A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed on teacher evaluations, authored by Mathematica senior fellow Brian Gill and senior researcher Duncan Chaplin, recommends comprehensive teacher evaluation that not only relies on achievement gains but also other valid and reliable measures. Multiple measures are a buzzword, but Gill and Chaplin unpack the options, which include locally developed curriculum-based assessments and teacher performance over the course of several years.
Gill and Chaplin discuss how Pittsburgh Public Schools collaborates with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (along with the help of their organization, Mathematica) to develop, pilot, and implement measures of professional practice that aim to be more comprehensive, rigorous, and useful than reports derived from cursory annual drop-ins by a principal. They write, “Multiple measures are relevant in several domains. Value-added models can be applied to locally developed curriculum-based assessments as well as to state standardized tests. Classroom practice can be observed by teacher peers as well as by principals. And the perspectives of students — who observe their teachers more than anyone else does — can be taken into account.”
Finally, they stress that, although all teacher performance measures should come with a certain level of scrutiny, using them is critical, because they can actually boost student achievement by making teachers better. Beyond that, better evaluations may even “raise the esteem in which the teaching profession is held.”
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