Senator Ron Calderon (D-Montebello) sponsored the teacher evaluation bill.

A proposed bill known as SB 441 that would tighten teacher evaluation rules statewide narrowly failed to pass the Senate Education Committee Wednesday — but it’s not completely dead yet.

After hearing impassioned testimony from parents, teachers, and union representatives, the Committee deadlocked 4-4 over approval of the legislation.

But the Committee also voted to reconsider the bill later in an amended form, leaving the door open for a return to the issue.

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Ron Calderon (D- Montebello), described the measure as “modest” in its scope.

Just before the hearing, his Chief of Staff, Rocky Rushing, told LA School Report that the evaluation bill is Calderon’s “attempt to modify the evaluation process and to provide better feedback for teachers to allow them to become better educators.”

The main change the bill would make is to update current evaluation law, which grades teachers on two grade levels, satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Calderon’s bill would create four grade levels, to be decided by school districts.

The bill would also require teachers who have taught more than 10 years to be evaluated at least once every three years. Current law only requires veteran teacher reviews every five years. (Read the bill’s text here.)

During the hearing, a stream of supporters — many of them teachers and parents from the Los Angeles area — spoke before the Committee on Wednesday, urging its members to pass the evaluation bill.

One LA-area teacher told the Committee he supported the bill because he had a more “comprehensive evaluation working at Blockbuster than I do as a public school teacher in California.”

Amy Baker, a LAUSD parent, criticized the state for making “no effort to improve our broken teacher evaluation system” and asked the committee to pass the bill because it was “a modest step in the right direction.”

CTA representative Patricia Rucker admitted that her union is unsatisfied with the current teacher evaluation system, but she insisted that Calderon’s bill “does not fix it.”

Lynne Faulks, representing the CFT and UTLA, said her unions oppose the proposal because it “fails to address central issues, such as developing teacher effectiveness and ensuring measurements are effective and fair.”

Calderon defended his intentions, saying, “Nowhere do I say, in this bill or in my remarks, that I’m putting targets on teachers’ backs… We want to give teachers a tool to deal with changes and become successful.”

The debate continued with both sides arguing their technical points, and committee members seemed torn between both sides.

Eventually they voted the bill down, 4-4, with an agreement to hear the bill later, after it’s amended.

Senators Bob Huff, Mark Wyland, Ben Hueso and Lou Correa voted in support; Bill Monning, Hannah-Beth Jackson, Carol Liu, and Loni Hancock voted against the bill; and Marty Block abstained.

Previous posts: Union Tells Teachers How to Protest Evaluations; Deasy Requests Changes to Teacher Dismissal Bill; Union & District Clarify Positions on Teacher Evaluation

Source: Gates Foundation

A study released Tuesday by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation showed that the controversial method of measuring teachers’ effectiveness with students’ test scores can be useful, but only when balanced with other factors, such as student feedback and classroom observation.

Teachers unions, including UTLA, have long insisted that grading teachers based on their student test results creates a flawed, inaccurate picture of teacher effectiveness. The Gates survey contradicts that idea—though it did find that giving test scores too much weight in teach evaluations can skew results. The study said the best balance for test scores was 33 to 50 percent of teacher assessments, depending on the balance of other measurements. Giving scores less than 33 percent of weight in assessments made them ineffective, according to the study.

The study results could influence the the final decision on how much weight to give test scores in LAUSD teacher assessments, which has not yet been determined in the tentative evaluations agreement between the district and teachers union.

To read the full Gates study, which surveyed 3,000 teachers in seven districts over three years, click here. To read the full LA Times story, click here.