New tests bring twists, frustrations

It's hard to miss the irony:  Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools didn't have enough confidence in new state exams to stake students'  grades on them,  yet student performance on those tests will be used to evaluate teachers.

That's not necessarily a sign of hypocrisy from the district.  Local officials had a choice about counting the tests toward student grades,  but the state has mandated that value-added ratings generated by the SAS Institute's EVAAS system be part of teacher evaluations.  Still unclear is whether lawmakers will use scores from the new exams to assign letter grades to schools this year.

CMS leaders aren't saying the new exams are bad.  They're just saying there are too many unknowns this year,  with teachers having little information about what would be on the new tests and how to prepare students.  (Those of us who have been around awhile know the state has a history of discovering glitches after kids take a new test,  and these have not been field-tested.)

Rather than risk a student failing a class,  which could potentially jeopardize or delay graduation,  CMS decided the state exams won't count toward grades this year.  That's frustrating to some teachers,  who believe students will put little effort into an exam that can only benefit or harm their instructor.  To top it off,  teachers have to spend unpaid time scoring new items on the tests.

CMS created a parent guide to explain the exams students are taking now  (some exams started earlier in May and some will run through June).  In addition to the familiar terms  -- end-of-grade exams in elementary and middle schools, end-of-course exams in high school  --  you'll now hear about  "common exams,"  sometimes called MSLs,  for measures of student learning.  The difference is that EOGs and EOCs will be used to grade schools,  while common exams will only be used for teacher evaluations.

I'll be curious to hear what parents and teachers think as the exam period plays out.  If there's one consolation for those who think this is too much testing,  it's that the new state program doesn't include the K-2 tests CMS tried in 2010,  requiring adults to administer the tests one student at a time.  However,  officials do expect an early-grades reading test in 2014.

Latest twists in teacher ratings

Teacher effectiveness ratings seem to be slow-tracked in Charlotte,  but Nashville is about to become the third large district to release ratings for individual teachers.  The Tennessean reports that each teacher's evaluation on a five-point scale will be made public this summer,  following the lead of media-initiated releases in Los Angeles and New York City (read one New Yorker's account of being labeled a bad teacher here.)

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has set aside the new tests and value-added ratings that created so much controversy last spring.  Local teachers continue to study the best ways to gauge effectiveness,  but the state's Race to the Top program is now taking the lead on evaluations based on student data. Students around the state will pilot a new survey this spring that could eventually be part of that standard, along with test-score gains.

In January, North Carolina released aggregate job-evaluation results for principals in each district and teachers at each school.  Chief Academic Officer Rebecca Garland said last week there are no plans to post evaluation results for individuals.  When and how the new evaluations might be linked to pay remains unclear.

Meanwhile,  CMS interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh and school board Chairman Ericka Ellis-Stewart are scheduled to update the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee about local performance-pay and teacher evaluation efforts on Tuesday.

Officials from Project LIFT, the philanthropic school-reform group working with CMS, are also on the agenda.  LIFT is looking at some kind of performance pay or bonuses in its nine schools for 2013-14. For the coming year,  top teachers in those schools are being offered retention bonuses based on job evaluations and test-score gains if they'll commit to staying through 2012-13.

Teachers in trouble and school-board lines

Just over 200 Charlotte-Mecklenburg teachers have performance and/or misconduct problems bad enough to merit warning letters, and almost 700 more relatively new teachers don't meet the standards to earn tenure, according to a report Superintendent Peter Gorman sent the school board today.

The tally comes in response to school board questions about the standards being used to evaluate teachers and decide who's in line for performance-based layoffs.

The weekly report to the school board also contains this nugget from Chief Operating Officer Hugh Hattabaugh: 345 teachers from schools that will close next year applied for transfers to other CMS schools, and less than half of them -- 153 -- got offers.

To answer an anticipated question: No, I don't know what all those "special meetings" on Gorman's calendar are.

In an unrelated item, the school board decided earlier this week not to change the structure or terms of the board, which now has six district members and three at-large representatives serving staggered four-year terms. They tapped planner Mike Raible, the district's latest go-to guy on all things complex and controversial, to draw new lines for the electoral districts based on 2010 Census data. He'll bring back options for board discussion and approval.

The school board decided not to focus on creating boundaries that coincide with county commissioner districts. However, at the end of the process they will confer with county folks and, if the two plans look similar, see if they can make minor adjustments to keep the lines the same.

"It may be better than we go down parallel paths and find that our destination may not be all that different," Rhonda Lennon said.

That's a wrap for this week.  If you're reading a schools blog on Friday evening or the weekend, you're probably hard-core enough to look forward to Sunday's paper, when I'll have an in-depth look at CMS's quest to crunch teacher value into a number. There's a school-by-school list of how effective each faculty looked based on the 2010 CMS formula (no listings for individual teachers).