By Alyson Klein
The U.S. Department of Education told state chiefs today that it will grant extensions on their waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act, without taking into account how each state is progressing when it comes to teacher evaluation, Deborah Delisle, assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education said in an email to Friday. That would give states extra time to put teacher evaluation systems in place that confrom to the department’s principles, which include measuring student achievement based on growth on state assesments.
Under the plan, states would essentially be given extensions based on their progress on two of the three big areas of waiver implementation (standards and assessments and turnarounds.) States ‘teacher evaluation-plans would then be reviewed separately. It was not immediatly clear what the impact of the decision would be on the proposed timeline for fully implementing teacher evaluation systems. That’s supposed to happen next school year.