John Tyler of the Center for American Progress released a report last month focused on the challenges of developing evaluation systems for high school teachers, and possible solutions. Tyler believes that special attention should be paid to high school educators for three reasons: 1) high school student performance lags behind performance of students with similar demographics at the elementary and middle school level; 2) the decision to drop out is made in a student’s high school years, which means that improving the average teacher quality could be one avenue for scaling back the dropout rate; and 3) high school is the “last line of defense” for preparing students to enter the workforce or college.
As we know, the only thing that everyone seems to agree on when it comes to teacher evaluation systems is that we need them. But depending on one’s “camp,” the shape, purpose, and outcomes of any evaluation system can vary widely. However, Tyler asserts that in order to accomplish anyone’s goals, whatever they may be, the information needed to design an effective evaluation system needs to come from two sources: teacher-related inputs (observations, classroom artifacts, etc.), and outputs from the teaching-learning process (student performance). This seems simple enough, but at the high school level it is complicated.
First and foremost is the issue of time: given the number of course options at most high schools, there is simply not enough time for all teachers to be effectively observed and evaluated by someone who is trained to do so with current staffing. “This not only compromises the validity and reliability of the evaluation results; it decreases the likelihood that teachers will buy into and support the evaluation system.”
Second, it is hard to use student performance data at the high school level because so many subjects are untested, and thus there is no baseline and final data to compare to determine a teacher’s contribution to learning. Additionally, at the high school level students in an 11th grade English course may have taken different paths to get there, which can affect outcomes.
Tyler’s potential solutions to these challenges include:
1. Developing new and enhancing existing assessments that test high school teachers’ content-based pedagogical knowledge.
2. Exploring and testing the increased use of technology, such as classroom recording, as a means for generating efficiency and productivity gains in practice-based evaluation.
3. Conducting more research on the properties and use of Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), as a measure of effective teaching based on student performance.
4. Continuing to study how value-added measures can be used at the high school level.
5. Finding the best way to incorporate all available information from both teacher inputs and outputs into the ultimate evaluation of teachers.
To read the full report, please visit http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/11/high_school_evaluation.html
