Last week the Hillsborough County School District delivered its first complete teacher assessments under the Gates-funded Empowering Effective Teachers. In what has become a model, the district is replacing the single-source evaluation with one made up of observations by the principal and a peer evaluator, and a component that measures student improvement and other data. Earlier this year, teachers received the written portion worth up to 60 points. The data-driven portion is worth up to 40 points, and teachers received that Tuesday. As the district prepared to give teachers their scores, the St. Petersburg Times spoke with project director David Steele. In addition to scores, teachers will get details on how each student performed.

So can teachers really look and say, "I helped Jimmy but I didn't help the other one …"

Yes. We emphasize validating their rosters, almost to death. … When they first came back to school, they got their roster that had the pretest and the post-test information on it so they had the opportunity to look at it and say, "Hey, none of my science kids have their pretests showing." …

We want to make it as easy to read as possible. We're thinking of doing it maybe the way they do movie ratings. Like, "This is a five-star kid for you" and, "This is a two-star kid," so now they can see the relative gain of each student.

Aren't you measuring the growth of some very different students?

One of the concerns you get from teachers is, "I have a lot of Level 1 students in my class." That's okay because each student's expected growth is compared to students like them. If they're a special education student, or an English language learner, or a highly mobile student who maybe moved schools three times, or some of the other things we take into account. Are they too old for their grade level? Or too young for their grade level? We put all those things in to get the growth and that's something we've never been able to do before.

The district worked with the University of Wisconsin on the student improvement data?