Audit: Teacher assessments are playing hooky

When it meets Thursday, Idaho’s State Board of Education will discuss next steps after an audit showed 99 percent of teacher assessments from the 2014-15 school year were incomplete, late or done incorrectly.

Educators have expressed concern the audit results could affect education funding, since teacher pay under a career ladder program implemented in 2015 relies in part on assessments.

“I’m hoping the Legislature doesn’t take it at face value,” said Geoff Thomas, superintendent of the Madison School District in Rexburg. “Legislators are busy people. What I worry is they are not going to take time to take a second look.”

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra said she’s confident that won’t happen.

“I know that legislators genuinely want to do what’s right for kids,” she said.

Ybarra emphasized the audit’s results show clarification is needed about how evaluations should be conducted and what they are meant to achieve.

“We realized that a lot of these issues are surrounding training,” she said, regarding the information flagged in the report as incomplete or missing.

The audit, received by Ybarra’s office in July, gained attention last week when the Albertson Foundation-based Idaho Education News reported about it after obtaining a copy through a public records request.

Ybarra said Thursday’s meeting was the earliest she could get the audit on the state board’s agenda. She wanted to discuss it with school district superintendents first, she said, which she did in November.

The state board, which has regular meetings every other month, convenes Wednesday and Thursday at the College of Western Idaho, in Nampa. Ybarra said a representative from the company that conducted the audit will be on hand to answer questions when she makes her department report to fellow board members Thursday. Both Ybarra and state board President Emma Atchley issued statements last week about the audit, with Atchley stating the findings raise “serious concerns” about the evaluation process, and Ybarra’s office issuing a point-by-point response to the report.

Atchley said problems with evaluations could affect the career ladder teacher pay system, since they play an important role in teachers’ ability to move up to higher pay levels.

“Realizing this audit was done on the 2014-15 school year, it has less impact along those lines because the details of how those (evaluations) were going to work were not enacted until the 2015-16 legislative session,” Atchley said in a phone interview. “But we take the fact seriously that assessments are going to be directly tied to the career ladder.”

Responsibility for auditing teacher assessments has been shifted to the state board in the time since Ybarra’s State Department of Education commissioned the 2014-15 audit. An audit of assessments from the 2015-16 school year is underway now, Atchley said.

Lewiston School District Superintendent Bob Donaldson noted some pieces of information identified as missing in the 2014-15 audit, such as individualized professional learning plans for teachers, were not required by the state.

“In our district, we comply with what’s established in state board rule or statute,” Donaldson said, noting no Lewiston assessments were among the 225 randomly selected to be reviewed for the audit.

Brad Baumberger, superintendent of the Highland School District in Craigmont, said the audit clearly shows where improvements should be made.

“I thought the audit was a great audit. It told us exactly what we needed to know,” Baumberger said. “That the process needed to be more clear to evaluators and evaluees.”

Confusion about what information was to be included in the assessments could point to another possibility, Thomas suggested.

“I think it all really boils down to trust,” he said.

Too many layers of accountability at the state level can become cumbersome and inefficient, he said, particularly when teachers and administrators already are held accountable by locally elected school boards.

“I think the problem is we have excess accountability, and we have too many cooks in the kitchen,” Thomas said. “I would like to see it streamlined a little bit.”

Ybarra said state leaders – both legislators and state board of education members – need to clarify what is to be reported and how, and also determine the purpose of teacher assessments.

“Do you want this to be punitive, or do you want this to be a tool?” she said. “We need to raise the profession.”