Related Arts Portfolios – Tennessee Education Report

I wrote recently about Tipton County opting out of portfolio evaluation for Fine Arts teachers after participating the past four years. The move came in response to a letter a group of teachers sent to the Tipton County School Board.

Now, Nashville has also decided to opt out of Fine Arts portfolios for the 2018-19 academic year. While this had been raised as a possibility toward the end of last year, it wasn’t clear MNPS would move away from the portfolio model this year.

MNPS took the time to survey Fine Arts teachers and then used that feedback to inform their decision. The largest number of teachers responding voted to stop participating in the Fine Arts portfolio now and in future years. Another significant group wanted to at least pause the portfolio for a year and evaluate options going forward.

As a result, MNPS will now hold focus groups with Fine Arts teachers in the Spring to determine evaluation options for 2019-20 and beyond.

The move in Nashville comes as the portfolio evaluation model is losing favor around the state due to both poor implementation and lack of beneficial impact on instruction.

Prior to the start of this school year, five of sixteen districts participating in the Fine Arts portfolio indicated they would drop it for 2018-19. Now, Tipton and Nashville have opted out. This leaves nine districts who were previous participants plus Sumner County, a district that added portfolio evaluation over the objections of Fine Arts teachers there.

A line from the letter Tipton County teachers sent to their School Board explains why so many districts are moving away from this evaluation model:

While we appreciate the theory behind it, in real practice the portfolio process is not an effective one. What has occurred over the past several years is that portfolio has changed our lesson structures, negatively impacted our students’ classroom experience, and it has failed to provide feedback to help us improve as teachers.

It will be interesting to see if any other districts move away from this model ahead of the roll-out of the new portfolio evaluation platform from new (the third in three years) vendor Portfolium.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport

Earlier this year, I posted a piece by Camilla Spadafino, an art teacher in Nashville, about her experience with the Tennessee Fine Arts Portfolio. At the time, there was some discussion in Nashville about the district moving away from portfolio evaluation for Fine Arts teachers. While that did not happen this year in Nashville, five districts did drop portfolio evaluation for Fine Arts prior to the start of this school year.

For those following the Pre-K/Kindergarten portfolio story, the Fine Arts and other optional portfolios experienced similar challenges with platform vendor Educopia last year. Now, those few districts using the Fine Arts portfolio in 2018-19 will shift to the third platform vendor in three years.

In 2017-18, sixteen districts participated in the Fine Arts portfolio. As of July, five districts had dropped and one, Sumner County, added. That left twelve districts to move forward this year.

Now, Tipton County has announced they are dropping the Fine Arts portfolio this year. The move comes after a group of Fine Arts teachers sent a letter to school board members citing numerous challenges with the portfolio.

Here are some key excerpts explaining why Tipton County Fine Arts teachers did not want to continue with portfolio evaluation after having used it for four years:

While we appreciate the theory behind it, in real practice the portfolio process is not an effective one. What has occurred over the past several years is that portfolio has changed our lesson structures, negatively impacted our students’ classroom experience, and it has failed to provide feedback to help us improve as teachers.

There is extensive time spent on putting all the collections together in order to submit. Teachers have attested to spending anywhere from 40-100 hours of their own time outside of school on preparing their portfolio.

It has not positively impacted our students, or our school’s arts programs. Many counties in the state have opted out because of these issues. Our goal is to support classroom teachers through collaboration in order to help students reach their specific target areas. Portfolio detracts from this goal and should be removed. Our belief is that we should opt out of the portfolio process…

The concerns mentioned here echo many of those raised by Nashville teachers. They are also similar to concerns expressed by Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers after their first year of portfolio evaluation.

The process, according to teachers, takes up valuable instructional time and yields no real benefits for students. Teachers spend countless hours of their own time without compensation and receive little or no meaningful feedback on how to improve practice.

It will be interesting to see how the process goes this year with yet another new vendor. Will more districts opt out next year?

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport