General Assembly Acting at Lightning Speed:

Recently IASA Executive Director Dr. Brent Clark and I were talking about the massive changes we have seen in education in the last few years and how the next few years the change will be even greater. An example of this rapid change is the prediction that the Illinois General Assembly may pass a bill this week that will totally revamp the way Illinois teachers and principals are evaluated.

You may have had many questions about signing the MOU for the Race To The Top application but it looks like it will not matter as the proposed bill will make most aspects of the RTT law for everybody by 2016. Read the following article titled “How’s Your Teacher” published in the Chicago Tribune on January 11, 2010:

A lot of folks in education have been working for weeks on a broad and rigorous plan to more thoroughly evaluate the performance of public school teachers and principals in Illinois. At first blush, it looks pretty good.

The plan will land this week on the desks of state legislators -- and they will be asked to vote by the end of the week to send it to Gov. Pat Quinn. Why the rush? Because there is a ton of money at stake.

The evaluation system could be key to the Illinois application to get funds from Race to the Top, the Obama administration's $4.35 billion program to spur education reform.

Race to the Top will give the money to a handful of states that offer the boldest proposals for improving schools. The money will be distributed in two rounds. First-round applications are due Jan. 19.

Illinois could get as much as $500 million. But it won't get the money unless it shows a substantial commitment to improving the quality of schools -- including the quality of their teachers and principals.

Lawmakers will be asked to pass a bill that directs schools and their teachers unions to negotiate an agreement on detailed teacher evaluations. It gives them a deadline: 90 days for the Chicago Public Schools, 180 days for all other schools.

If CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union can't reach an agreement, CPS will have the authority to create and use an evaluation system of its own making. Suburban and Downstate schools will use a system developed by the state if they can't reach agreement with their teachers.

That's "groundbreaking," says Timothy Daly, president of The New Teacher Project, which has been a leader in national efforts to improve the quality of classroom teachers.

The bill makes some excellent demands, including that the performance of students be used as a measure of teacher performance. In some ways, though, it is a missed opportunity. It doesn't require that schools use the evaluation results in tenure decisions or that consistently underperforming teachers be fired. So we're going to have to count on school administrators to make good use of this tool.

Approving the teacher evaluation bill won't guarantee that Illinois earns a share of Race to the Top funds. Illinois could have -- should have -- done much more, such as completely removing the state cap on charter schools. (Lawmakers raised the cap instead.)

If Illinois is turned down in round one, that will be an embarrassment. After all, the people driving Race to the Top -- President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- have some ties back here.

There will be a second round, and more time for Illinois to show it's serious about shaking up the education status quo. This agreement on evaluations is, at a minimum, a good sign that some things are cooking here.

Who would have predicted even six months ago that Illinois might have a prescribed teacher and principal evaluation plan with at least 50% of the weight of the evaluation based on student performance? I remember when NCLB was passed in 2002, it had overwhelming bipartisan support of Congress with President George W. Bush proposed and Senator Ted Kennedy sponsoring the bill. Most educators did not like the tenets of the bill because they thought 100% goal of all students achieving a basic standards based education was unrealistic. In retrospect, this law has done more to improve education than any of us could have predicted and it has drastically improved performance in low socio economic school communities. According to NAEP, “more progress was made by nine-year-olds in reading in the last five years than in the previous 28 years combined.”

Those of us in education need to “hang on” because more changes are likely to come. The RTT is probably the base of the new federal legislation that will be proposed by the current administration. I agree with the Chicago Tribune writer in the article above, until we change the teacher tenure law in Illinois and allow for the dismissal of poor tenured teachers we will not make significant student achievement progress. This will be especially true this year when the massive teacher reductions occur to the current state of Illinois finances. Many school districts will be reducing excellent young teachers because of teacher seniority and teacher tenure laws.