The St. Petersburg Times' blog is reporting that the foundation created by Jeb Bush is shopping a draft of a re-run of Senate Bill 6 with regard to teacher provisions.This draft carries over the parts of 2010’s Senate Bill 6 that pertain to teacher evaluation, pay, and employment status. Retained in significant or complete measure: the number of levels of evaluation, required inclusion and statutory minimums for use of test-score-based measures (“learning gains”) for evaluation, imputation of mass reading/math “learning gains” for teachers who are not responsible for teaching reading or math, required non-effective rating for teachers where students are not demonstrating progress (not clearly defined in the draft), state-level restrictions on how teachers can be paid, elimination of permanent status for teachers hired after the effective date of the bill (whether called tenure or the nonterminating professional service contracts), and statutory definition of just cause.
- Minimum use of some quantitative student outcome in evaluation remains 50%, but the minimum use of state-derived measure is 35%, with local option for up to 15% from other sources
- The imputation of “learning gains” scores for teachers who are not responsible for teaching reading or math can be at the team level rather than the school level (district choice)
- Teachers of students with disabilities who do not participate in standardized or alternative assessments may have outcomes based on student IEPs
- Employees without three years of test scores attributed to them for learning-gains purposes may be evaluated without student outcomes (not sure how this works with the imputation of learning gains)
- School districts may pay for higher degrees in the content areas of teacher assignment and may pay for years of effective ratings, but such payments may constitute no more than 20% of total salary adjustments in any year. (At least 50% must be by ratings, and 30% by a range of factors not including years of experience or education.)
- School districts may provide three-year contracts to teachers after they accumulate several years with effective or better ratings.
Apart from questions of constitutional authority for the state vs. local school boards and collective-bargaining rights, there are a number of obvious glitches. I don't know if this early-September draft (it was dated September 10) has been revised, so it doesn't make too much sense to focus on them.