Teacher evaluation is an issue that has received a considerable amount of attention recently, with teachers unions and policy-makers nationwide clashing over how to effectively and reliably assess teacher effectiveness and debating the appropriate role of students’ standardized test results in evaluation. Most traditional evaluation systems suffer from several design flaws. Evaluations occur infrequently and are not usually focused on teachers’ most important responsibility: helping students learn. In most districts across the country, teachers can receive only two ratings – satisfactory or unsatisfactory – which makes it impossible to distinguish really good teaching from fair or even poor teaching. And, nearly every teacher (99 percent in some districts) receives a satisfactory rating, making identifying good teaching – or, more importantly, identifying poor teaching – even harder. Traditionally, evaluations also do not provide feedback that is useful for the teacher, and schools rarely consider such evaluations in decisions about professional development, compensation, tenure, or promotion. In recent years, policies and incentives from the U.S. Department of Education are pushing districts to develop new evaluation systems that use multiple measures for assessment, expand the rating system, identify teachers’ strengths and weaknesses more precisely, and are used in teacher tenure and professional development decisions.
In 2010, New York State passed legislation outlining new teacher evaluation procedures. Beginning in the 2012-2013 school year, the new law requires 40 percent of a teacher‘s evaluation to be based on student outcomes, as assessed by standardized state test scores and other locally selected measures of student progress. The remaining 60 percent is to be based on locally designed assessments of a teacher‘s instructional practice, such as classroom observations, teacher artifacts, progress on professional growth goals, and/or structured student and parent feedback. Although the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have not reached agreement on how to implement the new procedures, the DOE is piloting a new teacher evaluation process focused on classroom observations. Measures used in the pilot may also include school-defined elements, such as student surveys or teacher contributions to the school community, as supplements to the observation of classroom practice. However, the DOE is not requiring schools to solicit any feedback from students or parents, who are the key stakeholders in New York City public education.
Recently, much of the debate over teacher evaluation has focused on the increasing trend of measuring teacher quality based on the standardized test scores of a teacher’s students. These “value-added” assessments intend to show how much value individual teachers add by measuring how much their students test scores exceed or fall short of expectations based on demographics and students’ prior performance.
Critics have raised a number of concerns about using value-added assessments based on student test scores. For example, value-added is available only for teachers in tested subjects – in New York City, for example, for math and English teachers in fourth through eighth grade and for high school teachers of Regents subjects. Even within tested subjects, many skills, such as critical thinking, analytic reasoning, creativity, and character traits that affect academic success like persistence, resilience, determination, do not conform well to standardized testing and are inevitably underrepresented on the test (Gardner 1999; Tough
2012). In addition, with one year of test score gains, it is impossible to distinguish between a teacher’s effect and other classroom and home factors, and, even with multiple years of scores, teacher value-added scores can fluctuate a great deal from year to year (Corcoran 2010).
More and more districts are finding that the goals of teacher evaluation are best accomplished instead by considering multiple measures of effectiveness (Goe & Sullivan 2011; Little, Goe & Bell 2009), as the proposed system in New York State does. These multiple measures include:
- student portfolios, teacher-designed assessments, student learning objectives, standardized tests, and student engagement measures, among others, to measure growth in student learning;
- multiple observations with more than one observer, transparent feedback to the teacher, student and parent surveys, and examination of teacher artifacts to measure instructional quality;
- and administrator and supervisor documentation of professional activities to measure professional responsibility.
(Byrd & Rasberry 2011; Center for Teaching Quality 2011)
Because the ultimate goal of all teacher evaluation should be to improve teaching and learning, good evaluation systems do not simply identify good or poor practice; they are tied to supports and targeted to a teacher’s identified areas of weakness (Little, Goe & Bell 2009). In cases where there is no improvement, evaluation can provide evidence that support and development efforts over time are not making a difference. In other words, good evaluation systems help good teachers become better and identify poor teachers who should be counseled out of the profession.
