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Post date: Feb 20, 2015 6:42:33 AM
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.
Who's to blame?
These positive changes appear to have the full support of Superintendent Hofmeister and to be driven by Tulsa's Jana Burk, who leads the TLE office in Tulsa Public Schools. They are an obvious drive to restore more local control in teacher appraisals after the state usurped most of that control when it changed Oklahoma's appraisal laws in a vain attempt to capture some of the Obama administration's Race to the Top funding, which mandated ill-advised test-based teacher appraisals.
The legislature should be faulted for its repeated meddling in and bungling of state education policy. But the greatest blame for the SLO/SOO fiasco attaches to the State Department of Education under the discredited leadership of former State Superintendent Janet Barresi, and to the existing State Board of Education, which mandated SLO/SOO without a recommendation to do so from the TLE Commission and without a research base to justify the use of such measures in teacher evaluations. These types of objectives and tests are certainly appropriate for the formative assessments used by Data Teams and Professional Learning Communities, but have not been shown to be an effective part of teacher appraisal.
The Commission also calls for study of other higher-quality measures, with Tulsa's TLE coordinator promoting that district's use of student surveys from Tripod. However, those surveys were the subject of considerable controversy this year. Tulsa's TLE leader also noted that while a 5-point scale is appropriate for qualitative ratings, Tulsa's research showed only a 3-point scale (below average, average, and above average) was appropriate for quantitative ratings, and they avoid a composite score, instead having evaluators consider multiple separate scores when data is available.
So far the Commission only says it plans to 'recommend', not mandate, such alternate measures. As your Chief Negotiator, if the Commission does eventually recommend the very expensive and controversial Tripod surveys now being used in Tulsa, I would not support their use in our district.
SLO/SOOs could be eliminated as soon as next week
While most of the recommended changes will require an amendatory law make it through the legislative process, SLO/SOOs are another matter.
The audio record of the meeting revealed that the TLE Commission never recommended the use of SLO/SOOs to the State Board of Education; that requirement did not come from them or from state law, but was imposed by the State Board of Education, and the Commission members were unclear on whether or not the state board knew that the TLE Commission never voted to recommend SLO/SOOs.
Bartlesville Suspends SLO/SOO Process
Bartlesville principals and supervisors are being asked to SUSPEND their SLO/SOO review process until further notice. If SLO/SOOs are to be scrapped and not merely delayed, then we see no value in continuing the rushed and burdensome implementation forced upon us by the Barresi-era State Department of Education. If SLO/SOOs survive the state board meeting, then we'll resume a streamlined approval process we have just put into place.
So Superintendent Hofmeister plans to ask the State Board of Education, at its 2/26/2015 meeting, to scrap SLO/SOOs. So we might soon be able to forget about that onerous mandate, with OAMs living on until hopefully a state law is passed to get rid of them as well. Bartlesville teachers, in a good faith effort to comply with state law, will then have wasted considerable time and energy on SLO/SOOs. Shame on the state's policy leaders for yet again foisting off on us yet another unfunded mandate, based more on politics than sound research.
It appears certain that the quantitative component of TLE will not be fully implemented until 2017-2018, but what precise form that component will take is now up in the air, with a Commission recommendation that may or may not be fully reflected in the necessary legislation.
Below is the press release on this matter from the State Department of Education:
OKLAHOMA CITY (Feb. 19, 2015) — The Teacher & Leader Effectiveness (TLE) Commission today voted unanimously to approve several recommended changes in an effort to have a more valid and reliable framework for teacher and leader evaluation.
Key recommendations include delaying implementation of TLE’s quantitative component for two years and eliminating the SLOs (Student Learning Objectives) / SOOs (Student Outcome Objectives) as a proxy for Value-Added Models (VAMs).
The proposal to delay the quantitative component is in legislation authored by state Sen. John Ford, who chairs the Senate Education Committee and is on the 11-member TLE Commission.
“This marks the first of several steps to ensure Oklahoma’s TLE framework is built on strong research and reliable measures,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister. “Our focus is on professional development for teachers and leaders that translate into greater results for children.”
The full recommendations passed include:
Report quantitative measures, as available, to teachers and leaders for information purposes only until 2016-2017. Begin using quantitative measures for evaluation purposes, as available, beginning 2017-2018.
Keep five-tier rating system of qualitative.
Allow for separate reporting of multiple measures — no composite score or weight system required.
Keep high-quality quantitative measures
Keep value-added, where available
Eliminate OAMs (Other Academic Measures) and develop alternatives that will be recommended to local school districts that are reliable, research-based and an actionable measure correlated to growth in student achievement or engagement.
Allow school districts the ability to define in their board policies, using qualitative and quantitative measures as available, when/how a teacher is deemed “effective” for purposes of automatic career status, or “ineffective/needs improvement” for mandatory exiting purposes.
Eliminate OAM menu and SLOs/SOOs and study alternatives. (State Board of Education policy)
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