In an interview with The City Paper, Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, nearing his first full year in the position, dismissed as “incorrect” media reports that his department planned to publish evaluation scores attached to teachers’ names.
The department is, of course, obligated to review open records requests on teacher personnel files, and would review them with state attorneys, he said.
“If news organizations or others make open records requests, we’ll have to review the requests, and figure out if we need to hand over that information, which could lead news organizations to publish that information,” Huffman said.
But an important caveat will determine which evaluation data in Tennessee actually receives sunshine.
Under the evaluation system, each teacher across the state is assigned a score ranging from 1 through 5. Administrators arrive at that figure by weighing three categories. Half the score is based on in-class observations by principals. Student achievement accounts for another 15 percent. The remaining 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation stems from what educators call value-added data, which measures a student’s progress over time, from one year to the next. According to state law, as Huffman pointed out, value-added data is protected from public records, complicating what state officials would be willing to publicize.
“Part of the challenge is that because value-added scores are protected by law, we can’t give out value-added scores, and we can’t give out information that will allow people to ultimately figure out the value-added scores,” Huffman said. “We would just have to look at every request that came in, because I think the nuances are tricky.”
In short, a teacher’s in-class observation score could very well be made a public record. But the value-added portion, more than one-third of a teacher’s overall scores, would not. That creates a grey area: The state wouldn’t hand over the final 1-through-5 score, along with remaining 65 percent of that score’s basis. If it did, someone could simply pull out a calculator to determine that shielded value-added portion.
At issue are the scores stamped on every teacher in Tennessee in the state’s new teacher evaluation system, implemented in the current school year in Tennessee and part of a growing trend nationwide. Performance evaluations have emerged as a hot-button education issue in Tennessee, with many teachers deriding the approach as flawed, unfair, time-consuming and methodical.
In other parts of the country, obtaining and publishing these scores — and the identities of the teachers who received each one — have proven contentious. The first news outlet to do so was the Los Angeles Times, which in 2010 overcame resistance from teachers’ unions to publicize evaluation scores, accompanied by teacher names, on the newspaper’s website.
In February, The New York Times published scores of New York City teachers after a failed legal effort by the United Federation of Teachers and despite the opposition of many educators. Today, a parent, teacher or student — anyone for that matter — can go on a Times-administered site called SchoolBook and find the evaluation scores for every teacher in the city. Some rankings are high. Some are abysmally low.
For now, Huffman is urging media outlets in Tennessee against taking up this tactic, saying that publicizing the information would yield nothing more than gossip material that isn’t in the interests of teachers.
