Big Changes Pending in TLE

By Granger Meador, Chief Negotiator, Bartlesville Education Association

UPDATE: The state board of education voted on 2/26/2015 to POSTPONE for this school year, but not yet eliminate, the use of SLO/SOOs for non-tested subjects and the mandated menu of allowable OAM selections while alternatives are being studied. Postponing or eliminating OAMs will require amending existing law. The Tulsa World provided some more details on the meeting.

LOCALLY this means that Bartlesville Public Schools has SUSPENDED all work on SLO/SOOs. However, since OAMs are still required by existing state law, the district is maintaining its database of OAM selections while hoping that legislation to postpone or eliminate them is approved in a timely manner: before teachers invest the time in collecting data such as student surveys.

In a most welcome development, the Teacher/Leader Effectiveness (TLE) Commission has unanimously recommended sweeping changes in the TLE appraisal system. (Bartlesville's Senator Ford, the chair of the Senate Education Committee and a member of the Commission, actively helped craft the recommendation language. But he declined to vote on the final recommendation to the State Board of Education; see below.)

The recommendation calls for scrapping Other Academic Measures (OAMs) and Student Learning/Outcome Objectives (SLO/SOOs). While it calls for retaining Value Added Measures (VAMs), the recommendation takes much of the potential sting out of their use, since it calls for eliminating TLE composite scores which would combine qualitative and quantitative scores, while also saying local school board policies (and bargaining agreements, unless specifically excluded in legislation), not statewide rules, should define how qualitative and available quantitative measures would be used for determining career teacher status and mandatory firings.

Don't count your chickens yet...

HOWEVER, many of the recommendations would require an amendatory law make it through the legislative process. Senator Ford, a key player in that, declined to vote for or against the final recommendations, saying that he did not want to vote no on the recommendations, but also is not clear on the end results of the legislative process to amend TLE. He said he will be working with many different parties to amend TLE, and he did make it clear that he:

• Supports a two-year delay in the quantitative component

• Wants TLE to be reflective and not combative

• Feels the qualitative component is well accepted while the quantitative component is not

• Wants the quantitative component to be significantly redesigned so that it can be better accepted, although he recognizes that its very nature makes it unlikely to ever be as well accepted as the qualitative component

So bear in mind that all of the recommended changes may well not make it through in their current form, although it appears certain that significant changes will occur. Senator Ford's SB 706 currently differs from the recommendation in marked ways, but he indicated he will be visiting with various parties to further craft the bill's language, and a companion bill will be introduced in the House.

So which quantitative measures are endorsed by the Commission?

The Commission recommends having separate quantitative scores only when a high-quality measure is available.  The Commission is following Ms. Burk's lead in considering VAMs to be high-quality, but labels the menu of OAM choices as poor-quality with little validity and accepts that while research supports the use of SLO/SOOs in formative assessments (e.g. for use in data teams), there is no strong research base supporting the use of them in teacher evaluations.