Another letter to ODE from a Superintendent expressing concern with the report card based on unreliable test results

In a recent letter to the leaders of the Ohio Department of Education and the president of the State Board of Education, Olmsted Falls City Schools Superintendent Jim Lloyd wrote that his school system will be taking full advantage of “safe harbor” enabling districts to exclude student progress as part of teacher evaluations. Dr. Lloyd’s letter was blunt and to the point:

“While we did our very best to provide an online testing environment for our students that would not yield confounding results, the online testing experience for our students in 2014-15 represented an epic fail due to the online platform that was utilized by the testing company.

As a result, we firmly believe that our students’ performances do not fairly represent their achievement or growth…Therefore, as the leader of the Olmsted Falls City School District, I cannot in good conscience require my building principals to use student test results to evaluate our teachers in any form or fashion.

Moreover, we will not waste our teachers’ time by creating last minute district or building level student learning objectives in order to retro-fit a growth measure into a teacher evaluation computer programming system that we did not create nor do we want to use.”