Chad Aldeman and a Bellwether Education team have collected and synthesized data from 17 states and the District of Columbia that tracked and reported information on their teacher evaluation efforts as of July 2014. Data analysis revealed five major conclusions: Districts are starting to differentiate between poor, fair, and great educator performance, rather than treating Read more about Teacher Evaluations in an Era of Rapid Change[…]
What do we know about using alternative student growth measures to evaluate teacher performance? The following three updates from The Institute of Education Sciences provide research-based answers to that question. States increasingly are interested in incorporating measures of student achievement growth in teacher evaluations. But the typical measure of student growth—progress on state assessments from Read more about Alternative student outcomes in teacher evaluation systems[…]
In his edweek.org blog, Marc Tucker argues that success in improving teacher quality should be measured by our country’s ability to transform teaching from a blue-collar occupation to a high-status profession. Tucker was encouraged to write this particular blog post by a new report, “Genuine Progress, Greater Challenges: A Decade of Teacher Effectiveness Reforms”, penned Read more about Who Gets to Write the History of Teacher Quality?[…]
Thomas Kane, of the Harvard School of Education and writing for the Brookings Institution, has recently penned an important article describing an aggressive plan for helping American students catch up with their international peers over the next 10 years. Kane produces calculations that reveal that incremental reforms are unlikely to be aggressive enough to allow Read more about Shooting Bottle Rockets at the Moon: Overcoming the Legacy of Incremental Education Reform[…]
In the ongoing dispute concerning teacher evaluation, most of the furor has concerned value-added teacher evaluations—those based on student test scores. The many problems with these, such as teachers being evaluated based on entire schools’ test scores or on test scores of students they have never taught, have been identified. Because of this research, good Read more about The Bias Inherent in Principal Observation[…]
Ten years ago, education leaders, policy makers, and philanthropists caught on to what parents already knew: In a school, teachers are the most important factor determining whether a student succeeds in the classroom. A decade ago, the Joyce Foundation decided to fund research and advocacy on the importance of placing a highly effective Read more about Ten Years of Research on Teacher Quality[…]
In 2011, President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan provided states with flexibility from certain requirements under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, currently known as the No Child Left Behind Act. The flexibility process requires states to develop and implement new educator-evaluation systems to help identify effective teachers. While some Read more about State Oversight of District-Designed Teacher-Evaluation Systems[…]
Jenny DeMonte and Robert Hanna at the Center for American Progress have written a timely paper on recent efforts to distribute the best teachers more evenly to those students who need it the most. This research has become possible due to new teacher evaluation processes that make it easier to compare the effectiveness of teachers Read more about Looking at the Best Teachers and Who They Teach[…]
Jane Best and Courtney Cohen of McREL have written a helpful document looking at some of the hot button education issues today, but with a unique focus on rural education. While a quarter of all American students are enrolled in rural public schools, many rural teachers and administrators believe that education stakeholders are slow to Read more about Rural Education: Examining Capacity Challenges That Influence Educator Effectiveness[…]
With new standards, curricular materials, assessments, and evaluations in many districts, the education landscape is changing rapidly. Feedback and leadership from teachers is essential to the profession at this critical time. In this month’s issue brief, we have assembled stories, survey results, and views of teachers reflecting on their own profession, as well as information Read more about May Issue Brief: Teachers on Teaching[…]
School districts across the country are incorporating measures of student achievement growth in teacher evaluations—but that’s a challenge in grades and subjects that lack standardized state assessments. In response, some districts have turned to alternative measures of student growth–that is, measures that rely on something other than state assessments in reading and math in grades Read more about Alternative Measures of Student Growth: What Can We Learn from Early Adopter Districts?[…]
Michele McNeil of Education Week recently sat down with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at his Washington D.C. office to ask him a wide range of questions about the goals of federal education policy in the time remaining before the next presidential election. Duncan stressed a few key issues: the transition to new standards and Read more about What does Sec. Duncan plan to accomplish before 2016?[…]
A consensus has emerged: In either their state guidance or Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) waiver applications, 42 states say the goal of teacher evaluations is to improve teaching practice or explicitly link the purpose of teacher evaluations to professional learning. Is your state achieving this important goal? Do teachers in your state receive Read more about Utilizing Evaluation to Support Teachers[…]
Florida has joined New York and Ohio as states to publicly release value-added data on teachers’ performance, despite litigation from the Florida teachers’ union and opposition from such notable education heavyweights as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. What is most contentious is that 70% of teachers in Florida do Read more about Florida releases value-added data despite objections[…]
According to a new issue brief by Taylor White of the Carnegie Foundation, many states and districts have begun to alter their original, one-size-fits-all evaluation processes to bring greater quality and efficiency to their evaluation systems. Evaluating Teachers More Strategically: Using Performance Results to Streamline Evaluation Systems explores differentiation strategies in nine districts, two charter Read more about Evaluating Teachers More Strategically: Using Performance Results to Streamline Evaluation Systems[…]
TNTP, which has recently published many helpful documents about teacher effectiveness, has a new whitepaper out about the connection between teacher evaluations and Common Core. While these two issues have been on the tongues of most education professionals for the last several years, TNTP’s approach is unique in addressing each of these two issues together, Read more about TNTP Publishes Whitepaper on Classroom Observation[…]