Randi's Folly, or How We Got Colorado's Teacher-Evaluation Reform Wrong - Education Week

May 6, 2010 -- Denver Post... AFT's Randi Weingarten weighs in
Wednesday’s endorsement of Senate Bill 191 by the American Federation of Teachers did not phase many in Colorado but caused quite a stir around the nation.

Nevertheless, AFT President Randi Weingarten said her organization’s support of the bill shouldn’t come as a surprise.
In January, Weingarten made a speech urging her 1.4 million members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account.

In that speech Weingarten called for more frequent and more rigorous evaluations and said she wanted standardized test scores and other measures of student performance to be part of the process.... http://blogs.denverpost.com/coloradoclassroom/2010/05/06/afts-randi-weingarten-weighs-in/318/

Back in 2010, Randi Weingarten, apparently to the surprise of the world -- but not to us here in NYC and other cities on her sellout tour (Newark, Detroit) -- endorsed the Colorado teacher evaluation plan.

Now skip ahead to today's Edweek article with this little nugget:
all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.

Read this and then go back and read the full article on Randi's endorsement plus these other links to Randi back in 2010. You won't hear a peep of mea culpa from our Unity leaders.

How We Got Colorado's Teacher-Evaluation Reform Wrong

Colorado's missteps on teacher evaluation is a cautionary tale for other states

By Van Schoales

April 4, 2017

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/04/06/how-we-got-colorados-teacher-evaluation-reform-wrong.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2

Commentary

Back in May 2010, hundreds of the nation’s education foundation, policy, and practice elites were gathered for the NewSchools Venture Fund meeting in Washington to celebrate and learn from the most recent education reform policy victories in my home state of Colorado and across the country.

The opening speeches highlighted the recent passage of Colorado Senate Bill 10-191—a dramatic law which required that 50 percent of a teacher evaluation be based upon student academic growth. This offered a bold new vision for how teachers would be evaluated and whether they would gain or lose tenure based on the merits of their impact on student achievement.

Colorado would be one of several "ground zeros" for reforming teacher evaluation in the country. Many, including myself, thought these new state policies would allow our best teachers to shine. They would finally have useful feedback, be differentiated on an objective scale of effectiveness, and lose tenure if they weren’t performing. Teachers would be treated like other professionals and less like interchangeable widgets.

Colorado’s law and similar ones in other states appeared to be sound, research-backed policy formulated by education reform’s own "whiz kids." We could point to Ivy League research that made a clear case for dramatic changes to the current system. There were large federal incentives, in addition to private philanthropy fueled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, encouraging such changes. And to pass these teacher-evaluation laws, we built a coalition of reform-minded Democrats and Republicans that also included the American Federation of Teachers. Reformers were confident we had a clear mandate.

And yet. Implementation did not live up to the promises.

Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

What happened?