Taking Note
Superintendent Selection in Tennessee: A Brief History
February 2011
effectiveness and willingness to take a leadership role within their school.
Not only has the state created this flexibility, but it has also received over
$194 million in competitive federal and philanthropic grants to help districts
develop these alternative salary schedules. In addition, as part of Race
to the Top, the state has contracted with the non-profit Battelle for Kids to
provide technical assistance to districts that want to develop alternative
salary schedules. Together, these legislative changes and resources
provide a true opportunity for districts to develop new ways of rewarding
highly effective teachers.
Future Opportunities
Despite the progress outlined above, Tennessee still has a very long way to
go in ensuring there is an effective teacher in every classroom. This section
outlines best practices from other states that Tennessee might want to
consider adopting to further improve teacher effectiveness.
Differentiating Teachers Strategies for supporting, rewarding,
and removing teachers based on their effectiveness are dependent
upon being able to accurately and reliably determine a teacher’s
effectiveness. Tennessee must focus on ensuring that the state’s
new teacher evaluation system, which is currently in development, is
able to accurately and reliably differentiate teache rs. As mentioned
above, the First to the Top Act committed Tennessee to developing a
new evaluation system based 50% on qualitative data (e.g., classroom
observations) and 50% on quantitative student achievement data. Over
the past several months, the state has made significant progress on
developing the classroom observation rubric, but much work remains in
defining the quantitative student achievement data to include in the new
evaluation system, especially for teachers without TVAAS data. The
state has not yet begun to develop a plan for rolling out training on the
new evaluation system. Ensuring that the development of the teacher
evaluation system is on track must be one of the new Commissioner of
Education’s top priorities.
Although no state has fully developed a high-quality evaluation
system based on student achievement data, there are a few districts
that have begun to do so. For example, the Teacher Advancement
Program (TAP) is based on a teacher evaluation system that combines
classroom observations with student achievement data. TAP currently
operates in 67 school districts across the country, and the classroom
observation portion of TAP is currently being piloted by the Tennessee
Department of Education to inform the development of the state’s
new teacher evaluation system. Similarly, the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation is working with four sites across the country, including
Memphis City Schools, on an over $1 billion Measures of Effective
Teaching (MET) Project to understand best practices in evaluating
teacher effectiveness. The first set of results from this research
was released in December 2010 with additional results expected
in Summer 2011. Over the coming months, it will be critical for
Tennessee to learn from these best practices as it completes the
development of its new evaluation system.
Page 3
Grants to Develop Alternative Salary Schedules
Grant
LOCATION
AMOUNT
Gates Foundation
Teacher Effectiveness
Initiative
Memphis
$110 million
Teacher Incentive
Fund
Knoxville, Memphis,
Statewide
$72 million
Race to the
Top Innovation
Acceleration Fund
Statewide
$12 million
Total
Statewide
$194 million
Supporting All Teachers Research has shown that professional
development seminars that teachers attend for one or two days rarely
alter teachers’ classroom behavior and improve teachers’ effectiveness.xxv
By contrast, both intensive mentoring programs for new teachers and
grade-level or subject-specific professional learning communities (in which
teachers have time set aside during the school day to collaborate with
other teachers) have been shown to improve teachers’ effectiveness.xxvi
Although Tennessee will likely not have resources to fund these types of
professional development opportunities at scale in the short-term, other
states have found several innovative ways to offer teachers meaningful
professional development opportunities at a low cost.
First, some states, such as Colorado and New Jersey, have developed
support networks for districts working to implement mentoring programs
or professional learning communities. Tennessee could easily
implement similar support networks for the state’s 35 districts that are
using Race to the Top funds to develop mentoring programs or the
state’s 15 districts that are using Race to the Top funds to develop
professional learning communities. Second, some states are providing
teachers with online professional development resources. For
example, Michigan has developed a website for teachers with online
professional development resources organized by topic. Tennessee
has developed a similar website called the Electronic Learning Center
(ELC), but could go a step further by aligning the existing professional
development resources available on the ELC with the new teacher
evaluations system so that teachers can electronically go online to
a single portal, review their evaluation results, and find professional
learning opportunities that address their specific needs. Finally,
several states, such as Delaware, are requiring districts to develop
comprehensive, district-wide teacher professional development plans.
Tennessee could require that districts do the same as part of each
district’s state-mandated improvement plan.
Rewarding the Most Effective Teachers
As discussed
above, Tennessee’s tenure and compensation systems must both be
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