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Study on Tennessee Teacher Eval's Released Monday

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP/WMOT) — A new study calls for the majority of Tennessee’s teachers to be evaluated each year using less student test score data.

The report released Monday by the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, or SCORE, was commissioned by Gov. Bill Haslam to review the state's controversial new teacher evaluation system.

Currently, fifty percent of teachers' evaluations are based on student testing data. But only about one-third of teachers are evaluated using data from the students they teach. The rest are evaluated using combined data for the entire school.

Gera Summerford, President of  the Tennessee Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, says teachers she’s spoken with are especially pleased with SCORE’s recommendation on this issue.

“They feel like, yeah, we all have to work together to bring up the overall student performance. But when you look at student growth being used to evaluate teachers, they really feel like it needs to be a measure that comes directly from the students they teach.”

The SCORE report recommends that teachers in subjects or grades without specific testing data for the students they teach be allowed to reduce that component to 25 percent of their evaluation.