Education Reform: School Spirit Edition

As the brother of a Seattle Schools high school junior, I'm happy to see that the state Senate passed an education reform bill yesterday, 46-3. That's some bipartisan support. The bill, SB 5895, takes up the debate surrounding teacher evaluations, which are currently performed on a two point scale, satisfactory and not-satisfactory. 5895 would increase that to four points of evaluation. That's a 100% increase in granularity! Progress, my friends.

More importantly, though, the bill also mandates that "student growth data" must be a factor in these evaluations. Current law makes no allowance for student improvement as a consideration in evaluating teachers. Common sense says that current law is ridiculous. That's why SB 5895 requires that of eight new criteria for evaluation, student growth be a substantial consideration for three of them, without specifying which three of the eight they mean. Compromises can be silly sometimes.

Opponents of the bill, including the teachers' union, argued that student growth data is hard to tie directly to teacher performance. Factors external to the teaching environment bear heavily on test scores, and teachers in more challenging school districts should be evaluated differently than those elsewhere. This is all true, but I am a great believer in the power of regression analysis to solve statistical puzzlers. A smart educational system should not have to sacrifice the progress of students in service of the maxim that "one size does not fit all." COME ON!