A bill backed by Colorado Democrats that aimed to cut down on how often Colorado district administrators evaluate their most effective teachers met its end Thursday evening.
House Education Committee members voted down the legislation in a 10-3 vote after more than three hours of testimony from educators, district administrators and education advocates.
House Bill 1291 proposed limiting evaluations for educators marked as effective or highly effective to at least once every three years, down from annually. A district that rated a veteran educator as less than effective, however, would have been able to complete another evaluation the next school year, according to the legislation.
Teacher evaluations have been among the most controversial issues in education in recent years, with ongoing debates around how teachers should be scored and how much factors like student test outcomes should play into their ratings. The state’s last major overhaul of its teacher evaluation system was in 2010.
Those testifying in favor of the legislation said evaluating every single teacher year after year absorbs significant amounts of time for district administrators — time they believe could be better spent coaching struggling teachers among other priorities.
In Adams 12 Five Star Schools, principals often spend at least four or five hours evaluating each teacher, Superintendent Chris Gdowski told committee members Thursday while testifying. A middle school principal typically has 25 educators to evaluate, while a high school principal often has more than 30 teachers to evaluate.
“You’re wasting tremendous amounts of time in a state where 97% of our teachers are rated effective or highly effective and have been for years under this annual evaluation system,” Gdowski said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Even without formal annual evaluations, there are still ways to give effective teachers feedback on their approach to their lessons and how they’re meeting the needs of their students, Gdowski said. That includes tips and guidance from an administrator after a 10-minute peek into their classroom, advice from a coach who shadows them or time for them to watch a colleague and their strategies around instruction.
“Frankly, we’ll be freed up to do those things much more effectively if we’re not spending as an average middle school or high school principal 100 or 150 hours a year evaluating every single teacher,” he said. “In terms of improving the craft of even really highly effective teachers, there’s much more time effective, cost effective ways to do that than evaluating everyone every single year.”
Others testifying against the bill pointed to what they see as a need to ensure teachers receive regular feedback with up-to-date data.
“While this bill’s goal is to lessen teacher burden, I fear that this bill will not actually lessen teacher burden (but) rather lessen administrator burden at the cost of teachers’ professional development,” said Jean Niederkorn, a seventh grade math teacher in Garfield School District Re-2 in Rifle. “Evaluations offer teachers the opportunity to look back at what they’ve done through the year and see how they can improve for the next year. My fear is that by only doing evaluations every three years, teachers are working with outdated data.”
Before voting, House Education Committee members weighed how districts and the state can best support teachers and provide them sufficient feedback. They also indicated a need to have broader legislative conversations about analyzing and improving the state’s teacher evaluation system.
State Rep. Tammy Story, an Evergreen Democrat, was one of the three to cast a vote in support of the legislation. She talked about a statewide school tour she took a few years ago focused on learning more about how the teacher evaluation system was working.
“I can’t tell you how many educators sat in the room with or without their colleagues not just a few tears but balling, just really, really disturbed about the immense pressure that this evaluation system has and how it negatively impacts their ability to teach students what they believe is important because the time is taken up so much with focusing on collecting artifacts and being able to prove every point on RANDA (the state’s evaluation system) and being able to check all those boxes just to get to an effective level, let alone highly effective,” Story said.
Assistant House Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat, was among lawmakers who voted “no” on the legislation, citing concerns around the need for consistent data and transparency, particularly for students of color, to ensure they are seeing growth in the classroom.
“My community always, always, always needs to know that someone is checking on kids who have been historically disenfranchised, Black and brown, and are they growing?” Bacon said. “I don’t want to get to a place that when we evaluate someone who was great in one year and three years later, God forbid, they’re not effective, that means there were two or three years that a student may not have gotten effective instruction.”