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Last week, Columbia University sociologist savaged in the Washington Post's "The Answer Sheet" blog, attacking the teacher evaluation system as "idiotic" and based on "preposterous" assumptions. Pallas asked, "Did DCPS completely botch the calculation of value-added scores for teachers, and then use these erroneous scores to justify firing 26 teachers and lay the groundwork for firing hundreds more next year?" He asserted, "According to the only published account of how these scores were calculated, the answer, shockingly, is yes."

Big news yesterday out of the West. While at the NewSchools Venture Fund Annual Summit, got word that Mike Johnston's path-breaking teacher quality bill (SB 10-191) had on a 36-29 vote. This, in the midst of the fight over Florida SB 6, is "seriously big stuff." Indeed, Pam Benigno, director of the Education Policy Center at the Independence Institute, called it a "landmark day in Colorado," saying the bill "will align evaluated teacher and principal effectiveness more closely with student academic growth and weaken tenure protections for consistently ineffective teachers."

Much as I'd feared, preparations for round two of Race to the Top (RTT) seem to be impelling states to overshoot the mark when it comes to teacher evaluation and pay. Generally laudable proposals like Florida's Senate Bill 6 and Colorado's Senate Bill 10-191 suffer from the "fix the world in one pass" syndrome. Advocates who are waging an admirable fight to end or dramatically scale back hyper-rigid, industrial-era state policies governing teacher tenure and compensation display a worrisome tendency to mandate that, henceforth, teachers will be evaluated in large part on (thus far) largely nonexistent, hyper-rigid, value-added metrics. This is all playing out in Colorado right now, where SB 10-191 passed the state senate on Friday and goes to the state house this week.

I've been meaning to do a longer postmortem on Florida's Senate Bill 6. As , I enthusiastically supported it even though I thought it a deeply flawed bill. The flaw? Its ham-fisted attempt to strip out one set of anachronistic strictures (governing tenure and step-and-lane pay scales) only to replace it with a set of test-driven processes that were almost equally troubling.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist, already desperately trying to claw his way back into the Senate GOP primary that he once dominated, has found himself in the middle of another maelstrom. Sitting on his desk, awaiting his signature or veto, is the most ambitious teacher quality legislation any state has yet contemplated. If he signs off, those teachers hired after June 30, 2010, will no longer receive tenure. Instead, they will receive a series of one-year contracts. To receive a contract after their fifth year, teachers will have to be rated "effective" or "highly effective" in two of the previous three years. Teachers hired before July 1, 2010, would have to demonstrate "effective performance" in four of the past five years when they seek to renew their teaching certificate. All teachers will have salaries set at a base level and will be eligible for pay increases linked to student performance, as well as for working in a "high priority location" or teaching in a "critical teacher shortage area." The bill stipulates that a teacher's years of service and degrees cannot be factored into the base salary plan.