Giving Compass' Take:

• Lawmakers in New York are thinking of rolling back the current teacher evaluation system which leaves advocates of the system dismayed, while unions, teachers, and parents are supportive.  They believe that standardized testing as a means of evaluation is inaccurate and unnecessary.

• Will other states start rolling back evaluations in the same way? How can state legislators try and incorporate voices of the stakeholders most involved in their decision making processes? (i.e. students and educators)

• Read the study that found after implementing new evaluation systems, the number of new teaching licenses dropped significantly.

The revelation that forces are lining up behind an effort to drop test scores from teacher evaluations jolted Albany on Thursday — and no one was more jarred than advocates who convinced the state to weigh scores in the first place.

Three years ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo channeled those advocates when he pushed through legislation to increase the weight of test scores to as much as half of teachers’ ratings — a move that has never fully gone into effect but that has continued to set the tone in New York even as other states have moved away from test score-based ratings.

So those advocates were dismayed to learn that lawmakers, unions, and possibly even Cuomo want to roll back the teacher evaluation push entirely.

“The current effort to permanently undermine New York’s teacher evaluation system takes us backwards, masks inequity, and will lead to more and unnecessary testing,” read a statement from Ian Rosenblum, executive director of The Education Trust-NY.

If the evaluation system is abandoned, the state could shift to a model where individual districts create their own evaluation systems and ways to judge student progress. Under the bill, the state could no longer require districts to use state standardized tests in teacher evaluations.

“We have been waiting for this day for years,” Andy Pallotta wrote. “Everything about the current system has angered and frustrated educators, parents and students. … There are far better ways to evaluate educators than to use mystery math and algorithms that spit out invalid ‘growth scores’ while subjecting kids to exhausting tests that neither inform instruction nor accurately measure achievement.”

Read the full article about the debate of teacher evaluations by Monica Disare at Chalkbeat