A fellow blogger, James Hamric and author of Hammy’s Education Reform Blog, emailed a few weeks ago connecting me with a recent post he wrote about teacher evaluations in Texas, titling them and his blog post “The good, the bad and the ridiculous.”

It seems that the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which serves a similar role in Texas as a state department of education elsewhere, recently posted details about the state’s new Teacher Evaluation and Support System (TESS) that the state submitted to the U.S. Department of Education to satisfy the condition’s of its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver, excusing Texas from not meeting NCLB’s prior goal that all students in the state (and all other states) would be 100% proficient in mathematics and reading/language arts by 2014.

While “80% of TESS will be rubric based evaluations consisting of formal observations, self assessment and professional development across six domains…The remaining 20% of TESS ‘will be reflected in a student growth measure at the individual teacher level that will include a value-add score based on student growth as measured by state assessments.’ These value added measures (VAMs) will only apply to approximately one quarter of the teachers [however, and as is the case more or less throughout the country] – those [who] teach testable subjects/grades. For all the other teachers, local districts will have flexibility for the remaining 20% of the evaluation score.” This “flexibility” will include options that include student learning objectives (SLOs), portfolios or district-level pre- and post-tests.

Hamric then goes onto review his concerns about the VAM-based component. While we have highlighted these issues and concerns many times prior on this blog, I do recommend reading these as summarized by others other than us who write here in this blog. This may just help to saturate our minds, and also prepare them to defend ourselves against the “good, bad, and the ridiculous” and perhaps work towards better systems of teacher evaluation, as is really the goal. Click here, again, to read this post in full.

Related, Hamric concludes with the following, “the vast majority of educators want constructive feedback, almost to a fault. As long as the administrator is well trained and qualified, a rubric based evaluation should be sufficient to assess the effectiveness of a teacher. While the mathematical validity of value added models are accepted in more economic and concrete realms, they should not be even a small part of educator evaluations and certainly not any part of high-stakes decisions as to continuing employment. It is my hope that, as Texas rolls out TESS in pilot districts in the 2014-2015 school year, serious consideration will be given to removing the VAM component completely.”