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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico school districts are giving mixed reviews on this year's new teacher evaluations.
Roswell Superintendent Tom Burris told The Albuquerque Journal (http://goo.gl/4FegHp) that his school district only discovered a small percentage of its evaluations contained errors. That affected about 4 percent of its 700 teachers.
"I thought (the switch to the new evaluations) went pretty well," he said.
Meanwhile, Moriarty-Edgewood Schools Superintendent Tom Sullivan says 40 out of 160 teacher evaluations contained errors, and those errors included teachers getting data that didn't belong to them.
Los Alamos also reported that a quarter of their evaluations contained errors, while Rio Rancho found errors in half of their evaluations.
In the Truth or Consequences Municipal Schools district, about 40 percent of its 124 teachers had problems with their evaluations, Superintendent Craig Cummins said.
The state Public Education Department overhauled the evaluation system after officials said the old system lacked accountability, pointing to the fact that 99 percent of teachers were considered effective.
Under the new system, 76 percent of teachers were "effective" or better. The new evaluation process takes in several new factors, including student test scores.
Hanna Skandera, the state's education secretary, said the errors were caused by mistakes districts made when reporting data to the education department that was needed to compile the evaluations. "We can only have a good evaluation if we have good data," she told the Journal.
But Mike Chambers, superintendent of Magdelena Public Schools, said the state can't place all the blame on districts.
"I think it's easy for the state to say it's because the data has been reported incorrectly, but there are more problems than that," Chambers said, adding that all 29 teachers in his district found mistakes on their evaluations.
Gerry Washburn, assistant superintendent at Los Alamos Public Schools, said while he doubts districts are solely to blame for the errors, it's not worth assigning blame.
"I think it's counterproductive for us to be pointing fingers regarding who made what mistakes," Washburn said.
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