The Texas Education Agency (TEA) extended the deadline for the TELL survey to June 6. The Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) Texas Survey is designed to gather information on how teachers and other educators view the teaching and learning conditions at their schools. The TELL Texas Survey is part of House Bill 2012 passed last year by the Texas Legislature, which requires the Texas Education Agency to develop an online teaching and learning conditions survey to be administered statewide biennially to teachers, principals, counselors and other school-based professional staff. The anonymous survey will provide data for schools and districts to use in improvement planning.
State, district, and school results will be posted on the TELL Texas website approximately five weeks after the close of the survey for schools that have at least 50 percent of educators and five staff members responding. A separate survey of school superintendents will occur later this year.
The TELL survey is one element of the new Teacher Evaluation and Support System. The new appraisal system will replace the current state-recommended instrument for evaluating teachers – the Professional Development and Appraisal System (PDAS) – which has been in place since 1997.
Beginning in the fall of 2014, the new teacher appraisal system will be piloted in school districts and charters across the state. These districts and charters will provide valuable feedback over the course of the next year. Observations and recommended revisions from these pilot districts will be utilized to strengthen the final appraisal system. The new state-recommended system will be offered to all districts statewide in the 2015-2016 school year. It is designed as an educator evaluation and support tool only. The decision to utilize this tool will remain a local decision. Any personnel decisions at the district and campus level will also remain local.
The Texas Education Agency secured a waiver from specific provisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2013 at the request of the state’s superintendents. The U.S. Department of Education is pushing all states to adopt teacher evaluation systems that utilize a value-add component. The State of Washington recently lost its waiver for failing to follow through on that provision. The waivers for three additional states have been placed on high-risk status by the U.S. Department of Education for similar circumstances.
For more information about the 2014 TELL Texas Survey, please visit www.telltexas.org.
To view complete details of the new Teacher Evaluation and Support System submitted by the Texas Education Agency to the U.S. Department of Education, visit http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=25769803880.
