NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The state's largest teachers union has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state's use of standardized test scores to evaluate teachers.
“If you're going to evaluate an art teacher, why try to come up with a standardized test for an art teacher,” Tennessee Education Association General Counsel Richard Colbert said.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in Nashville said more than half of the public school teachers in Tennessee receive evaluations that are based substantially on standardized test scores of students in subjects they do not teach. The Tennessee Education Association (TEA) and other plaintiffs want the practice stopped.
“There is something fundamentally wrong with the evaluation system that we're still using in Tennessee that evaluates teachers on the basis of one standardized test taken each year by students they've never met in classes, they don't teach,” Colbert added.
The TEA has long argued that the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, or TVAAS data, shouldn't be relied upon because it's a statistical estimate and could lead to a flawed evaluation of a teacher. TVAAS uses student’s test scores to measure the growth they’re making year-to-year.
“I think it's really important to me and to a lot of folks, obviously to our state that we have an evaluation that has some real accountability,” Gov. Bill Haslam (R-Tennessee) said.
Last year, state lawmakers passed legislation that prohibits standardized test scores from being tied to teacher licensing. Haslam signed the measure. In December the Governor proposed changes to teacher evaluations that would lower the weight test scores have in the evaluations of teachers in untested subjects.
The modification is not enough for the teacher’s association.
"TEA has been pushing back against the inappropriate use of standardized test scores in teacher evaluation since the new system was first implemented in 2011," said TEA President Barbara Gray, who is also an administrator with Arlington Community Schools.
Other plaintiffs in the suit include, teachers from Anderson County and Metro Nashville Public Schools, along with the Anderson County Board of Education and the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association.
Both teachers teach grades and subjects where student learning is not measured by a state standardized test, but each saw their overall evaluation scores drop as a result of school-wide TVAAS estimates being used to calculate their scores.
The teacher from Nashville was also denied a bonus and the one from Anderson County lost her eligibility to be recommended for tenure. Evaluations are now being used to make high stakes decisions that could impact a teacher’s job security. That’s why the TEA said school wide test scores should not be factored into any individual’s evaluation.
(The Associated Press Contributed To This Report.)
