Need exists for ‘solid, objective’ ways
to measure teachers’ effectiveness

Lew Armisted
LA Communications

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(A photo from our 2007 Summer Leadership Institute.)

  While school leaders frequently hear education reformers say that effective teaching is defined by improvements to student learning, those reformers issue conflicting statements on how to measure such effectiveness and use those assessments to improve teaching. That’s the contention of a new issue brief, Measuring and Improving the Effectiveness of High School Teachers, presented by the Alliance for Excellent Education this spring.

   Thus far, most of the policy debate on teacher effectiveness has focused on using test scores to implement merit pay or to fire teachers, but those strategies alone will not lift teacher performance on a large scale,” the brief reads. “The best way to improve teacher effectiveness is to provide teachers with support and guidance that … uses effectiveness data to enhance professional development and teacher education, strengthen evaluations and career development, and revamp accountability policies to reward and encourage student learning.”

   The Alliance called for an investment in “solid, objective ways to measure a teacher’s effectiveness” and outlined a “value-added” approach to achieve that during a conference in Washington, D.C., in late March. Value-added is a complex statistical means to measure a teacher or school’s direct impact on student achievement. It eliminates other casual factors such as family income level, previous educational experiences, and other school characteristics. Rather, it attempts to isolate the direct impact an individual teacher has on a student’s success while in that teacher’s classroom.

   While the value-added approach has merit, it is not perfect, Jeremy Ayers, an Alliance policy and advocacy associate, said at the March conference. “It works best when supplemented with other measures of student learning and of teacher knowledge and skills.”

   The value-added approach estimates how much academic growth a student should be expected to make during the year and, at the end of the year, compares that figure with actual student gains on standardized tests.

   "Students who make greater gains than expected are judged to have teachers who ‘added value’ whereas students who did less well than anticipated have teachers who did not,” the brief points out. If a student achieves at the predicted level, the teacher is viewed as neither adding value nor hindering that youngster’s progress.

   The Alliance also points that out using value-added measurements can be more complicated in high schools than in the earlier grades, especially in the humanities where students are influenced by many teachers. It’s easier to measure in the core subjects that have readily available standardized tests. If these obstacles can be overcome, the value-added approach can isolate teacher effectiveness in an objective and comparable way and lead to discussions about teacher improvement that are based on student outcomes. Teachers who are deemed to have added value can be used as models for others.

   “A primary goal of measuring high school teacher effectiveness is to improve the knowledge and skills of teachers so that they improve student achievement,” the brief reads. The Alliance outlined three areas where improvement efforts should focus—

• enhancing professional development and   teacher preparation;
• strengthening evaluations and career   development; and
• revamping accountability policies.

Enhancing Professional Development and
Teacher Preparation

    “The most immediate use for effectiveness measures is to target and strengthen professional development, including evaluating which professional development programs are the most productive in enhancing teacher effectiveness,” the brief reads. Since value-added can identify the high and low performing teachers, it can leverage “the expertise of top-performers to improve the skill of low-performers, with the caveat that some chronically low-performers may need to be counseled out of the profession.”

      The brief questions the value of one-day workshops but indicates that regular staff development that occurs in the school and is developed with teacher input can improve teacher effectiveness. In high schools research also demonstrates that effectives improves “when teachers collaborate as part of learning communities—groups of teachers working together (rather than apart as most teachers do) to improve student achievement and to build a culture of shared responsibility for learning.”

    The brief cites a professional development project that is driven by teachers and effectiveness data at Norview High School in Norfolk, VA. “Teachers were grouped into teams by subject area, adopted shared curriculum guides and common assessments, and met regularly as teams around assessment data in order to review student progress. To evaluate their effectiveness as teachers, teams focused on three central questions: ‘What am I teaching well?’; ‘What am I not teaching well?’; and even ‘Why do your students perform better than mine?’ Struggling teachers observed successful teachers in the classroom. Six years later, the results were clear: Norview raised achievement and narrowed gaps.”

Strengthening Evaluations and Career Development

   Evaluations are generally dismissed as an effective way to improve teacher effectiveness since most evaluation tools are poorly constructed and administered haphazardly, according to the brief.

    "On the other hand, meaningful evaluation instruments do exist, and they hold promise for identifying and improving effective teaching,” the brief reports. “The best evaluations have explicit standards for the instruction to be assessed and clear rubrics for assessing it. Good evaluations take place several times throughout the year and are administered by multiple evaluators, some of whom are peers and some of whom are administrators.”

     The brief also indicates the value of career ladders focused on improving teaching work in conjunction with evaluations and effectiveness data. School systems in Rochester, NY, and Denver are cited for effective use of career ladders.

  The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), used in approximately 15 high schools in seven states, is a promising approach to teacher evaluation and career development, according to the Alliance. “TAP’s success is due not to an evaluation instrument alone, but rather to how it fits within a larger framework of professional development, career advancement, and differentiated pay. In TAP, teachers meet weekly in clusters, led by master and mentor teachers, to review student work and to improve instruction. Cluster meetings provide ongoing, job-embedded professional development, and the roles of master and mentor teachers provide effective teachers with a career ladder and additional pay.” More information about TAP can be found at www.talentedteachers.org.

Revamping Accountability Policies

The brief outlines a broad approach to accountability to improve teacher effectiveness.

“Effectiveness measures may work best to revamp accountability policies when responsibility for student growth primarily rests on the shoulders of schools as a whole, since multiple teachers contribute to student learning, particularly at the high school level. Furthermore, cooperation between, rather than competition among, teachers is needed to improve student achievement on a large scale.

   To move toward the goal of college and work force readiness for students, three areas need to receive focus, according to the brief:

• Measures of student learning must improve;
• Policymakers and educators must develop and   strengthen teacher effectiveness measures that   access knowledge, skill, and classroom practice;   and
• Policymakers and educators must improve the   school structures that allow effectiveness   measures to improve teaching.

The complete issue brief and video from the conference can be seen at http://www.all4ed.org/events/effectiveness_HSteachers.

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