New teacher evaluation system to get trial run

New Mexico’s new teacher evaluation system will get a trial run this school year.

State Public Education Deputy Secretary Gwen Perea Warniment told lawmakers during a Legislative Education Study Committee hearing late last month that Elevate New Mexico, the new system created under the Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham administration, will be softly rolled out this year.

The department will garner feedback but educators and districts won’t get an official evaluation report with a ranking from the PED.

Formal rollout is slated for 2021-22.

Elevate NM will use professional development plans created by teachers, multiple observations from fellow teachers and administrators and surveys of families and students to gauge teacher performance.

She said each will provide data on different aspects of teaching performance, rather than adding up to a final score.

“There’s no weight to each of them. They’re all equally important, because there is no single, big score that they all add up to; there’s no summative score,” the deputy secretary said. “They’re all just going to be their own components.”

Notably absent are focuses on student test scores and teacher attendance, which were controversial components of previous teacher evaluations.

Perea Warniment said students’ academic progression can be used to map out professional development plans, and therefore, could direct observations from principals, but student achievement data will not be directly tied to how teachers perform on the evaluation.

Based on formal and informal observations, teachers are ranked from “not demonstrating” to “innovating.”

A brief by the LESC says the system doesn’t outline how evaluations will be used to make personnel decisions.

Perea Warniment had said the PED is also working on creating evaluation processes for other licensed educators.