Montgomery County, Maryland, and a handful of other districts across the country are using a strategy for teacher evaluation called Peer Assistance and Review (PAR). The PAR program is a cornerstone of Montgomery County’s overall “professional growth system.” The PAR program is run by a joint panel of representatives from the union and from the principals’ association and serves two groups of teachers: novice teachers, first year teachers with no prior teaching experience, and experienced teachers who have received a below standard evaluation from their principal. For both groups, PAR provides intensive assistance to the teacher to improve teaching practice and ultimately an independent assessment – based on multiple measures – that results in a recommendation for continued employment, continued assistance, non-renewal, or dismissal. PAR has been shown to be an effective way to improve the skills of struggling teachers and also to eliminate poor performers from the system: in the first eleven years of PAR in Montgomery, the panels have voted to dismiss 200 teachers. In comparison, only five teachers were fired in the ten years before PAR, according to the former superintendent (Winerip 2011).
Student surveys are another strategy that could yield important information on teacher performance. As the recipients of instruction, students have a unique and valuable perspective on a teacher‘s classroom performance, and meaningful student involvement in the teacher evaluation process has the added benefit of improving student engagement and attitudes about school (Blum 2005; Fletcher 2005). Studies have found that student perceptions are a valid and reliable measure of educator effectiveness; that students were also able to distinguish between a teacher they simply liked and one who supported their learning (Peterson, Wahlquist & Bone 2000); and that student ratings of teachers were a strong predictor of achievement on district-developed reading, language arts, and mathematics tests (Wilkerson et al. 2000). Most recently, the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, an initiative from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2010), evaluated the use of student surveys in 2,519 classrooms in seven urban school districts and found that perceptions of a given teacher are consistent across different student classrooms; students are able to clearly differentiate between teachers; and student perceptions correlate with learning gains as measured by standardized tests. Of the various elements surveyed, a student’s perception of a teacher‘s ability to control a classroom and to challenge students was most predictive of achievement gains.
Peterson et al. (2003) suggests that parent surveys are also a potentially valid and reliable data source for teacher evaluation. Using standardized, district-developed parent surveys to evaluate 341 teachers from 27 schools in one Utah district, researchers found that parents responded to the range of items with reason, intent, and consistent values. While positive feedback from parents does not necessarily indicate effective teaching, the researchers note that multiple data sources are necessary to identify teacher quality, and high parent ratings in conjunction with at least several other positive indicators are a good measure of quality teaching. More research is needed in the role of parent feedback in teacher evaluation. However, research does establish that family involvement in school improves student outcomes. Students with involved parents are more likely to attend school regularly, have higher academic outcomes, show improved behavior and social skills, be promoted, and eventually graduate from high school (Caspe, Lopez & Wolos, 2007; Kreider et al., 2007). Despite the widely recognized importance of family involvement, nothing in New York City’s current teacher evaluation system measures how a teacher interacts with families and supports participation in education.
A robust and fair teacher evaluation system should utilize multiple measures of teacher performance and help teachers improve their practice so that they can better serve their students. In addition, detailed, constructive feedback from students and parents can offer useful and actionable information to supplement test scores and classroom observation, and integrating this feedback with other data sources can provide a more complex and sophisticated analysis for professional development to build on.
Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 2011. Straight Talk on Teaching Quality: Six Game-Changing Ideas and What to Do About Them. Providence, RI: Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
Corcoran, S. 2011. Can Teachers Be Evaluated By Their Students’ Test Scores? Should They Be? The Use of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in Policy and Practice. Providence, RI: Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
Little, O., L. Goe, and C. Bell. 2009. A Practical Guide to Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness. Washington, DC: Learning Point Associates.
Peterson, K. D., C. Wahlquist, and K. Bone. “Student Surveys for School Teacher Evaluation,” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 14, no. 2: 135–153.
Peterson, K. D., C. Wahlquist, J. E. Brown, and S. Mukhopadhyay. “Parent Surveys for Teacher Evaluation,” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 17, no. 4: 337–351.
Examples of Best Policy and Practice
Advocates for Children of New York
Measures of Effective Teaching Project
Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation