Senate Bill 191. Great Teachers and Leaders: Ensuring Quality Instruction through Educator Effectiveness. Retrieved from http://www.mikejohnston.org/issues/sb-10-191/

Leverage Human capital to: (1) Defining Effectiveness; empowers a specific team, the Governors Council for Educator Effectiveness comprised of stakeholders from all parts of the system, to develop a fair, timely, transparent and valid metrics that will gauge teacher educator effectiveness. (2) Teacher Evaluations; ensures that all students are afforded access to good instruction by requiring that fifty percent of the evaluation be based on effectiveness metrics developed by the Council. Teachers with three or more years of effectiveness will earn non-probationary status, but could rotate into non-probationary if rated as ineffective for more than two years in succession. (3) Principal Evaluations; charges principals to focus on student growth and staff development by requiring that fifty percent of a principal’s evaluation be based on the growth of students in his or her building. (4) Mutual Consent; eliminates forced placement of non-probationary teachers from one school to another and requires that all hiring decisions are based on a mutual consent. (5) Career Ladders; asks the Council to create career ladders that provide compensated opportunities for highly effective staff to become leaders in their field

The New Teacher Project proposed that America’s schools had been operating in a policy environment that assumes all teachers are the same. Though a teacher’s effectiveness is singularly important to student success, schools do not distinguish great teaching from good, good from fair, or fair from poor, and a teacher’s effectiveness in helping students to succeed academically almost never factors into critical decisions such as how teachers are hired, developed or retained. The study, citing evidence collected from several large school districts from across the country about their respective teacher evaluation process, suggests that excellent teaching goes unrecognized, and that hard-working teachers who could improve are ignored, and poor performance goes unaddressed (Weisberg, et. al., 2009).

Policymakers advocate using student achievement and student growth to measure teachers’ effectiveness. This process assumes that a teacher’s effect on a students’ achievement should be stable over consecutive years. Researchers and policymakers are often surprised when this is not the case. Why can’t teachers have similar effects on their students over time? Or, more perceptively, how can teachers achieve similar results over time when events in their personal lives and in their teaching environment change so much?

Researchers have documented repeatedly that teachers’ effects on student achievement are highly unstable from year to year (Good, 2014). One reason that teachers vary in their effects on student achievement from year to year is because the characteristics of students they teach also vary from year to year (Good, 2013, 2014). As teachers well know, sometimes subtle changes can have a huge impact on classroom environment. However, there are instructional behaviors associated with student achievement and those behaviors can migrate across subjects and grade levels. These instructional behaviors can be seen as general indicators of what teachers can do to facilitate student achievement.

Race to the Top, The New Teachers Center, Colorado Legacy Foundation, The Tripod Project and the Measures of Effective Teaching Project – funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with critical friends in Colorado’s House and Senate, together with leading teacher and administration agencies such as the Colorado Education Association, Colorado Association of School Boards, Colorado Association of School Executives, and the Colorado Department of Education have shepherded SB 10-191 from a concept to a fully operational practice in 176 school districts across the state (Colorado Legacy Foundation, 2013).

To provide a snapshot of state-level efforts in reaching out and communicating with stakeholders, the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality reviewed 27 states’ communication and engagement efforts regarding educator evaluation (Colorado was included in this review). Although it is much too soon to determine the quality and impact of these effectiveness efforts, it is possible to explore the methods of communication and stakeholder engagement that states had employed to engage stakeholders.

Leaders in the state house, which at the time was controlled by a democratic majority with a democratic governor in office, created a bi-partisan proposal to create broad policies, and wisely directed a to-be-formed Educator Effectiveness Council to tease out strategies and practices that would be implemented to meet the spirit of the law (Behrstock-Sherratt, Biggers, & Fetters, 2012).

Relationship building: prioritizing face-to-face interactions with stakeholders and approaching these as opportunities to genuinely listen to teachers and others.

Inclusiveness: involving all relevant parties, most particularly the statewide professional associations, at each stage of development and implementation.

Vision: keeping the vision central to the reforms to ensure that the SEA’s efforts and discussions with stakeholders stayed focused and avoided losing sight of what they hoped to accomplish and for what purposes. Referring back to this vision when obstacles arise is especially important, as is communicating to stakeholders concerning how the new policy will benefit them.

Expertise: recognizing the need to consult with experts, in addition to engaging with stakeholders. For example, as the scale of work demanded that the Colorado Department of Education Educator Effectiveness team expand from a close-knit group of three to nine, the group’s communication functions became more complex and the decision was made to hire a communication expert to assist with this task. A second expert consultant was hired to assist with rubric development (Beherstock-Sheratt, et. al., 2012).

Schools and educators who are measuring the growth of their students and reflecting practice that responds to that growth, will, over time, see trends of growth that will yield to greater levels of proficiency in their students.

A fundamental premise associated with using student growth for school accountability is that ‘good’ schools bring about student growth in excess of that found at ‘bad’ schools. Students attending such schools tend to demonstrate extraordinary growth that is causally attributed to the school or teachers instructing the students.

A weakness of value-added analyses is the difficulty anchoring the normative results with the performance standard criteria on which the accountability system rests. In essence, universal proficiency does not necessarily follow from above average growth. The gap between value-added analyses and standards based accountability systems is simply a reflection of a deeper schism between underlying norms and standards (Betebenner, 2009).

The schism is created where current practice must yield to future practice, and paves the way for a review of what the process would cost. It could be argued that the cost of doing nothing is greater (over time) than the cost of implementation, however, there are quite real costs associated with bridging the schism.

Actual costs varied depending on the effectiveness level of the staff involved, for instance, additional cost to implement SB 10-191 with fidelity with an already effective staff member could cost an additional $531 per teacher per year (not adjusted for inflation). That cost for an ineffective teacher would grow to $3,873 per teacher per year (not adjusted for inflation).

There would be both an increased cost to perform evaluations at the scale recommended by the State Council for Educator Effectiveness (SCEE), and that the capacity to provide supervision would in many districts have to be supplemented with additional support, and in 39 small and rural districts across the state, they currently do not have the capacity to perform the duties required by SB 10-191 (APA, 2011).

Since the passage of SB 10-191 three years ago, there has been massive effort provided by CDE to provide resources and support to districts to navigate this field; curriculum samples, resource banks, templates for practice, communication and engagement strategies, student and parent survey documents, and an amplified web presence that includes growth, accountability, practices and policy are but a few of the support mechanisms provided to each school district and BOCES in the state. In addition, outside agencies have joined forces to augment the work that CDE is doing and to provide an additional level of support to move the needle (Beherstock-Sheratt, et. al., 2012).

While there is still room for additional research regarding the practices that effective teachers demonstrate, there is growing evidence that student growth, when anchored with standard performance criteria, and measured with thoughtful input with the folks who live at the point of delivery could yield greater levels of content proficiency.

The question is: can we afford to ignore or resist this process? Ought implies can. Can we create capacity that provides for all students to achieve proficiency?