Nevada teacher evaluation lacking specifics as implementation nears
State lawmakers were updated Tuesday on the first statewide teacher evaluation system being implemented in the fall, but a lot of questions remain.
For one, the specifics of the scoring system have yet to be created, members of the Legislative Committee on Education learned Tuesday.
“Everyone wants a tool, and we’re still in the validation phase,” said Pam Salazar, chairwoman of the Nevada Teachers and Leaders Council, which created the evaluation system. She noted that 10 percent of Nevada schools are piloting the new evaluation system this year before the council decides how to make the scoring rubric.
Under Nevada’s new system, teachers and school-level administrators earn one of four designations, from ineffective to highly effective, based on their score. The scoring system will be split into two equally weighted parts.
The first half relies almost entirely on an administrator’s observations of that teacher under five standards. The second half relies solely on student scores from state tests.
But the tests are only given in key subjects, namely math, reading and writing, in third through eighth grades, providing direct data for 30 percent of Nevada’s 25,000 teachers.
The council had to find a way to use student scores for all teachers, as the Legislature required. It came up with a creative alternative for scoring most teachers. It recommended using school-wide scores from tested subject areas for teachers of grade levels that aren’t tested and for those in specialty subjects such as music, social studies and art.
The majority of teachers soon will be evaluated on the test scores of students they never saw or subject areas they didn’t teach, or both.
Other states and school agencies did the same and could be forced to abandon the scoring systems because of lawsuits with teachers unions over the constitutionality of evaluating teachers on test scores over which they have no control.
“We’ll be watching those (cases),” State Superintendent of Public Schools Dale Erquiaga said.
The evaluations will be in place statewide next school year but possibly as a trial run with no stakes attached.
