ALERT: Judge Tosses FL DOE Rule on Teacher Evaluations

The Florida Education Association announced and WCTV in Tallahassee reported this morning that the administrative law judge, Judge John Van Landingham has invalidated, the 2011 Senate Bill 736 also known as the “Student Success Act”, performance evaluation rule that the Florida Department of Education had required Florida school districts to develop and follow. (Click here to read FEA’s full announcement and click here to read WCTV News Report.)

As I understand it at this time this basically means that the performance measure for educators known as the “Value Added Model” (VAM) which represents 50% of the educators evaluation will need to be redeveloped.  Based on SB-736 the additional 50% of a teacher evaluation is based on student’s scores and as I understand it has not changed as it was not part of this lawsuit.

I am pleased with the court’s decision and hopefully this decision will result in more local control and flexibility in developing the teacher evaluation system.

I am not a supporter of “teacher’s merit pay” where teachers evaluations and pay raises are directly tied to student scores and performance.  Therefore it may seem strange that I am somewhat thankful for the teacher’s merit pay section involving  the VAM in SB-736 that was just invalidated by the court.  The reason is that in the initial architecture of the Bill was to have 100% of a teachers evaluation based on students’ scores .  If the VAM was not part of the Bill then we might never have this opportunity to impact locally deciding on 50% performance measure section.  As a result the FEA was able to suit based on the VAM being part of the Bill.

I am encourage that while we will have to begin developing a new evaluation system that in the end this will be positive. I still have concerns but it is a new place to start.

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