By Sarah Campbell
scampbell@salisburypost.com
SALISBURY – Local school districts will have to foot the bill for new tests that will gauge teacher effectiveness.
And it won’t be cheap.
“No matter how you slice it, it’s going to be a significant amount of money,” said Kelly Burgess, director of Student assessment for the Kannapolis City school system.
The North Carolina Department of Public instruction is rolling out more than 45 exams in subjects that do not currently have state-administered End-of-Grade or End-of-Course assessments to measure how teachers contribute to the academic success of their students.
The first wave of tests in subjects such as physics and world history were set to be administered at the end of this semester, but the implementation has been bumped to next semester, Burgess said.
Although the state education department has created the tests, individual districts will have to pay to print and score the exams.
“Our major cost is going to be from copying all the assessments,” Burgess said. “We’re expecting detailed information at the beginning of October about how long each assessment is going to be, until then it’s really hard to project how much it’s going to cost.”
But Burgess said cost will extend beyond copying to include manpower.
“It’s going to take people to run the copiers and get the tests where they need to be,” she said.
The money to cover the tests will have to come from the district’s local fund, Burgess said.
The Charlotte Observer reported the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System could use Race to the Top funds to cover the unforeseen cost of the exams, but Burgess said that’s not an option for Kannapolis.
“Our Race to the Top money has been already allocated for instructional and professional development and teaching tools,” she said.
Dr. Rebecca Smith, assistant superintendent of curriculum for the Rowan-Salisbury School System, said funding sources for the exams would have to be worked out through the district’s testing division headed up by Colby Cochran.
Cochran, director of testing and student accountability for the Rowan-Salisbury School System, declined to comment on the exams.
“There are many decisions yet to be made at the state level before we can finalize our local plans,” he wrote in an email to a Post reporter. “When there is news to report on this new initiative I will let you know. Right now I do not want to speculate.”
The new assessments will not be used in promotion decisions for students or as part of the school accountability model, but instead in the evaluation process for teachers.
“It’s a measure of teacher effectiveness and not students performance, which is very different,” Burgess said.
But Burgess said schools do have the option to use the scores as the final exam grade for students.
“That way we don’t have to give students the test and then turn around and give them a final exam,” she said.
Contact reporter Sarah Campbell at 704-797-7683.
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