Editorial: State should heed Lanoue, Clarke BOE on new education evaluation system
“You need to go back to the drawing board on this.”
That was Clarke County Schools Superintendent Phil Lanoue, speaking to two members of the local delegation to the state legislature at an Athens-Clarke County Federation of Neighborhoods forum last week.
His reference was to a new teacher evaluation system overwhelmingly approved by the Georgia General Assembly earlier this year, a system which Lanoue told forum attendees, including state Reps. Regina Quick, R-Athens, and Chuck Williams, R-Watkinsville, is expensive, time-consuming and won’t accurately measure how well teachers perform. As just one example of problems with the system, Lanoue noted that evaluation of music students would require significant time that could otherwise be used for instruction and student practice.
Briefly, House Bill 244, the legislation establishing the new teacher evaluation system set to become effective in the next school year, would base half of the annual evaluation of teachers on their students’ scores on state standardized tests, with the remainder of the evaluation based on other indicators of student performance and on classroom observation.
For teachers of subjects that don’t include a state standardized test, like band or chorus, annual evaluations would be based on measures of student achievement developed by the individual local school systems and approved by the state school board. Principals and assistant principals also would be subject to evaluation based on student test scores.
In other words, House Bill 244 is a perfectly bureaucratic response to what is the decidedly imperfect science of assessing how teachers and administrators are doing with regard to the decidedly challenging task of reaching the wide variety of students who attend the state’s public schools.
For the record, Quick and Williams voted in favor of House Bill 244, while Rep. Spencer Frye, D-Athens, voted against it. In the state Senate, Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, voted in favor of the bill, and Frank Ginn, R-Danielsville, did not vote.
At the Federation of Neighborhoods forum, Lanoue noted the difficulty of performance assessment, but did not, it should be noted, suggest that there is no place for assessment in the public school arena. Here’s what he said: “It’s impossible for anyone to be able to distill the hundreds of thousands of interactions that happen on every single day. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have assessment. We need to go back and create an equilibrium. It doesn’t mean lower the bar.”
Lanoue’s comments at the forum were backed up last week by a resolution approved unanimously by the Clarke County Board of Education asking Gov. Nathan Deal, the state legislature, and the state school board to put the new evaluation system on hold “and enter into a collaborative dialogue resulting in a broad-based system that supports students, teachers and leaders in improving student achievement by addressing the varying needs of school districts ... .”
What we have in Lanoue is a seasoned educator and administrator who recognizes the need for assessing how students and teachers are performing, but who makes a good case that the evaluation system now approved for the state will compromise instructional time and bring other negative consequences — a case bolstered by the Clarke County Board of Education’s resolution.
If they’re wise, state lawmakers, other elected officials and education officials will pay attention to what Lanoue and the local school board are telling them.
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