The Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) has announced its Pennsylvania’s Educator Effectiveness Rating System (PEERS), a free, voluntary, web-based version of the Act 82 Educator Effectiveness final rating tools (PDE 82-1, 82-2, and 82-3). This online tool will be available to local education agencies for the summative evaluation of teaching professionals, non-teaching professionals and principals/administrators during the second half of the 2014-15 school year.

PEERS will be hosted within the existing PVAAS web application, allowing all account holders to have ease of access to the online rating tools for the 82-1, 82-2, and 82-3 using the existing PVAAS account system. Through PEERS, the School Performance Profile (SPP) Score will be pre-populated by the PVAAS web application, with the flexibility to change the school or allow multiple schools. When available, PVAAS teacher measures will also be pre-populated into PEERS. As part of the web delivery, rating information will be aggregated to summary-level reporting.

PEERS is aligned to the 82-1, 82-2 and 82-3 .xls documents provided to LEAs on the PDE Educator Effectiveness webpage, with the added benefit of web-enabling the three forms to maximize the capabilities of a web interface and the online management of these forms.  The system will link teachers, principals/administrators, and non-teaching specialists to a possible final rating form based on PIMS data submitted by each LEA, with the ability to change the form as per local decision.

Use of PEERS is free, voluntary, and may be used alone or in concert with other tools that LEAs are using to manage the supervision and evaluation process. Access to the forms is granted by the LEAs.

Opportunity for Input:

During the development and implementation process, PDE and SAS (the PVAAS provider) are interested in gaining input from administrators in the field in order to design and deliver a system that provides users with an efficient and effective process to not only complete the summative rating forms, but to be able to use the data effectively for teacher, principal, and school/district growth and improvement.

To that end, focus groups will be established to provide feedback, with the overall intent to elicit input as to the effectiveness of the online tool in meeting the needs of LEAs.

PDE is asking for a maximum of a three member LEA administrator team – representatives of large and small LEAs from rural, urban and suburban areas across Pennsylvania. Feedback is sought from those who plan to use the tool during the second half of SY14-15, those considering using the tool, and those who may use the tool along with other systems they already have in place.

Focus groups will be convened a maximum of twice during this school year to meet with SAS (the PVAAS provider), as well as completing a maximum of two online surveys about the design and development of PEERS.

Any LEA/District that is interested in serving on the PEERS focus group should email pdepvaas@iu13.org by October 15, 2014. One person from the LEA should email the name, role and email address for each person from your 1-3 member administrator team for the PEERS focus group.

To learn more information about the specific capabilities of this tool, please access the PVAAS site at https://pvaas.sas.com for more details about PEERS.