The Wake County school system is touting how things have improved in the district since use of the SAS EVAAS program has increased this school year.

In a school district press release earlier this week, principals say EVAAS is helping them to better educate students and assess teacher effectiveness. Prior to the 2009 school board elections in which the new board members urged the use of EVAAS, the program got a much cooler reception in Wake.

“It’s a wonderful tool,” said East Wake Middle School Principal Nancy Allen in the press release. “With just a click of a mouse and I can find out all kinds of information about my school. That’s how I’ve got to make the decisions about where to take my school.”

The Wake County school board voted 5-4 tonight to immediately eliminate use of the Effectiveness Index while also unanimously agreeing to make EVAAS the primary data tool for schools.

School administrators said that the Effectiveness Index would have been ended in June. But members of the fractured board majority came back together to say they wanted to kill the program now.

The original resolution on the table called for making EVAAS the primary data tool and for ending any additional allocation of resources for the Effectiveness Index.

The Wake County school board's agenda for Tuesday covers a wide range of things, including student assignment, eliminating the Effectiveness Index and relocating Central Office to Cary.

During the work session that begins at 3 p.m., the board will discuss board member Kevin Hill's consensus-building approach to developing a new multi-year student assignment plan. They'll also get into a talk on the 2011-12 assignment plan, the third year of the plan adopted by the old board.

Also during the work session, the board will discuss whether to keep the process of having only one regular action meeting per month.

UPDATE

If passed, the resolution would essentially kill off the Effectiveness Index. E&R has said that the only resources put in are staff time.

The vote to scrap the community zone plan wasn't the only issue that Wake County school board vice chairwoman Debra Goldman split with her Republican colleagues on Tuesday night.

Goldman provided the swing vote against a resolution that would have halted the use of the Effectiveness Index. She said she support dropping the Effectiveness Index but objected to wording in the resolution from board member Deborah Prickett saying that EVAAS would be exclusively used.

"I wish it was worded differently because I could support it," Goldman said. "But the way it's worded I can not."

The Wake County school system's Effectiveness Index will go back under the school board's microscope at today's committee of the whole meeting.

Board members had previously agreed over the summer to continue using the Effectiveness Index after David Holdzkom, assistant superintendent for evaluation and research, contended that they didn't have enough years of data to use EVAAS to review teachers. Some board members, notably John Tedesco, disagree.

Janet Johnson, the CEO of EDSTAR, also disagrees with Holdzkom. She is no fan of the Effectiveness Index that she helped develop 17 years ago when she worked in Evaluation and Research.

Why were a majority of qualified black and Hispanic students not placed in advanced math classes in Wake County middle schools for years?

As noted in today's article, the new EVAAS-based selection criteria is expected to sharply increase placement in middle schools this school year. As the SAS EVAAS report showed, Algebra-ready black and Hispanic students were the least likely to have gotten placed before.

Questions abut institutionalized racism and low expectations have been tossed out as possible reasons for the low placement rates.

CORRECTED POST TO SAY BARBARA WALTERS

Wake County school board member John Tedesco wants the school district to do its own teacher effectiveness report following the much-discussed study done recently in Los Angeles.

As noted in today's Triangle Politics column, Tedesco is hailing the findings in the study of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers that was reported Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper's analysis of the data is challenging some popular conceptions about teacher effectiveness.

"It's everything we're saying," Tedesco said "We have to get the best teachers in front of the kids. The most highly certified teachers are not necessarily the most effective teachers. We need to get the right teachers in front of the kids instead of shuffling kids around."

A Sunday Los Angeles Times article is challenging some popular conceptions about which teachers are effective and where they work.

The newspaper analyzed student records in the Los Angeles Unified School System to perform a value-added analysis of teacher effectiveness. The newspaper's plan to post online a database of the results of 6,000 elementary school teachers has produced an uproar, including a mass boycott from the teacher's union.

Findings included: