3 Evaluation Issues We Need to Be Talking About

There's
no question that if teaching is ever to become fully professionalized, then
teachers need to be evaluated on results. Across the nation, we're making progress, but we rarely seem to be discussing the most important issues about using (or not) test score data in teacher assessments.

Granted, over the last several days, teacher evaluation news from New York City has revealed the gross lack of
trust that exists between district and union leaders. And, from most media accounts, it seems that district administrators believe
that teachers don't want to be accountable, while union leaders think that
school managers just seek to fire more expensive and vocal classroom
practitioners more easily. However, I want to suggest three issues that deserve
more attention if we want our public school system to create the kind of
results-oriented teacher evaluation system that students deserve:

1. Standardized tests can
   provide important information to policymakers as well as parents and educators,
   but researchers have shown that most items on multiple-choice exams are
   instructionally insensitive, i.e., student performance does not differ much for
   which teachers have taught a topic and those for which they
   have not.
2. Value-added methods, while
   offering a much-needed tool to isolate individual teacher effects, depend on random assignment of students, but this is virtually impossible to
   achieve.
3. Statistical tools can control
   for extraneous variables such as poverty, school resources, and class size, but
   can't account for other important factors—such as whether students get after-school tutoring, whether teachers collaborate with colleagues, and what working conditions teachers experience. 

These are serious matters that can confound researchers’ efforts to accurately identify who teaches effectively or
not. Teaching is complex work—and as
confirmed by the recent MET study—cannot be reduced to a single number. More than 20 years ago Brian
Rowan, using data
from the U.S. Department of Labor, analyzed the nature of teachers' work in
comparison to other occupations and concluded that “teaching is a complex form
of work that requires high levels of formal knowledge for successful
performance.” Reformers often ignore the scholarship of yesterday.

But one
education leader, Jerry Weast, did not, and his record in forging teacher
evaluation reform in Montgomery County, Maryland, is a model for how administrators
and union leaders should proceed. I was able to hear Jerry tell his story, in
just a few minutes at recent meeting of the Asia Society in Seattle, which had
assembled small teams of education leaders from nine cities, including those in
Asia, Australia, and North America.

In his brief remarks, Jerry told of how he
built trust with teachers over twelve years. He explained several specifics of their Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program,
which has been documented extensively by the Harvard Graduate School of
Education and is
part of a larger set of “deep changes.” 
Montgomery County is a large, diverse school district of over 140,000
students and 9,300 teachers. Jerry made it clear that “we never could have developed
a results-oriented system of teacher evaluation without our union—they became the best judge of pedagogical
performance.”

In fact, while Jerry noted that over 500 teachers were dismissed over a decade as a
result of PAR (about ten times more when only administrators conducted
evaluations), the real benefit has been “all the support” now provided to
those who teach. And behind PAR is the
district’s Professional Growth System that includes incentives to
help teachers pursue the rigorous process of obtaining National Board
certification. “Our approach to teacher
evalution,” Jerry reminded us, “was built on stability and a long-term commitment to a coherent strategy.”

All this matters for student
achievement. In 2010, when Jerry left
the district, Montgomery County had the highest high school graduation rate—83 percent—of any large school system in the nation. The gap between white
and Hispanic students reaching proficiency in third-grade reading narrowed from
43 percent in 2003 to just 12 percent in 2009; the black-white gap narrowed
from 35 percent to 15 percent.

Trust matters. And so do teacher evaluation
systems that respect the complexity of teaching.