How to measure teacher effectiveness fairly?

From the Hechinger Report

By Justin Snider

In the age of accountability, measuring teacher effectiveness has become king. But it’s not enough merely to measure effectiveness, according to many leading thinkers and policymakers; personnel decisions—from pay and promotions to layoffs and outright firings—should be based on teacher-effectiveness data, they say.

The Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition brought renewed attention to teacher evaluation, as did The New Teacher Project’s 2009 landmark report, “The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness.” (TNTP’s report found that the vast majority of teachers in America—upwards of 99 percent in some districts—are rated as “satisfactory,” usually by their own principals. And such ratings or evaluations have tended to be infrequent and pro forma. That is beginning to change, however.)

Two new studies about the feasibility of grading teachers based on their students’ performance provoked a lot of discussion this week. I had a chance to be part of the conversation on January 14th with Christine Romans, host of CNN’s “Your Bottom Line,” and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.

Romans opened the discussion by citing a remark made by John Friedman, a Harvard economist who coauthored one of the studies. Summarizing his study’s findings for The New York Times, Friedman said: “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

Friedman was speaking specifically about value-added ratings of teachers—which use student scores on standardized tests to determine a teacher’s relative effectiveness—and whether they are sufficiently accurate and reliable to guide personnel decisions. His answer? An unambiguous “yes.”

I addressed this “Let’s-find-and-fire-the-bad-teachers” mentality in my comments on “Your Bottom Line,” but what I said ended up on the cutting room floor—so I figure it’s worth re-articulating here.

The problem with the approach that Friedman and others advocate is that it assumes we have all these wonderful, high-quality teachers just waiting in the wings to take over the jobs of the bad teachers we fire. In reality, there is no such supply, even in a bad economy with high unemployment. We have a shortage, not a surplus, of great teachers—and so it’s naïve or shortsighted (or both) to think we can somehow fire our way to a great educational system.

There are almost four million K-12 teachers in the United States, which is more than twice the number of lawyers and doctors combined. Teaching is America’s largest profession. And so we need teaching to be a job that an average person can do reasonably well, which means we probably need to rethink how the job is structured.

A starting point would be to look at—and reconsider—the number of hours U.S. teachers spend at the front of the classroom each week compared to the time they spend planning lessons and collaborating with colleagues. It’s no secret that American teachers spend many more hours teaching than their colleagues do in higher-performing nations. Elsewhere, teachers often teach fewer lessons each week than U.S. teachers, but they spend significantly more time on planning and collaboration.

In Finland, for example, teachers teach an average of 600 hours per year (or 800 lessons of 45 minutes each). In American middle schools, by contrast, teachers teach an average of 1,080 hours per year (or about 1,300 lessons of 50 minutes each). Perhaps we should rethink the amount of time that U.S. teachers spend teaching vs. planning vs. collaborating? A well-planned lesson, after all, is worth any number of poorly planned (or unplanned) lessons when it comes to student learning.

http://hechingerreport.org/content/how-to-measure-teacher-effectiveness-fairly_7391/