Seattle teachers, district think they have deal

Seattle Public Schools and the city's teachers union said Monday evening they believe they have reached a tentative agreement on a new teacher contract.

The two parties plan to meet Tuesday to make sure they are on the same page, said Glenn Bafia, the union's executive director.

If they are, he said in an e-mail, they will announce the agreement Tuesday afternoon.

Both sides said they would not provide more details until then.

Teachers are scheduled to vote on the contract Thursday if a tentative agreement is reached. Classes are to start Sept. 8.

Until earlier this month, district administrators and the union said little about what they were discussing. That ended when they reached a stalemate over the district's proposal to use student academic growth, measured by test scores, as one factor in judging how well teachers do their jobs.

That's an idea gaining favor nationally. The Obama administration has promoted using such measures as a significant part of teacher evaluations.

But many teachers unions — including the Seattle Education Association — oppose using test scores that way.

Seattle union leaders say that test results, while a good tool for teachers, can't accurately measure teachers' effectiveness.

They're backed up by some prominent national testing experts, some of whom were among the authors of a study released Sunday that warned that test-score-based measures of effectiveness are not a reliable measure of teacher quality because the scores can be affected by so many factors outside of the classroom.

The authors pointed to a study in five large, urban school districts in which fewer than one-third of the teachers who ranked in the top 20 percent one year stayed there the next.

"For people to assume that they can just do these calculations and find the best teacher or find the worst teachers is inaccurate," said Lorrie Shepard, dean of the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and former president of the American Education Research Association.

But the study also said test scores could be a piece of a comprehensive evaluation.

That's what Seattle administrators say they want to do.

In the district's initial proposal, test scores would account for no more than one-quarter of a teacher's evaluation, and teachers would be judged by at least two tests over at least two years.

"We are not using test scores to generate lists of teachers to be fired," said Eric Anderson, a member of the district's bargaining team. If anything, he said, the district wants to use test scores "in combination with a lot of other information, particularly principal ratings, to generate a more in-depth investigation as to what's happening in the classroom."

The union and the district agree that the current teacher-evaluation system needs to go. They endorse the recommendations of a union-district committee, which call for replacing the existing system, in which teachers are judged as simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Instead, the committee favors a system in which teachers receive one of four ratings, and principals have more specific criteria for their evaluations.

But the two sides disagreed on a number of elements the district wanted to add, especially the use of test scores.

The district had proposed that its evaluation system be voluntary for all but new teachers, be phased in over several years, and match additional accountability with additional support.

Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com