Report cards for teachers: Are they fair?

This from the HechingerEd Blog:

A new study underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report) tackles the question of whether the new teacher evaluation systems going into effect in school districts across the country are accurate and reliable in identifying which teachers are good and which are not. The researchers found that the new evaluation systems are likely to be more reliable than the methods used in the past. But they are not perfect.

The study argues that current teacher evaluation systems are broken, suggesting, as many critics have in the past, that the problem with the old approach was its failure to distinguish among the great, the mediocre and the bad: More than 90 percent of teachers were labeled as satisfactory, even in school districts where student achievement and graduation rates were abysmal. Under the old system, principals usually conducted one classroom observation per teacher every few years, marking off things on a checklist, like whether students were behaving and goals were displayed on the chalkboard.

Advocates for a new system of measuring teachers—with usually more than one classroom observation a year, plus standardized test scores that measure how much a teacher’s students improve academically, plus other measures like student survey results—say it is more consistent and precise. This new system is being promoted as more dependable in telling districts which teachers are great, which need help to get better, and, most controversially, which need to be let go...

Popular Frameworks Found to Identify Effective Teachers

This from Education Week:

Teachers who embodied the teaching skills outlined in certain popular teaching frameworks tended to help their students learn more, concludes a new study released by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The report is the second major release from the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, which seeks to identify the best gauges of effective teaching. Ultimately, the Seattle-based foundation plans to devise a prototype teacher-effectiveness measure based on the findings.

Among other implications, the study’s results suggest that observations of teaching practice hold promise for being integrated into teacher-evaluation systems—if observers are carefully trained to ensure consistent application of the frameworks over multiple observations. Also, the study indicates that the gauges that appear to make the most finely grained distinctions of teacher performance are those that incorporate many different types of information, not those that are exclusively based on test scores.

“I was surprised at how aligned all the measures were,” said Douglas O. Staiger, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., and one of the principal researchers on the study. “They seem to pick out teachers who are good on a range of dimensions, and I think that says there really is something kind of coherent about good teaching.” ...

House to Release Teacher, Accountability Bills This Week

This from Politics K-12Education Week:

The House education committee will put out draft bills this week that address the issues at the heart of the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act—teacher quality and accountability, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., said this morning on Bill Bennett's radio show "Morning in America."

Kline, chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, didn't elaborate on the substance of the bills. But it does sound like this is going to be yet another blow to Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP, the law's signature yardstick. The administration's waiver package and an NCLB reauthorization bill that passed out of the Senate education committee last year essentially scrap AYP as it's used now.

Kline doesn't like it either.

How Much?

Bill in Kentucky legislature
would tie teacher evaluations
to student performance

House Ed Cmte Chair Rollins is Thinking 30%

Including student test score performance as one factor in a teacher's evaluation is going to happen. It ought to happen. The question is how much should it count? No social science measure is absolute. Given all of the known weaknesses in our present ability to accurately assess any given teachers' contribution (the value they add) to test scores is cause for extreme caution. The system is fraught with weaknesses that render the accounting unfair. For that reason, Rollins's number is too much by half.


Still, Rollins must be hearing from those number lovers who would have test scores count for half of a teacher's performance evaluation. That is 30's biggest virtue. It's not worse.

This from Jim Warren at the Herald-Leader:

Under legislation pending in the General Assembly, student achievement would become a standardized part of Kentucky public school teachers' performance evaluations for the first time.

House Bill 40, sponsored by House Education Committee Chairman Carl Rollins, D-Midway, would authorize the Kentucky Department of Education to implement the evaluation system starting with the 2013 school year. Rollins' committee is to take up the measure Tuesday.

The Kentucky Education Association generally has signed off on the proposed evaluation system. But closely tying teachers' evaluations to students' academic progress could be one of the most sensitive issues in the 2012 legislative session.

The idea already is generating heat in Tennessee and some other states that are implementing new teacher evaluation systems in answer to the U.S. Department of Education, which wants student achievement factored into evaluations as a way of improving instruction.

As now planned, Kentucky teachers would be assessed on criteria such as their communication skills, knowledge of subject matter, ethics, use of technology and how well their students are doing academically.

The Kentucky Department of Education is developing the evaluation system now. But the state Board of Education has not yet decided the extent to which student achievement would affect a teacher's overall score. That could be a sticking point...

Working With Teachers to Develop Fair and Reliable Measures of Effective Teaching

This from Vicki Phillips at Gates:

Over the past four decades, research has consistently confirmed what we have known intuitively all along—that no school-based factor matters more for a student’s learning than having an effective teacher.

It’s ironic, then, that we give teachers so little useful feedback on the quality of instruction—the strengths they bring to the classroom and the gaps in their practice that need to be filled.

As part of our education strategy, we have made a commitment to learning from great teachers about what makes them great. To this end, we launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project last fall to explore ways to provide better feedback to teachers on their practice, so that schools can reward and retain those who are most effective, and create new professional development tools to help all teachers improve.

The project is led by independent researchers who will spend two years developing and rigorously validating new ways of identifying effective teaching. Two principles are guiding that work:

• In the grades and subjects where it is feasible to do so, any assessment of the quality of instruction should include student achievement growth as a major component.
• There should be multiple indicators of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations and student feedback, not just test-based measures of student achievement. These indicators must be demonstrated to be helpful in identifying classrooms with exemplary growth in student achievement.

Because we do not believe there is one single measure that can capture the range of skills which teachers need—the art and science of teaching—we are testing many different tools for their association with growth in student achievement...

A new white paper articulates the scope and methods...

Blaming Teachers Is Easy, But Is It Fair?

Central Falls High, a struggling school in Rhode Island, recently fired all its teachers, in large part because only 7 percent of its 11th graders passed the state's math test.

But here's the question: Are the teachers at fault?

According to George McLaughlin, one of those fired teachers: No. They probably deserve a portion of the blame but now, we're just being stepped on.

[If] you ignore your own policies of due process,

you ignore the rights of employees.

I mean, how do you look in the face of a PE teacher,

a history teacher or a cafeteria worker and say:

The reason you don't have a job is because our fourth graders,

compared to last year's fourth graders,

didn't do well on a math and reading test?

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel:

This from NPR:

When schools are failing and students aren't learning, who is responsible? The answer these days seems to be teachers. When it comes to education reform, most of the current focus is on making teachers accountable for their students' performance. But is it fair to assign so much of the burden for the success or failure of schools to teachers? NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.

Listen to the Story
[4 min 24 sec]