Education Next – Thomas Toch
“When Education Next paired my recent article, “A New Era for the Battle over Teacher Evaluations,” as a “Behind the Headlines” item with “When Fancy New Teacher-Evaluation Systems Don’t Make a Difference,” by Rick Hess, I read with interest Rick’s suggestion that the teacher-evaluation reform movement hasn’t made much of a difference, and I tracked down the study Rick suggests supports his conclusion. It found that most teachers have earned satisfactory ratings under new, more comprehensive state teacher-evaluation systems. Alas, I don’t think the study supports Rick’s contention. The study highlights weaknesses in the reforms that need to be addressed. But its findings are more positive than Rick suggests, especially when compared to conditions before the onset of teacher-evaluation reforms. And the new teacher-measurement systems have produced benefits in areas the report doesn’t address. The report’s authors, Matthew Kraft of Brown University and Allison Gilmour of Vanderbilt, studied teacher ratings in roughly half of the more than three dozen states with new evaluation systems and found that a median of 2.7 percent of teachers were rated unsatisfactory, even though principals they surveyed in one large urban school system suggested that there were more low performing teachers than that in their schools.”(more)