Seattle Schools Community Forum

From the Seattle Chapter of Stand for Children: Empowering Educators: Success for All Students A community discussion on new approaches to evaluation and compensation and how it can work in our schools. Monday, May 24th 7p–8:30p Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS) 3639 Martin Luther King Jr. Way S Seattle, WA 98144 This event will also be available through live streaming video on our website. During the 2010 legislative session, the Governor, education advocates and the legislature committed to pilot improved evaluations of teachers and principals that will likely become a statewide model. A work group was established to consider how educators in Washington are paid starting in 2011. How will these changes affect kids? What do improved compensation and evaluation systems look like? What can Washington learn from other districts and states tackling these issues and how do we ensure that changes result in positive outcomes for educators and students? Our panel rep...

Here are some articles/ideas I've been reading about this week; these on teacher performance. (I note that some of these have been previously mentioned by other readers here and thanks for that; I tend to collect all the articles to go over at one time.) Denver schools are trying a new teacher pay system called Pro Comp . I find it to be a fairly complex system of extra pay for different measures like working in hard to staff schools, exceeding expectations, advanced degrees. It started in 2008 and about half of Denver's teachers are enrolled. This system came about thru an agreement with Denver Public Schools and their teachers union and is funded by a levy. There was also a link at the Pro Comp site to the Center for Educator Compensation Reform, a clearing house for performance based compensation. There's just a ton of information there but I haven't had time to read it yet. A map at the site indicates that about two-thirds of the states have some form of...