BY JAIME SARRIO • THE TENNESSEAN •

Each fall, thousands of Tennessee teachers receive a confidential report showing how much last year's students learned from them.

Until now, there wasn't much reason for them to read it. It carried little or no impact on their job security or salary. Parents couldn't see the report, so there was no chance of a flurry of calls asking for a new teacher.

But at least some of that's about to change.

Starting next year, annual teacher evaluations will be partly based on student learning gains. Tenure will be at stake for new teachers, and in some cities, school districts are developing ways to link pay to that measure.

Because teacher evaluations are open to the public, parents will get a sense of whether individual educators boost academic growth. And some leaders, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, believe states should go one step further and make the entire reports available to parents.

"Teachers are going to be much more attentive to the score reports, and they're going to be expecting there's a lot more transparency so they understand what areas they can improve in," said Gera Summerford, president of the Tennessee Education Association. "We're going to see a lot more attention to this data because it has higher stakes now."

Tennessee's First to the Top education law triggered the change. To be eligible for a $500 million federal grant, states had to link teacher evaluations to standardized test scores. Tennessee answered with the new law, requiring a portion of annual teacher evaluations to be linked to student learning gains.

The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program scores reveal two things — a one-shot glance at how the student performed in testing that day and how much he or she learned over last year's test. That second measurement reflects teacher effectiveness.

The state looks at years of test scores, projecting the outcome based on prior performance. If the student scores higher than predicted, the teacher was effective. Lower, the teacher hampered learning.

The same measure can be used broadly to determine district and school performance and narrowly to determine teacher and student weaknesses and how those should be addressed.

University of Tennessee statistician William Sanders developed the system, called "value added," in the early 1980s. His idea was sparked by then-Gov. Lamar Alexander's teacher career ladder proposal, which offered incentive pay for higher degrees and more training.

Sanders, who now works with SAS, the company that crunches the numbers and provides the teacher reports, said he has always been in favor of keeping the learning gains private. He felt making those public would create problems for principals rushed by parents wanting the best performers. But given how his system was used — or not used — he'd like principals to do a better job of using the data to match teachers and students.

"You've got what roster you've got — most principals don't get to pick their teachers," he said. "What I believe and argue is, you want principals to work with those less effective teachers to become more effective. But don't let any child catch two weak teachers in a row."

Sanders' formula didn't get much traction until Gov. Ned McWherter embraced the idea as a centerpiece for his 1989 education reform. Schools were judged on the learning gains data until the federal No Child Left Behind law installed its own measurement in 2002.

Principals were responsible for issuing passwords to teachers so that they could visit a special website to see how they did. But many never handed out the passwords, according to several state officials.

Passwords were e-mailed directly to teachers this year. And the educators will have to log on to the website to get their scores, rather than getting a paper report.

Scores Viewed More

Rachel Woods, spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said that in the past, Tennessee didn't have the money to train teachers statewide about how the data were calculated or should be used. It was up to principals or local superintendents to put the system to use.

"In districts that put a lot of work into training teachers on how to use value-added diagnostically, you see a lot of support and understanding for that data and how it can be used to help teachers improve," Woods said.

Information provided by SAS shows the number of teachers accessing the student-growth scores has steadily increased over the past five years.

Tennessee is spending some of its $500 million in Race to the Top winnings to train educators across the state on how the data should be used.

At Hillwood High School, Principal Steve Chauncy uses the learning gains data in concert with other information to see whether students are responding to new approaches. He tracks which students probably will score well on crucial college admissions tests like the ACT. The data can predict low scores, triggering an academic intervention to try and change the student's fate.

Teachers will receive more of this type of training in the coming months. Some teachers don't know how to navigate the student reports or haven't figured out how to incorporate them in their instruction.

"We use it for professional development, but we want to get where the teachers get on and can look at each student's scores and see where projections are," he said. "It's like an electronic cumulative folder."

Should Parents Know?

Using the teacher reports is another story. Chauncy said he's aware of which teachers are struggling to boost academic performance but adds that the district and principals are just beginning to understand the new frontier of how the data will be used.

A different issue is whether parents should be able to know how far individual teachers advance their students in a year's time.

Secretary of Education Duncan told the Los Angeles Times he supported making the scores public after the paper published a series on that city's learning gains data and posted 6,000 teacher scores online.

District of Columbia Chancellor Michelle Rhee told The Washington Post that she would consider making her district's scores public.

James Fuller, a precalculus and algebra teacher at Overton High, said he has no problem with parents seeing his scores, as long as they understand they are only one measurement of effectiveness.

Large class sizes, student backgrounds and a host of other factors go into how a student learns, and they can't always be quantified, he said. He believes eventually the value-added craze will lose its steam.

"Teachers are not totally afraid of scores," said the 40-year teaching veteran. "With the value-added score — they're going to realize it's one measure, and they're trying to make it the total measure."

Tennessee law protects individual teacher reports from being made public, though under the new law, more information will be available than ever before. That's because parents will be able to see how many points a teacher earned for improving student achievement by viewing the teacher's annual evaluation. The score itself is still protected by law.

Richard Tennent, a parent of students at East Literature Middle School and Lockeland Elementary, says he has mixed feelings about whether the scores should be public. He'd love to get a peek at how his child's teachers are doing, but he thinks it would be unfair to teachers to release the scores as the only measurement of their performance.

"I would like to know that the school district is taking the information seriously," he said. "And I would like to know that teachers scoring low are getting the information they need to improve, and to know that principals have this data to identify high-performing teachers."

A committee of state leaders, including Metro Schools Director Jesse Register, is still developing exactly how teachers will be evaluated. Register supports keeping the reports under wraps but believes the information should be used to improve teacher instruction through training and development.