Each year legislative committees spend the first few weeks of the session reviewing rules from governmental agencies. Today both the House and Senate Education Committees began sifting through the rule changes.
The rule making and approval process is lengthy. The public typically is provided ample opportunity to weigh in with concerns before the rules make it to the legislative phase of the process. As a result of the lengthy vetting process of these rules, they are rarely rejected.
However, it appears that not all the education-related rules will be easily dealt with this session. A rule addressing teacher and administrator evaluation hit a bump on its path toward approval. Both House and Senate committee members balked at various pieces of this rule. Though neither panel moved to reject the rule, both the House and Senate Committees held off making a decision about this particular rule pending further study and discussion.
Both committees raised concerns regarding what they saw as minimal involvement of parents in the development of the evaluation tool and in the rating of educators. Additionally, the rule clarifies that up to 33% of an individual teacher’s or administrator’s evaluation results be based on student achievement/growth. Several lawmakers expressed concern that student achievement should make up closer to 50% of an educator’s evaluation.
Rules review is expected to continue into next week.
