates that require value-added models of student “growth” to make up a majority of a teacher’s effectiveness rating.

The bills, now Public Acts 100-103 of 2011, make important changes to the rules for teacher tenure in Michigan and for how teachers are hired and dismissed. While tenure remains, its importance is dramatically reduced. The legal standard for dismissing a teacher with tenure was significantly weakened, from requiring a “fair and just” cause to one that is simply “not arbitrary or capricious.” Seniority and tenure status may no longer be used to determine which teachers are laid off or called back to work, except as a tie-breaker. Instead, all decisions about hiring and laying off or dismissing teachers are now to be based primarily on their “effectiveness.”

All school districts (including ISDs and charter schools) must now give their teachers and administrators one of four ratings: “highly effective,” “effective,” “minimally effective,” or “ineffective.” These ratings determine priority in layoffs and recall; educators with low ratings may be subject to dismissal at any time. In fact, teachers or administrative who receive three annual “ineffective” ratings must be dismissed under the law.

The focus on teacher effectiveness clearly makes the evaluation system of critical importance. While there is a wide range of opinions on how best to evaluate teachers, in this legislation Michigan lawmakers made a decisive choice: to give pride of place to “objective” measures of “student growth,” commonly understood to mean standardized testing. In particular, the legislation requires that this student growth data is to be used in a “teacher value-added” model, which in ideal form is a complicated statistical model estimating a particular teacher’s contribution to a student’s progress on tests while controlling for many other factors. The real-world application of value-added models faces many difficulties, however, because so many important factors (parent income & education, class cohort effects, the involvement of other instructors, etc) can be difficult to measure and are not normally collected by schools. [For more information about value added models, please see the end of this article.]

These provisions received less attention because they were added to the original bill (HB 4627) in the Senate Education Committee, long after the original hearings had been held in the House. Inserted just eight days before the bills passed on the floor of the Senate (and were rapidly sent to the Governor), the evaluation provisions were drawn from a separate bill sponsored by Rep. Tim Melton (D-Pontiac), HB 4796. The Senate made important changes to that language, however: nearly all changes gave local districts less leeway to develop their own evaluation system, reduced the impact a teacher could have on the process, and tightened political control over the choice of evaluation model.

The timeline set by the legislature is tight: districts must start assigning one of the four ratings to teachers and administrators by this September; a new body, the Governor’s Council on Educator Effectiveness, must recommend an evaluation model for educators by next spring; districts must begin using the new tool in the 2013-14 school year.

Key provisions of the evaluation legislation:

• seniority or tenure status may no longer be used to determine layoff or recall priority;
• with some exceptions, all teachers and administrators must be evaluated annually;
• new educator evaluation tools must be adopted by local districts and used to assign effectiveness ratings;
• a “Governor’s Council,” controlled by nominees of the Governor and the House and Senate leadership, will recommend the evaluation tool which districts state-wide must use (with few exceptions);
• that Council will also recommend a tool to measure student growth, and the tool must use value-added modeling;
• only districts which have a functioning evaluation system in place as of 19 July 2011, that also meets the requirements in the new law, may keep a local evaluation model – others must adopt the state model or one of the approved existing alternatives;
• by the 2015-16 school year, at least 50% of an educator’s effectiveness rating must depend on student growth and assessment data;
• educators who receive three annual “ineffective” ratings in a row must be dismissed, but districts are free to dismiss ineffective educators at any time (tenure status notwithstanding).

In a separate bill, HB 4628 (now PA 103), the teacher evaluation system and its use for performance-based compensation (“merit pay”) were added to the list of topics which shall not be the subject of collective bargaining. This takes away most of the leverage teachers might have had over how the system was implemented locally.

The following is a breakdown of the key provisions in PA 102 regarding teacher evaluation, compared with the original bill on evaluation. Provisions we consider critical for school policy are marked in red; other provisions that were changed substantially for political or policy reasons are marked in yellow.

Resources on Value-Added Modeling
While this topic can get very technical, there are some good resources to get a handle on the subject and why it has been so controversial:
A background article, from Education Week, about the origin of and debate over Value Added Modeling
An Education Week blog post on the importance of implementing VAM the right way.
Attached below are several PDF documents on VAM, including brief issue papers on the subject from Educational Testing Service and the RAND corporation, a longer research study by RAND, and a recent paper on the stability of VAM results.