CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) -
One issue at the heart of the fight between the city of Chicago and its striking teachers are teacher evaluations.
There's a nationwide trend in education to evaluate teachers based on how well their students do on standardized tests. Chicago is part of the trend.
A few months ago, Chicago teachers agreed to have student test scores count toward 25% of their overall evaluation this year.
The fight seems to be about what happens after this year. The city wants the weight of standardized test scores to go up. Several reports say it's demanding that, within five years, test scores count toward 40% of each teacher's overall evaluation. State law set the eventual goal at 50%.
The teachers say even 40% is way too much, and just unfair.
These evaluations will be used to determine which teachers keep their jobs and which get fired.
The teachers say the factors that affect a kid's score on a standardized test go well beyond the classroom and how well a teacher is teaching. They say things like family and family income come into play, but others say accountability is crucial and has been lacking. They point to 2007, when nearly every CPS teacher - 99.7% of them - was evaluated as "satisfactory" or better.
Meanwhile, for what it's worth, the majority of students were not meeting state standards.
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