Currently, Nevada is ineligible to fill out a grant application for its share of $4.35 billion in federal “Race to the Top” education funding because of Nevada Revised Statute 386.650, which prohibits student’s test scores from from being used for teacher evaluation.
The statute was passed in 2003 when Nevada legislators were focused on No Child Left Behind, according to Lynne Warne, president of the Nevada State Education Association (NSEA).
“It was part of a very large and broad sweeping bill that dealt with the implementation of NCLB,” she said. “Since then, we have a new administration and in their final guidelines for Race to the Top, we cannot have a prohibition to linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.”
To help the state apply for the federal funding, the NSEA has a proposal that would change the language of the law. The wording is crafted so that student test scores could be used to assess teacher performance but it would not the sole criteria on which teachers would be evaluated.
“We’ll formally present the proposal to remove that barrier,” Warne said.
As the law stands, according to Jeanne Allen, president for the Center of Education Reform in Washington, D.C., the current prohibition was the desire of teachers unions.
“Not allowing for student achievement-based teacher performance evaluations is not an accident of legislation; it is a condition of teachers unions,” Allen wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune.
She said the unions fight to make sure educators keep their jobs, putting aside the quality of their performance.
“This flies in opposition not only to Race to the Top guidelines, but to professional evaluation in almost every other industry,” Allen said. “Nevada shouldn’t lift the ban only to ensure their competitiveness for federal dollars, but to ensure the competitiveness of their teachers and students as well.”
Warne said six years ago, educators didn’t fully understand No Child Left Behind when it was still new legislation. But that has changed in time, she said.
“There were a lot of unknowns back in 2003,” she said. “At that time, Nevada ranked 46th in the nation in education. Now we’re at 49th. … Legislators and educators feared (linking test scores to teacher performance) would lead to another emphasis on high stakes testing and that has remained.”
Warne said teacher evaluations can be complex and multi-faceted and cannot be determined by student testing alone.
However, Warne and others agree that getting the federal grant is important.
“Everybody believes it’s important for the state to be able to apply for these funds,” she said.
Though Race to the Top could potentially award Nevada between $65 million and $175 million, Warne said it’s not enough because it’s not a continuous source of funding.
“What I’d like to see happen is for the state to renew its commitment to educational funding appropriations,” she said. “(Race to the Top) is a one-shot opportunity. … There needs to be a stable and sustainable funding source for education. I don’t think you or anyone is satisfied with being 49th, so the state needs to do better. The federal grant will help, but it’s only a temporary Band Aid.”
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