What’s the Fuss About Teacher Evaluation?

Legislature Should Act to Avoid Ballot Fight

June 7, 2012

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June 27, 2012

What’s the Fuss About Teacher Evaluation?

June 22, 2012

Yesterday, the Massachusetts Senate passed legislation – S.2315 An Act Providing for the Implementation of Education Evaluation Systems in School Districts. The bill is a compromise forged by Stand for Children and theMassachusetts Teachers Association to make teacher effectiveness, as measured through evaluation of performance, the primary factor in personnel decisions regarding layoffs, transfers and placement. Stand had proposed a ballot question to further this transition from seniority-based decisions to performance-based ones. It was headed for a costly and divisive political battle. MBAE has explained its support for legislative action at this juncture in a long process to build a strong statewide system for attracting, developing and retaining the very best teachers for our children. We are aware that many in the business community are struggling to understand why performance-based decisions are an issue at all (as well as the political machinations necessary to preclude the ballot question).

So, in search of a succinct explanation, I checked the website for the Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET, project launched almost three years ago – in the fall of 2009 – by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to see if I could find some helpful information. The project’s aim is to find out how effective teaching can be identified and developed. (Yes, I know that just raises another question – how can a profession that’s been around for hundreds of years not have that information already? The simple answer is that teachers have traditionally not been held accountable for the performance of their students. The focus has been on the “practice” of teaching, not on outcomes.)

The MET project set out to improve the quality of information about teaching effectiveness available to education professionals to help them build fair and reliable systems for teacher evaluation and address teacher recruitment, training, professional development, and compensation challenges. The project has brought together over 3,000 teachers in six districts and scores of education researchers. Two sets of preliminary findings – the most recent in January – have been issued and a final report is expected this fall. ·

Here, are a few examples of what the project has found:

In every grade and every subject, a teacher’s past success in raising student achievement on state tests is one of the strongest predictors of his or her ability to reproduce those results.
The teachers with the highest value-added scores on state tests, which show improvement by individual students during the time they were in that teacher’s classroom, are also the teachers who do the best job helping their students understand math concepts or demonstrate reading comprehension through writing.
Valid feedback can come from multiple sources – test scores being only one. Other data, including student opinions, can give teachers the information they need to improve. The average student knows effective teaching when he or she experiences it.

It is worth spending three minutes watching teachers explain what is wrong with the current evaluation system and what they would like to see by clicking on “Teachers Talk about Multiple Measures” here. There is a lot of work to be done to implement an effective educator evaluation system in Massachusetts but the fact that stakeholders with different views can compromise is an indicator that we are finally able to move on from the status quo – an antiquated approach to educator human resource management. More to come!