The Wisconsin teachers union said this week it is in favor of efforts to improve teacher quality and even would allow student data to be used in teacher evaluations.
The announcement comes on the heels of an eight-part series on teacher training and evaluations reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in collaboration with The Hechinger Report. The front-page stories, which ran in November and December 2010, took the state and union to task for not moving quickly enough on reforms.
The union outlined its vision for a new statewide teacher evaluation system on Tuesday.
The plan proposes to:
– Establish a system to ease underperforming teachers out of the profession
– Use “various student data to inform evaluation decisions and to develop corrective strategies for struggling teachers”
– Offer performance pay for teachers
– Break up the Milwaukee Public Schools into smaller, “more manageable” components (though the local teachers union in Milwaukee has not signed off on this, says the Journal Sentinel).
The union says it wants to work on legislation that would put these reforms into place by 2015.
