After a year under tougher new teacher evaluation rules, all of the teachers in Indiana who received the state’s lowest rating last year could fit in a single school cafeteria.
Statewide just 219 educators were rated “ineffective” last year, representing less than 0.5 percent of the 50,000 educators who received ratings. In fact, nearly all rated educators — 97 percent — were classified in the top two categories as effective or highly effective. About 10 percent of educators were not rated for reasons such as not completing the year due to maternity leave or retirement.
The ratings are based on an evaluation system put in place over the last two years that was expected to make it harder for teachers to earn top scores. Read about the evaluation system — which weighs principal observations, student test scores, and and other factors chosen by each school district and has consequences for educators’ employment and pay — here.
In several stories, Chalkbeat Indiana examines the first round of ratings under the law — and their potentially significant implications on education policy in the state.
- Legislators are weighing changes to the state’s teacher evaluation law, saying that the high scores suggest that the law does not go far enough to tell teachers apart. READ MORE.
- The overall 0.4 percent ineffective rate masks wide differences in teacher ratings from district to district. Some struggling schools had ineffective rates more than 20 times the state average, while some top suburban districts had fewer highly effective teachers than average. READ MORE.
- In all of Indianapolis Public Schools, the state’s largest district, just five educators were rated ineffective. The district’s superintendent is already asking its teachers union to work together an overhaul of its rating system. READ MORE.
- And the ratings are raising questions about how prepared principals were to execute the new evaluation system. They say they did their best at a challenging time. READ MORE.
- Find your school and see how many of its educators were rated highly effective, effective, in need of improvement or ineffective. READ MORE.
The Indiana Department of Education made evaluation data available by school district and by school, allowing parents to see how many teachers at their children’s traditional public schools were rated in each category. To search for your school, go here. (More school data: Find your school’s A to F grade here.)
The department also calculated effectiveness rates for the first, second, and third year graduates of the state’s colleges that offer education degrees. That data can be found here.