The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction recently released a new teacher and principal evaluation system, which will weight equally student outcomes and educator practices.

Deputy State Superintendent Mike Thompson said this new evaluation system, designed by the Wisconsin Educator Effectiveness Design Team, comes from a national push of looking at better evaluation systems for teachers and principals.

“We felt that we wanted to create a better system than what is currently out there and also to provide some consistency across districts and what that system could look like,” he said.

Fifty percent of the evaluation system will consist of the achievement of students, measured by state and district assessments data, student learning objectives, school-wide reading and district choice data based on
improvement strategies.

Educator practice will account for the other 50 percent, which will be based in standards such as instructional strategies, classroom organizations, content knowledge, school culture and collaboration with faculty and
the community.

Dr. Jill Pastrana, chair of the Education Studies department at UW-Eau Claire, said this new evaluation system is much better from other current systems. She said this new system is very comprehensive and it actually focuses on what should be evaluated, which is student learning and teaching effectiveness.

“The bad thing of what has been happening lately with the whole focus on teacher quality is that they are judging teacher quality on the basis of kids test scores, which are just fill out the bubbles,” she said. “And that’s problematic because they don’t measure how effective a teacher is.”

Educators who are in their first three years in a school district or whose performance rating is at the developing level will be evaluated every year, according to a news release. Veteran educators will have a summative evaluation every three years, though these educators could be evaluated on a subset of performance dimensions each year.

Thompson said the pilot will be released in the 2012-2013 and 2014-2015 school years to identify if any improvements need to be made. The new evaluation system was also recommended to the DPI State Superintendent
Tony Evers.

“One of the recommendations is that we have to look at ways that this system can be standardized across the state so there is some consistency how we evaluate our teachers and principals,” Thompson said.

Thompson added that this new evaluation system will provide the ability to identify the strengths of any people within the system.

“(The new system) helps you identify where people need assistance to get better … it really provides a great opportunity to really look at what is the potential of human capital in your system in a really accurate way.”