Chad Aldeman of Bellwether Partners recently provided a reflection on teacher evaluation reform during the Obama presidency in Education Next. Excerpts of his insightful piece appear below:
When President Obama took office in 2009, his administration quickly seized on teacher evaluations as an important public-policy problem. Today, much of his legacy on K-12 education rests on efforts to revamp evaluations in the hopes of improving teaching across the country, which his administration pursued via a series of incentives for states. In response, many states adopted new systems in which teachers’ performance would be judged, in significant part, on their contributions to growth in student achievement.
Those moves have paid off in some ways, but in others, they backfired. Teacher evaluations today are more nuanced than they were eight years ago, and have contributed to better decisionmaking and enhanced student achievement in some districts. But progress was uneven, hampered by both design flaws and capacity challenges. And the changes were unpopular, helping generate a backlash against much of the reform playbook for the last few decades-as well as a strong federal role in education policy writ large. As we look ahead into the next four or eight years, an honest reflection can yield useful lessons about the potential, and limits, of federally led reform.
Teacher evaluation systems today are much stronger than they were before Obama took office. Teachers are evaluated more frequently, evaluators use higher-quality observation rubrics to assess their performance, and teachers receive more detailed feedback on their performance. More states and districts now factor teacher effectiveness into decisions regarding promotion and compensation.
These changes have had a positive effect on student learning—even if, in some cases, the changes were not implemented well. That was the finding of an independent evaluation by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the administration’s investments in educator evaluation and compensation through the TIF program. The review unearthed numerous problems: Districts chose to base teacher performance awards on measures that don’t reflect individual performance, such as raw, unadjusted student achievement scores or school-wide average growth rates. They shared smaller incentives among large numbers of teachers and principals rather than giving larger awards to the highest-achieving staff. And they failed to communicate the program well to teachers and principals, leading to mass confusion about who was eligible for awards and how large the awards would be. Yet, despite those flaws, a randomized controlled trial found that the program led to gains equivalent to 10 percent of a year’s worth of learning in math and 11 percent in reading.
We don’t know why the TIF program succeeded, but it suggests that performance-based evaluation and compensation systems can drive improvements in student outcomes.
There were successes, but we can also learn from the weak spots. The efforts to revamp teacher and principal evaluation systems got at least four major things wrong:
A Universal Approach. Rather than keeping its focus on competitive grant programs like RTT or TIF, the Obama administration sought to apply its ideas everywhere. In the NCLB waiver program, all states, regardless of interest or capacity, were asked to tackle teacher evaluation systems—and to do so in all of their districts. Places that didn’t really want to tackle this particular challenge were forced to anyway. While bold initiatives can be admirable, it’s important to get the scope right.
A Narrow Definition of Reform. In all its grant competitions and funding programs, the administration included language that pushed states and districts to create multi-tiered evaluation systems to “differentiate” among educators based “in significant part” on their contributions to “student growth.” States and districts should have been focusing on the real end goal—differentiating the best teachers from those who are merely satisfactory and those who continue to struggle—a task that would not have required complicated mathematical formulas designed to measure each teacher’s “value-added” to student achievement. It would have been better to allow or even encourage states and districts to use any set of measures that came to broadly similar results.
Process over Purpose. There are perils in prioritizing a process over its end result. The perceived complexities of evaluating teaching and, in particular, the mysterious-sounding nature of value-added models, captured much of the public conversation—and the time and efforts of state and district officials. The push to revamp evaluation systems ended up focusing too much on the evaluation systems themselves, and never actually got around to using those systems to make decisions.
Common Core Collision. As these new systems were coming online in 2013 and 2014, many states and districts were also starting to implement the Common Core State Standards and related assessments. The two reforms amounted to a one-two punch in the public eye and gave critics an easy-to-understand argument against reform: too many uncertainties, all at once.
To see more go to: http://educationnext.org/the-teacher-evaluation-revamp-in-hindsight-obama-administration-reform/
