AUGUSTA, Maine - Maine must make changes to its teacher and principal evaluation rules, or risk losing a waiver that exempts it from the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind.
To qualify for a waiver, states across the country submitted plans aimed at boosting student performance, closing achievement gaps and improving instruction and leadership inside schools. But Maine recently received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education that spells out the state's shortcomings.
Under No Child Left Behind, 2014 was the year when all children were expected to be 100 percent proficient in reading and math. Even states with the highest performing schools were expected to have trouble meeting this deadline.
So the U.S. Department of Education began allowing them to come up with their own plans for improving the performance of students, teachers, principals and schools. In its application, accepted by the department in August 2013, Maine agreed to set up a new evaluation system for teachers and principals. Last spring, the Legislature passed broad guidelines on what should factor in to the evaluations.
"The federal government looked at those and said they don't meet the standard they expect," says Tom Desjardin, who says word of the U.S. Department of Education's misgivings about the state's approach came in a recent letter to former Maine Education Commissioner Jim Rier. Desjardin took over as acting commissioner in December.
"If we don't reply to them by the 15th of March, with changes to those rules to make them comply, we will lose what we call our federal waiver," Desjardin says.
That would subject Maine, all over again, to the most onerous mandates under No Child Left Behind. Desjardin says it would also give the state much less control over how it spends the federal education dollars it gets from Washington. "The big rub is that the federal government wants student assessment scores to be a significant factor - 20, 25 percent" of a teacher's overall score on their annual evaluation.
Those rules the Legislature passed, though, give local districts wide latitude to come up with their own systems. "Multiple measures of student learning and growth must be used for each educator being evaluated," one part of the rule reads. "Large-scale, norm-referenced standardized tests may not be the sole type of student learning and growth measures used."
"The MEA's position on this is that we have an adequate process. It does represent what Maine wanted," says Lois Kilbey-Chesley, president of the Maine Education Association.
Kilby-Chesley says what Maine teachers don't want is a mandate that a quarter of their evaluations be based on student test scores. Kilbey-Chesley served on the committee that developed the guidelines for teacher evaluation.
"We've already got these in place. So we've already started to implement these in districts," she says. "How does that, now, effect the people who've put the time into this?"
At the same time, few people involved in education policy circles in Maine, including Kilbey-Chesley, think it would be a good thing if Maine loses its federal education waiver.
State Sen. Brian Langley, an Ellsworth Republican, chairs the Legislature's Education Committee. Langley says those who favor the use of standardized tests in teacher evaluation didn't want to lock districts into a 20 percent threshold either.
"We didn't want to make that also the ceiling, in case there were districts that felt they wanted more than that," Langley says. "We tried to build in flexibility for locally-developed systems that would work in their district. But there is this 20 percent minimum, and it has to be made clear."
Langley says he expects legislation to be introduced soon that will do that.
But not everyone wants to see a bill immediately. Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Millett, who serves with Langley on the Education Committee, says she finds parts of the U.S. Education Department's letter vague. Millett is asking Congresswoman Chellie Pingree to intervene and find out exactly what changes the federal government wants to see.