The prospect of designing and implementing teacher and leader evaluations and the data systems necessary to link teachers with the achievement of their students is a daunting task. States and districts are only now confronting technical and logistical hurdles to creating new evaluations, writes Stephen Sawchuck in Education Week. In the coming months, states — especially winners of Race to the Top — will put out RFPs for technical support related to a number of issues pertaining to data systems, such as overhauls to systems that store student and teacher information; the provision of value-added analyses of teacher performance; and reporting and professional development to help teachers and principals use information from these systems.
“It is hugely, hugely challenging to get all of the data accurate, before you even start talking about the analytical process,” said William Sanders of the SAS Institute. “Particularly when you’re doing this at the classroom level, you’ve got to make sure the right students get attributed to the right teachers.”
It will be equally hard to institute other pieces of new evaluation systems, such as multiple observations of teachers’ classroom skills. States and districts must determine how observations are to be conducted and how the resulting information is collected, audited, and stored.
An element of teacher and leader evaluation that is threatened to be lost in the hurry to implement technically accurate systems is the buy-in of the educators themselves. Without a clear plan for communication with teachers and leaders through the development process, fear and anxiety will intensify. Processes for open communication and professional development should be designed along with the evaluation systems so that teachers are kept apprised of the developments and decisions made along the way.
For more on effective design of teacher and leader evaluation, see www.CoreEducationLLC.com
