Exams bigger than the teacher
Maryland’s House Bill 1167, which passed unanimously both in the House of Delegates on March 12 and in the Senate on April 2, now heads to the desk of Gov Martin O’Malley for his signature. If he signs it, schools can’t use state-administered standardized test results as the basis for any personnel decisions until the 2016-17 school year.
Responding to teachers, lawmakers hope this bill provides relief from the overwhelming feeling that comes with facing several reforms at once. Other legislation awaiting Mr O’Malley’s signature won’t derail any school reforms as surely as this one will derail the teacher evaluations, but the incorporation of standardized test data into teacher evaluations was considered the most onerous of new school reforms.
Maryland wrote this requirement into its application for the $250 million Race to the Top grant in 2010, and teachers have always viewed it in an unfavorable light, especially since testing experts say standardized test scores aren’t valid for evaluating teacher quality.
The bill would make it illegal, until at least the 2016-2017 school year, to require school districts to include a percentage of student growth data, known as value-added measures, or VAM, in teacher evaluations. Results from the tests in English language arts and math, now being field tested by the multi-state testing consortium known as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, were slated to provide data for teacher evaluations by next year, but the bill would delay that requirement.
(7) Any performance evaluation criteria developed under this subsection may not require student growth data based on state assessments to be used to make personnel decisions before the 2016-2017 school year.
Delegate Sheila Hixson, Democrat of Montgomery County, who chairs the powerful Ways and Means Committee, led a coalition of 47 delegates in sponsoring the bill, Maryland Reporter.com reports.
But just because VAM can’t be used for making personnel decisions until 2016-2017 doesn’t mean the state won’t need the data from several years before that. When the 2016-2017 school year comes, schools will need data to use as a basis for comparison. Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Lillian M Lowery recently spoke about how that might work.
“Test measures from 2014-2015 will serve as baseline data and data from 2015-2016 will facilitate the norming of the test measures in 2016-2017,” she said in a talking-points document distributed electronically.