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5th grade teacher Nancy Borders

Teachers rarely bat an eye when the next great thing in education comes around, but over the last year many changes have stormed in all at once. Teachers now teach tougher material. The new Governor is questioning the tenure system. Teachers are now being judged on their students’ test scores. Tennessee is one of a handful of states and cities to tie a teacher’s effectiveness to student performance.

For teachers like Nancy Borders this change will be a big shift and a baby step.

When Borders walks into her fifth grade classroom at Nashville’s Wright Middle School she looks ready to meet the President: crisp blouse, not a crease in her pants, not a hair out of place. The 34-year teaching veteran is meticulous and it shows in her lessons, like one on proper sentences.

“Is it important just for this year? For fifth grade?” Borders asks.
“No,” the students collectively respond.

“Prove it!” Borders says. “Why is it important after fifth grade?” Her children buzz with answers and their hands shoot up.

Borders’ has a knack, a flair for teaching. Still she’s had years when her kids struggled on year-end assessment tests. That used to just hurt her on a personal level. Now the stakes are higher. A third of her yearly review stems from those test scores.

“I don’t think it’s a bad change,” she says. “I think it’s a scary change for some teachers.”

“A Scary Change”

In the past most teachers received good reviews from their principals. Now they’ll be partly judged on a complex number crunching system called value added or TVAAS. Take Suzy. In Borders’ classroom her test scores improve ten percentage points from last year. That’s great. But, TVAAS also looks back at Suzy’s history of scores, to come up with where they should be when she leaves Borders’ class. If her scores exceed that projection, and Borders has 30 other kids like Suzy, Borders will earn a good value added score. This complex system has actually been around awhile.

“It’s never mattered before, “ Borders says. “So it’s kind of been like one principal said, ‘Ah, don’t worry about it. It just goes in a file who cares.’ Now it’s going to start mattering.”

TVAAS started being calculated in Tennessee in 1992. Close to a million students have had their test scores analyzed, producing millions more sheets of data. Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey says over the years all of it just sat there, driving some legislators crazy.

“We’ve had this data now for almost twenty years,” Ramsey says. “I think it’s a tool, the time has come for us to use that data.”

Race to the Top Drives Change

The federal Race to the Top competition is what finally coaxed TVAAS out from folders and databases. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake and the use of test scores was a major sticking point to winning. Tennessee had a law prohibiting the use of scores as a way of measuring teacher effectiveness. The state changed it and won the money. Ramsey still gets an earful from those upset with the move.

“When I’m out eating in restaurants I have teachers walk over to me and say this is a major mistake, that this is beyond my control of what the students do and it’s more to do with parenting than it does teachers,” Ramsey says. “I can’t argue with any of that. They are exactly right.”

But Ramsey says Tennessee needed an objective way to track teachers. Still, educators cringe at months of work coming down to one day. Pam Ross also teaches at Wright Middle. Her kids take the annual assessment test known as TCAP. She’ll never forget the student who arrived on test day tired and stunned.

“They lived in an area where there was a lot of shooting and stuff, “ Ross recalls. “They’d been up all night listening to gunshots. And they came in and talking about they’d slept on the floor and all that stuff and I’m thinking to myself and we’re getting ready to do part one of the TCAP.”

Wright Middle’s Pam Ross

Even if Ross has a year where an entire class tests poorly, she won’t immediately get branded as ineffective. She’s measured on three years of scores, not one. It’s the trail teachers are leaving behind that matters. Tom Smith, a public policy and education professor at Vanderbilt, says if scores are consistently heading downhill, then there’s a problem.

“What there will be is additional evidence that establishes…a trail of low performance,” Smith says. “The question that’s a little open is how that is going to be addressed.”

Big Step, Small Impact…So Far

With the change in the law teachers are now hitched to their test scores, for better or worse. But the state says this change is just a concrete way to pinpoint who’s struggling and lend them a hand. Base pay and job security are not affected…yet. Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey says stay tuned.

“I think this is just the beginning of the reform that you’re going to see in Tennessee,” Ramsey says.

The emphasis on test scores is simply one step in a new direction. But it carries with it a lot of momentum.

It isn’t clear yet is how the state will judge art, P.E. or music teachers since those subjects don’t have year end assessment tests. Also, the full scope of what teachers will be judged on hasn’t been fully determined.

Thirty-five percent will come from TVAAS. Fifty percent will be based on principals’ classrooms visits to watch teachers in action. That leaves fifteen percent with no definitive criteria.

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