Action Alert: Help Stop AB 5!
August 20, 2012 at 8:37 pm arunramanathan 1 comment
We believe great school leaders and highly effective teachers play the most important roles in closing opportunity and achievement gaps. If you do, too, please help us stop Assembly Bill 5. This bill guts all objective accountability on adult job performance in public schools while undermining local authority and adds new unfunded state mandates of over $50 million.
We know that tackling stubborn achievement gaps requires giving the students who have the least more of everything that matters, including equitable access to effective teaching. AB 5 will prevent reforms to California’s teacher evaluation system necessary to achieve this goal.
At the very time voters are being asked to invest more in public education, this bill creates additional barriers to using pupil progress toward grade level standards in the evaluation of teachers and principals, a 40-year old law recently upheld by the courts in the Doe v. Deasy decision.
AB 5 cannot be waived and therefore will preclude the State of California or ANY local district in California from a waiver of No Child Left Behind/Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) because it runs explicitly counter to federal ESEA waiver and local Race to the Top application requirements.
Lastly, AB 5 mandates processes that are counter to and would immediately nullify best practices in teacher evaluation systems and innovative work being done locally in California districts and charter schools, including meaningful parental and community involvement and feedback in evaluations.
Click here to send a letter asking your California State Senator to vote NO on AB 5 today! The State Senate could take a floor vote on AB 5 as early as Monday.
Thank you for your support.
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1.
David B. Cohen | December 12, 2012 at 2:21 am
While AB5 is now history, let the record reflect that the use of student test score data is anything but “best practices in teacher evaluation systems.” It has often been a dismal failure, in fact. There are some economists whose studies suggest correlations that sound compelling, but leading research and educational measurement organizations and professional bodies OVERWHELMINGLY caution against the use of test scores and VAM for teacher evaluation. Look up “value-added measurement validity” in conjunction with any of these professional or research organizations: ETS, NCME, AERA, APA, NRC, EPI. Also look at the Nov. 2012 edition of Education Leadership. “The validity and reliability of value-added models for rating the effectiveness of teachers, principals, and schools have been roundly rejected by almost the entire psychometric and education research community.” – Stephen Caldas, former state psychometrician of Louisiana