Colorado lawmakers are deliberating a bill that would change how frequently experienced teachers are evaluated, scaling formal evaluations back to at least once every three years from annually. Supporters of the legislation say it would give districts more flexibility in how administrators assess teachers and would also cut down on paperwork for school and district leaders.
The one caveat: A district that deems a seasoned educator less than effective would be able to administer another evaluation the following school year.
How to best measure teacher effectiveness in educating students is one of education’s most hotly debated topics, and House Bill 1291 puts the conversation back into the hands of lawmakers. Colorado’s last major overhaul of its teacher evaluation system was in 2010, when the state decided to grade teachers based equally on student academic growth and professional practices.
The legislature revisited the state’s approach to teacher evaluations in 2022, passing Senate Bill 70 that, among other things, diminished how much student test scores counted in teacher evaluations and developed a separate rubric for assessing teachers regularly ranked as highly effective.
The change on the table this year is a much lighter shift than other ideas backers of the bill initially weighed, including giving local school boards the ability to devise their own teacher evaluation system as long as they follow state standards.
Is this bill the first step toward redesigning how Colorado gauges teacher performance?
“Not necessarily,” said Brandon Shaffer, executive director of legal and governmental affairs for St. Vrain Valley School District in Longmont, who helped write the bill. “We do not have a road map for the next step. We are always open to good ideas that would restore local control.”
Shaffer describes the process of evaluating teachers as “an overwhelming task,” robbing administrators of time for other critical duties.
“We want administrators to be in classrooms working with teachers every day,” he said. “We want administrators in the hallways making sure that our students are safe and they’re getting to class on time. We don’t want our administrators sitting in front of computers filling out forms, and that’s what a lot of the process has devolved into, is simply a paper drill instead of authentic feedback to teachers in the classrooms.”
Democratic sponsors of the bill say evaluating highly effective teachers every few years instead of every year would “free up” administrators to devote more time to helping “struggling teachers” and would also lighten the load of veteran teachers.
“Teachers are burning out like crazy and teachers sort of get everything piled on them by society and by the state,” said Rep. Eliza Hamrick, a Centennial Democrat and prime sponsor of the bill. “This would (allow them) to take a breath.”
The bill would “allow teachers to really focus on areas where they need growth, so they can really help their students and not have to do this pretty unwieldy evaluation tool that’s a one-size-fits-all for master teachers and for young novice teachers,” said Hamrick, who taught for 32 years.
The bill comes with a price tag of $528,200 for the 2026-27 fiscal year — stemming from a combination of adjustments the state education department would need to make to the software many districts use for teacher evaluations and tweaks to the state education department’s data collection processes.
“We are looking at many options to reduce the fiscal note,” Hamrick said.
Divides over what’s best for teachers and their growth
Gov. Jared Polis is eyeing the efforts to cut down on teacher evaluations warily but remains open to “further conversations with the sponsors about this work,” spokesperson Ally Sullivan wrote in a text message to The Colorado Sun.
“The Governor is proud of the work that Colorado has done to make teacher evaluations more effective and efficient for Colorado teachers,” Sullivan wrote. “He is very skeptical of any efforts to harm any of the successful work in (Senate Bill 70) that streamlined evaluations in a bipartisan way with the support of the larger education community.”
Meanwhile, some district administrators and education organizations maintain that annual evaluations should continue for every Colorado teacher, regardless of how long they have been in the classroom.
Jamie Davis, director of human resources for Cañon City School District, sees yearly evaluations as a key part of retaining good teachers and ensuring they feel connected to their school.
“It’s an opportunity to build relationships,” Davis said. “It’s an opportunity to check in with the teacher to see how they’re doing for their own social-emotional wellness.”
The district of 3,082 students in Fremont County evaluates all teachers at the beginning, middle and end of the school year. Once a Colorado educator is rated as effective or highly effective for three consecutive years, they earn nonprobationary status, which gives them more job security.
Nonprobationary teachers in Cañon City are observed in the classroom three times a year. Probationary teachers, the newer teachers whose employment contract must often be renewed every year, are observed six times.
Administrators grade educators based on state teacher quality standards, determining how effective educators are based mostly on their professional practices but also by looking at measures of student learning.
A district can classify a teacher as highly effective, effective, partially effective or ineffective.
“There should be no surprises at the end of the year,” Davis said. “You should be able to see a snapshot throughout the year so you can speak to a teacher’s strengths and areas of development.”
Davis, who has worked for Cañon City School District for 21 years, including as a teacher, pushes back on the argument that annual evaluations for all educators consume administrators’ time and bury them in paperwork.
“What pulls them away from the classroom more is (student) behaviors,” she said. “It’s not instructional observations. It’s all the other stuff. That’s the part they love to do. They want to be in the classroom. They want to be giving feedback.”
Jamita Horton, executive director of Teach Plus Colorado, said while it’s important to consider how much administrators can take on, she is equally concerned about how proposed changes to teacher evaluations would shake out for educators.
“We would hope it would be framed more around teacher development and how we’re meeting the needs of students,” said Horton, whose organization prepares teachers to inform and challenge education policy.
The legislation has also raised accountability and logistical questions for districts and education groups: If a teacher coming from another district was previously marked highly effective, how will their new district know they will be effective in their new classroom? What happens when a new principal takes over a school during a year when a seasoned teacher is not scheduled to have an evaluation? How does an educator continue to advance their skills as a teacher in the years they aren’t required to complete an evaluation?
Hamrick said districts would put some of those anxieties to rest by continuing with other methods of examining how well teachers are getting through to students, including by creating individualized growth plans for educators, peer observations or goal-setting.
“Our teachers put everything in their students and into their classroom,” she said, “and we just want to make sure that the time they have, they can really focus on developing their professional growth so they can best help their students.”
The bill also addresses the challenge of evaluating a teacher transitioning from another district, according to Shaffer, of St. Vrain Valley School District. When an experienced teacher moves into a new district, that district would be able to immediately evaluate that educator to establish “a baseline” of that educator’s performance, he said.
The Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, supports the bill in hopes that it could ease some of the educator “fatigue” that has come with the current evaluation system and spare teachers from extra responsibilities that overwhelm them and can lead to turnover.
“The amount of evidence that needs to be produced every year in this, whether it is an area of concern or not, becomes just simply a bureaucratic exercise,” CEA President Kevin Vick said.
That evidence includes a requirement among teachers and administrators to collect, organize and analyze results of student assessments and assignments that inform a teacher’s evaluation, which adds up to “hours of work for each teacher” and has prompted districts to stand up data departments, Vick said.
The latest legislation on teacher evaluations is a matter of efficiency and also a matter of trust, Shaffer said.
“Teachers are professionals,” he said. “These are individuals who are very well educated, have been very well trained and go into the profession because they want to help students. They take that obligation, that role very seriously. If we trust our teachers, if we believe in our teachers and our administrators who are running our buildings, we need to give them the latitude to manage their time effectively.”
House Bill 1291 will be heard by the House Education Committee on Thursday afternoon.