While talks between D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union remain stalemated over salary and job security issues, one critical question is not even on the bargaining table: how the District's educators will be evaluated.
For months, Rhee and her chief "human capital" assistant, Jason Kamras, have been working on an overhaul of the evaluation system that would expand the ways teachers are assessed. In addition to a system of classroom observations and conferences, it is likely to include methods to track how students' standardized test scores grow over time. Several major school systems, including those in Houston, Chicago and Milwaukee, have started limited use of this new "value-added" approach.
Rhee is under no obligation to bargain with the union on evaluations, though the union wants to see it on the table and said so in the contract proposal it delivered a few weeks ago. Congress gave the school system sole authority over the issue in the mid-1990s after the WTU refused to renegotiate the then-existing evaluation system with the District.
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