The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its report State of the States: Trends and Early Lessons on Teacher Evaluation and Effectiveness Policies late last month that offers a closer look at what is being done across the nation with regard to teacher assessments. While admitting that it is too early to assess which states have been successful, the report attempts to provide a detailed picture of what is currently happening and preliminary observations of potential best practices in this area. A summary of their findings are:
a. 32 states plus DC have made some change to their state teacher evaluation policy in the last three years.
b. 24 states and DC now require an annual evaluation for all teachers, nearly double the number of states that had such requirements two years ago.
c. In 2009, only 15 states used student achievement data as part of teacher evaluations, four of which used these measures as the primary criterion. Now, 23 states require “objective evidence of student learning in the form of student growth and/or value-added models.”
d. 17 states plus DC have adopted legislation that requires student achievement or growth be a “significant” portion of teacher evaluations.
e. 18 states plus DC allow for teacher dismissal based on teacher evaluation results, though only 13 of those states have evaluation measures explicitly tied to student performance.
The “early lessons” identified by NCTQ tend to push for quick action rather than a slower pace of planning advocated by some groups. However, there is some concern expressed for avoiding evaluation systems that use a “scarlet letter” to brand teachers. Among the dozen or so recommendations are:
1. Teacher effectiveness measures don’t have to be perfect to be useful.
2. Insistence on comparability of measures for all teachers could cripple evaluation efforts.
3. The most useful initial capacity of new evaluations will be to discern the most and least effective teachers.
4. Stakeholder input is important, but bold leadership is more so.
5. State review and approval of district evaluations may not be an adequate approach to ensuring quality and rigor.
6. A scarlet letter, in the sense that parents should be privy to the evaluation scores of teachers, isn’t appropriate teacher effectiveness policy..
7. Teacher evaluation policy should reflect the purpose of helping all teachers improve, not just low-performers.
8. States need to attend to potential bias with systemic checks of their evaluation system and maintain flexibility to make adjustments as needed.
To read the full report, visit http://www.nctq.org/p/publications/docs/nctq_stateOfTheStates.pdf
