PORTFOLIOS
State accountability measures continue to create headaches for teachers as Pre-K and
Kindergarten Portfolio scoring experienced technical issues resulting in undeserved 1s
for many teachers across the state.
As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began working with the TN Department of
Education to develop a plan to address teachers’ concer ns with not only the immediate
effects of the mis-scores, but the potential for future negative consequences.
If you haven’t already heard, there was a major
problem with the scoring of Pre-K and Kindergarten
portfolios for the 2017-2018 school year. Teachers
receive an overall portfolio growth score based on
their scores on four separate collections, which look
at students’ growth over the course of the school
year on specific standards. As soon as the scores were
released over the summer, teachers noticed that they
received growth scores of 1 for some collections,
without any notation as to why from the peer
reviewers, despite having submitted the appropriate
content and student work examples. In some cases,
despite having double-checked their submissions
multiple times before submission, there appeared to
be files they had uploaded that were missing.
For those who received 4s and 5s in every other area,
even a single 1 could negatively impact their final
score. Not only could this have immediate affects
(just look at the teachers in Greene County who are
being told they won’t receive score-related bonuses
this year due to TNReady failures), but these scores
are now on their records. Many worried that potential
future employers would see the poor scores and
naturally interpret them as a sign of poor growth as a
result of ineffective teaching.
As the rumor mill began churning, reports of “glitches”
and problems with the Educopia platform rolled in.
We put in a call to the Department, and their response
was a firm denial: “There was no error by our vendor,
and there was no computer glitch.” As it turned out,
this was technically true. Most of the outlier scores of
1 were the result of what have been dubbed “Scenario
2” submisison errors - most commonly, either student
work or the standard selected between point A and
point B were mismatched. In those cases, the issue was
flagged by a peer reviewer and the teacher received
a score of a 1 on that specific collection. However, in
most cases there were no comments from the reviewer
describing exactly what was mismatched, and many
teachers were left unable to determine where the
supposed error actually occurred.
The first resolution offered by the state was to allow
teachers to vacate these scores in their overall TVAAS.
This was already a hold harmless year for portfolios,
and Public Chapter 751 was passed to protect teachers
from employment and compensation decisions based
soley on portfolios for the 2018-2019 school year.
However, vacating a score would mean substituting
their school’s score, which had not yet been released,
and many were unsure if that would pan out as an
overall better score. Besides, that wasn’t the only
concern, of course. All semantics aside, scores needed
to be accurate and teachers wanted answers.
Unfortunately, some teachers began to be told that
they should “file a grievance” as a means of resolution.
There are multiple problems with this direction. Such
a recommendation would not really resolve the issue,
and likely lead to frivolous litigation. There is no state
grievance that can be filed and every local system has
a different grievance procedure. The only result of a
grievance, if approved by the district, would be the
aforemnetioned vacating and substitution.
Our objective, as with every problem that surfaces
for our members, is to identify the issue and find an
attainable solution for those problems. In this case,
they wanted answers as to why they received the low
score - what exactly had they done wrong? If they had
really made a mistake, how could they avoid making
the same mistake again in the future? What if there
wasn’t really a mistake, and the peer reviewer was
wrong? How would they know, when there was no