State will not require school districts to use student data in teacher evaluations

  • By Kelly Sullivan
  • Wednesday, July 6, 2016 10:05pm
  • News

Student success is no longer a mandatory indicator of teacher performance.

In June, the State Board of Education and Early Development chose to repeal the requirement, relieving what many state officials, local educators, administrators and their peers statewide believe to be a significant burden on Alaska’s 54 public school districts. The repeal comes only months after the Every Student Succeeds Act, the 2015 reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB, voided the same requirement at the federal level.

“Initially it looked like it had promise,” said Sondra Meredith, administrator of teacher education and certification for the state. “…It was not as straightforward as we had anticipated, the way it was being developed. It seemed irrelevant and not really practical. For our capacity in the state, we couldn’t do justice to that component and do justice to all the teachers.”

Alaska adopted the evaluation tool to qualify for a waiver from NCLB standards, along with the requirement that all school districts use an evaluation system based on a national framework model to measure academic achievement to develop and publish the data, called student growth maps, annually.

ADVERTISEMENT
0 seconds of 0 secondsVolume 0%
Press shift question mark to access a list of keyboard shortcuts
00:00
00:00
00:00
 

President Barack Obama verbalized what many were already feeling in 2011 when he announced his administration deemed the NCLB criteria unrealistic and doing more harm than good.

NCLB demanded all U.S. public schools reach 100 percent proficiency by 2014 in the areas of math and reading, as demonstrated through 32 different criteria under the Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP, accountability system. By 2011, half of all public schools were failing to meet AYP, and that number was only expected to increase if a waiver for the criteria was not made available, according to an October 2012 report by the Center on Education Policy titled “What Impact Will NCLB Waivers Have on the Consistency, Complexity and Transparency of State Accountability Systems?”

According to the Center on Education Policy study, AYP actually incentivizes states to keep standards low so the number of failing schools will not continue to increase.

Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and 43 states are approved for the waiver, including Alaska, which was approved for the waiver in 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Only five states have not applied for the waiver.

School districts and the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development spent the following three years preparing programs to qualify for the NCLB waiver. All school districts were expected to implement pilot programs for the student growth maps and teacher evaluation requirements by the 2015-2016 school year.

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District was one of the less than 10 percent of school districts that were ahead of the curve, and so was slightly more prepared to carry out the new requirements, Meredith said.

In 2008, the school district implemented the Charlotte Danielson Framework for Teaching, a certified teacher evaluation method, which pre-emptively met the requirement that school districts adopt a national model for monitoring student growth, said Christine Ermold, director of Elementary Education and Professional Development. The school district advised at least 10 other school districts that were considering using the Danielson Framework to meet the new standards, although some chose other tools in the end, she said.

The Danielson Framework, which could be applied in large, small, rural and urban school districts, already incorporates student performance data into teacher evaluations, Ermold said. The program emphasizes teacher performance in four main areas including planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction and professional responsibilities and engagement in the profession. Student performance is a valuable piece of gauging the quality of a teacher, but not as a standalone, which is the position the school district has taken from the start, she said.

“We invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into developing that process (for recording student performance) in that 2.5-year time frame,” she said. “If you equate the time that a committee of (20) educators spent over 2.5 years developing to a financial burden, I would say it was a financial burden… there is other work we could have been doing during that time.”

The educator evaluation process developed by the school district has turned out to be useful enough to implement in some capacity, Ermold said. Tenured teachers who have met state proficiency standards and are approved by their principals to skip one year of a formal evaluation can choose to take a teacher enrichment path, or track student achievement as a replacement. The school district previously offered enrichment paths, which are more flexible avenues for professional development, prior to the teacher evaluation requirement and is a very valuable tool for educators, she said.

Reach Kelly Sullivan at kelly.sullivan@peninsulaclarion.com.

More in News

Kachemak Bay is seen from the Homer Spit in March 2019. (Homer News file photo)
Toxin associated with amnesic shellfish poisoning not detected in Kachemak Bay mussels

The test result does not indicate whether the toxin is present in other species in the food web.

Superintendent Clayton Holland speaks during a meeting of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Board of Education in Soldotna, Alaska, on Monday, July 7, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Federal education funding to be released after monthlong delay

The missing funds could have led to further cuts to programming and staff on top of deep cuts made by the KPBSD Board of Education this year.

An angler holds up a dolly varden for a photograph on Wednesday, July 16. (Photo courtesy of Koby Etzwiler)
Anchor River opens up to Dollies, non-King salmon fishing

Steelhead and rainbow trout are still off limits and should not be removed from the water.

A photo provided by NTSB shows a single-engine Piper PA-18-150 Super Cub, that crashed shortly after takeoff in a mountainous area of southwestern Alaska, Sept. 12, 2023. The plane was weighed down by too much moose meat and faced drag from a set of antlers mounted on its right wing strut, federal investigators said on Tuesday.
Crash that killed husband of former congresswoman was overloaded with moose meat and antlers, NTSB says

The plane, a single-engine Piper PA-18-150 Super Cub, crashed shortly after takeoff in a mountainous area of southwestern Alaska on Sept. 12, 2023.

Armor rock from Sand Point is offloaded from a barge in the Kenai River in Kenai, Alaska, part of ongoing construction efforts for the Kenai River Bluff Stabilization Project on Wednesday, July 23, 2025. (Jake Dye/Peninsula Clarion)
Work continues on Kenai Bluff stabilization project

The wall has already taken shape over a broad swath of the affected area.

An aerial photo over Grewingk Glacier and Glacier Spit from May 2021 shows a mesodinium rubrum bloom to the left as contrasted with the normal ocean water of Kachemak Bay near Homer. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Greer/Beryl Air)
KBNERR warns of potential harmful algal bloom in Kachemak Bay

Pseudo-nitzchia has been detected at bloom levels in Kachemak Bay since July 4.

Fresh-picked lettuces are for sale at the final Homer Farmers Market of the year on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024, in Homer, Alaska. (Delcenia Cosman/Homer News)
USDA ends regional food program, pulls $6M from Alaska businesses

On July 15, the Alaska Food Policy Council was notified that the USDA had terminated the Regional Food Business Center Program “effective immediately.”

Exit Glacier is photographed on June 22, 2018. (Photo by Erin Thompson/Peninsula Clarion)
2 rescued by park service near Exit Glacier

The hikers were stranded in the “Exit Creek Prohibited Visitor Use Zone.”

Two new cars purchased by the Soldotna Senior Center to support its Meals on Wheels program are parked outside of the center in Soldotna, Alaska, on Wednesday, March 30, 2022. (Camille Botello/Peninsula Clarion)
State restores grant funding to Soldotna Senior Center

In recent years, the center has been drawing down its organizational reserves to provide some essential services.

Most Read

You're browsing in private mode.
Please sign in or subscribe to continue reading articles in this mode.

Peninsula Clarion relies on subscription revenue to provide local content for our readers.

Subscribe

Already a subscriber? Please sign in