On Teacher Evaluation: Slow Down And Get It Right

One of the primary policy levers now being employed in states and districts nationwide is teacher evaluation reform. Well-designed evaluations, which should include measures that capture both teacher practice and student learning, have great potential to inform and improve the performance of teachers and, thus, students. Furthermore, most everyone agrees that the previous systems were largely pro forma, failed to provide useful feedback, and needed replacement.

The attitude among many policymakers and advocates is that we must implement these systems and begin using them rapidly for decisions about teachers, while design flaws can be fixed later. Such urgency is undoubtedly influenced by the history of slow, incremental progress in education policy. However, we believe this attitude to be imprudent.

The risks to excessive haste are likely higher than whatever opportunity costs would be incurred by proceeding more cautiously. Moving too quickly gives policymakers and educators less time to devise and test the new systems, and to become familiar with how they work and the results they provide.

Moreover, careless rushing may result in avoidable erroneous high stakes decisions about individual teachers. Such decisions are harmful to the profession, they threaten the credibility of the evaluations, and they may well promote widespread backlash (such as the recent Florida lawsuits and the growing “opt-out” movement). Making things worse, the opposition will likely “spill over” into other promising policies, such as the already-fragile effort to enact the Common Core standards and aligned assessments.

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Lawsuit filed over unfair teacher evaluations

The Washington Post is reporting on a lawsuit being filed by Florida teachers, that cold shake the foundations of a lot of teacher evaluation systems both in Florida, but across the country, including here in Ohio

A group of teachers and their unions filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Florida officials that challenges the state’s educator evaluation system, under which many teachers are evaluated on the standardized test scores of students they do not teach.

The seven teachers who filed the lawsuit include Kim Cook, who, as this post explains, was evaluated at Irby Elementary, a K-2 school where she works and was named Teacher of the Year last December. But 40 percent of that evaluation was based on test scores of students at Alachua Elementary, a school into which Irby feeds, whom she never taught.

Kim Cook's story is very unneverving

Here’s the crazy story of Kim Cook, a teacher at Irby Elementary, a K-2 school which feeds into Alachua Elementary, for grades 3-5, just down the road in Alachua, Fla. She was recently chosen by the teachers at her school as their Teacher of the Year.

Her plight stems back to last spring when the Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 736, which mandates that 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation must be based on student scores on the state’s standardized tests, a method known as the value-added model, or VAM. It is essentially a formula that supposedly tells how much “value” a teacher has added to a student’s test score. Assessment experts say it is a terrible way to evaluate teachers but it has still been adopted by many states with the support of the Obama administration.

Since Cook’s school only goes through second grade, her school district is using the FCAT scores from the third graders at Alachua Elementary School to determine the VAM score for every teacher at her school.

Alachua Elementary School did not do well in 2011-12 evaluations that just came out; it received a D. Under the VAM model, the state awarded that school — and Cook’s school, by default — 10 points out of 100 for their D.

In this school district, there are three components to teacher evaluations:
1. A lesson study worth 20 percent. In the lesson study, small groups of teachers work together to create an exemplary lesson, observe one of the teachers implement it, critique the teacher’s performance and discuss improvement.
2. Principal appraisal worth 40 percent of overall score.
3. VAM data (scores from the standardized Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores for elementary schools) worth 40 percent of the overall score.

Cook received full points on her lesson study: 100 x .20 (20%) = 20 points
Cook received an 88/100 from her former principal: 88/100 x .40 (40%) = 35.2 points
On VAM data — points awarded by the state for the FCAT scores at Alachua Elementary School: 10/100 x .40 (40%) = 4 points
Total points that she received: 59.2 (Unsatisfactory)

Here's a video of Kim speaking on this issue

We imaging this to be the first, not the last legal action against many of the provisions corporate education reformers are trying to cram into teacher evaluations.

RNC Convention Final Day - Upstaged!

On education related issues, the final day of the RNC convention featured Jeb Bush, former Florida Governor and brother of former President George W. Bush. His speech centered on the issue of education, and if you're not a fan of corporate education reform, you probably didn't like what he had to say. The Washington Post reported it thusly

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said pretty much what you’d expect him to say about education reform at the GOP convention — schools are failing and teachers unions are bad —
[...]
Here are some other things Bush said in his speech — and things he didn’t say:

* Insisting that American schools are failing, he threw out statistics such as: “Of 34 advanced nations in the world, American students rank 17th in science, 25th in math.” But he didn’t note that Americans have always ranked ranked at best average in international rankings.

* “China and India produce eight times more engineering students each year than the United States,” Bush said, without noting, as my colleague Jay Mathews did in this blog post, that “we are light-years ahead of them in providing instruction and opportunity for every child who wants to go to college or adopt a useful trade.”

* Teachers unions are super powerful and their supporters are “masters of delay and deferral,” he said, without mentioning that the unions have lost so much political power that they have been unable to stop the implementation in a number of states of unfair teacher evaluation systems that link teachers’ pay to student standardized test scores. Bush’s implication that teachers unions are stopping academic progress ignores the fact that the problems that ail urban schools are the same in union states as they are in non-union states.

* Bush praised his own school reform program when he was governor from 1999-2007, which became known as the “Florida Miracle” and has been a model for other governors who have adopted its key tenets, which include standardized test-based accountability, charter schools, vouchers, virtual education, an end to teacher tenure, merit pay and assigning letter grades to school.

But he didn’t mention that the standardized testing regime that he pioneered, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, is in shambles after a succession of scandals, and that his claims of great progress in student achievement are questionable.

Of course the highlight of the evening was to be the acceptance speech by Mitt Romney, but somewhere along the line the proceedings got sidetracked and overwhelmed by a bizarre 11 minute piece of theater performed by movie legend Clint Eastwood having a conversation with an invisible President Obama, or an empty chair depending upon your perspective.

A new internet meme has been born - Eastwooding (google it, but be prepared to waste some of your day).

Romney's speech lacked any policy specifics, "Where was the policy?" wrote one Washington Post reporter. Here's the word cloud of his speech - he mentioned America, a lot