The Iowa State Board of Education has approved new rules that will require prospective teachers -- beginning with those graduating in spring 2013 -- to score in the 25th percentile on two national tests in order to obtain their teaching certificates. Only elementary school teachers are presently required to take two exams, but the new rules expand the requirement to all teachers.
Georgia Superintendent of Schools John Barge has praised the state for helping improve student test scores over the past year. Barge said the state has partnered with the Black Caucus to set up educational summits throughout the state to share the positive news.
CCSSO will be hosting a webinar with 2012 National Teacher of the Year Rebecca Mieliwocki on the recently released Partnership for Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced sample assessment items in English language arts.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced the awards for the five-year Comprehensive Centers program. The Comprehensive Centers program is composed of a two-tiered approach to providing technical assistance to states. Fifteen regional comprehensive centers (RCCs) provide support to directly to their constituent states while seven national content centers specialize in building state capacity and providing technical assistance to RCCs and states
South Dakota Education Secretary Melody Schopp says that voters will get a say in education reform on Nov. 6 when they decide whether Referred Law 16 should be implemented. The law will enable local school districts to create their own programs to reward teachers, though schools can opt out of the merit-based program; but the program will provide annual state-funded merit bonuses to a district's full-time certified teachers.
Rhode Island continues to develop and implement an intensive teacher evaluation system that uses student learning as a performance metric for teacher effectiveness. The evaluation system will be used for the first time this year, and over the summer, teachers worked with school principals to create personal student learning objectives to help them track student progress throughout the year. The state will use the students' progress on those objectives to determine teacher effectiveness.
In Maryland, the General Assembly paved the way for the state to create new teacher and principal evaluation systems as part of the federal Race to the Top grant program. Now, 129 Howard County teachers and 23 principals will participate in a pilot evaluation, even though the new evaluation system does not take effect until 2013. The evaluation systems must ensure that student growth is used as a measure in teacher evaluations, with about 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation based on student growth.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced its fourth round of Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants, a program that backs differentiated compensation systems. The program has expanded to include career ladders, where teachers not only get pay bumps but are given additional professional responsibilities; grantees now must secure more support from teachers' unions and others up front, rather than during a planning year; and more attention is paid to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
During his State of Education address, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett praised the new teacher evaluation models and said he hoped to expand the state's accountability system to all districts. All school districts are using new teacher evaluations this year based on the state's general framework, and Bennett indicated that the feedback from the evaluations will help identify the best teacher preparation programs.
The Connecticut Educator Preparation Advisory Council will develop policy recommendations and propose regulatory revisions to increase teacher and school leader preparation at the behest of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. The council, co-chaired by State Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor and Board of Regents for Higher Education Executive Vice President Michael Meotti, must examine educator training and its alignment with school and district needs and responsiveness to feedback; establish recruitment best practices and standards for candidate acceptance into these programs; and develop metrics for preparation program performance linked in part to graduate performance in the years following entry into the education field.
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