Unbeknownst to many American parents and students, school systems around the country have spent the past several years completely overhauling the policies that determine how we judge the teachers in our classrooms. Since 2009, 32 states and the District of Columbia have significantly altered their policies towards teacher evaluation systems. While old systems of teacher evaluation were generally thought to be perfunctory, resulting in high ratings for the vast majority of teachers, these new evaluation systems seek to differentiate between teachers based on their effectiveness in the classroom. Despite ardent political resistance and implementation challenges at the local and state levels, these new evaluation systems will completely overhaul the way American schools evaluate, hire, fire, and train their teachers.
The Race to the Top Revolution: Teacher Evaluations Take America by Storm
For most of recent history, America’s education systems have lacked a way to differentiate teachers based on factors that significantly affected outcomes for students. As Drew University Political Science professor Patrick McGuinn explained in an interview with the HPR, “For all of American history, teachers have never really been evaluated in a particularly meaningful way … and certainly haven’t been measured by or held accountable for student achievement.” Teachers unions have long advocated for decisions regarding salaries and employment to be based on teachers’ degree status and years of experience. Although unions view these as the fairest criteria by which to judge teachers, research suggests that they have little bearing on teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom after the first few years of experience.
In recent years, however, significant advances in education research, pressure from education reform advocates, and massive policy shifts engendered by the Race to the Top (RTTT) program have completely revolutionized the system. New research has introduced a measure known as value-added modeling, which uses a complex statistical model to compare students’ actual growth to their expected growth in a classroom. The difference is attributed to individual teachers’ effects on student learning. The seminal Measures of Effective Teaching study, funded in large part by the Gates Foundation, concluded that evaluation systems that include both value-added calculations and other factors, including classroom observation and student surveys, are the most stable measures of teacher quality.
This evolution in research has been increasingly translated into policy in response to Barack Obama’s Race to the Top Grant program, which required applicant states to develop rigorous new teacher evaluation systems. For most states, meeting this requirement meant a significant transition, often through a state law mandating that districts develop evaluation systems that use measures of student learning to differentiate between effective and ineffective teachers.
The new evaluation systems vary from state to state, but most share basic common parameters. They include significant measures of student achievement—either standardized tests or Student Learning Objectives developed by teachers—and observations of teachers by principals or outside observers. Dartmouth professor Douglas Staiger, one of the researchers involved in the Measures of Effective Teaching project, explains in an interview with the HPR that “The best of the districts and states are doing multiple measures—not just value-added, but doing student surveys and teacher observation. They aren’t putting too much emphasis on any one [measure].”
With these new systems comes a range of other reforms. One of the most notable existing teacher evaluation systems is Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT system, implemented in 2009. IMPACT incorporates student achievement, classroom observation, teacher collaboration, and professionalism into a teacher evaluation rating. It then provides large financial incentives for highly effective teachers and rigorous professional development for less effective teachers. In an interview with the HPR, Jason Kamras Chief of Human Capital for D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) and one of the designers of IMPACT, emphasized the importance of demonstrating the value of teaching through a comprehensive system of evaluation coupled with meaningful rewards.
Growing Pains
However, this dramatic overhaul has created significant political pushback and significantly increased the human capital states must invest in evaluating and developing teachers. Indeed, perhaps the biggest threat to the long-term viability of these evaluation systems is the vehement opposition from many states’ teachers unions. This opposition has taken a variety of forms. In New York, state law now requires teacher evaluation systems to incorporate measures of student achievement. However, implementation on the district level is subject to collective bargaining, and many unions have maintained staunch opposition. Thus, many of the state’s teachers are still evaluated by systems that only minimally incorporate teacher performance assessments. Nationally, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently came out in opposition to the use of the value-added model in any evaluations, even after previously agreeing to some compromise plans that included its use.
The significant human capital expansion required for states to successfully implement these new evaluation systems has also created challenges. Patrick McGuinn, the lead author of a seminal Center for American Progress report on implementation of teacher evaluation, told the HPR that state education agencies are facing an “ongoing effort where the learning curve is steep.” In particular, complicated statistical analyses involved in calculating teacher value-added estimates and record-keeping on evaluation systems call for entirely new mathematical and data management expertise. State agencies have struggled to recruit staff with these skills and, in the meantime, have had to stretch already thinly spread human capital. Human capital concerns are also playing out on the school level: principals face increased demands on their time as loose requirements for brief annual reviews are replaced with mandates for longer and more frequent classroom evaluations.
However, advocates of new evaluation systems are optimistic that resource intensive evaluation processes will help states prioritize teacher quality over administrative matters that matter less for student success. Sandi Jacobs, Vice President and Managing Director for State Policy at the National Center for Teacher Quality, told the HPR that American education policy “too often hasn’t prioritized [teacher] human capital and instruction” in the classroom, despite overwhelming evidence that teachers’ short-term impact on students is heavily predictive of long-term student outcomes. These evaluation systems, she hopes, will force “important re-prioritization that needs to occur.”
The Promise of Reform
Despite the numerous operational and political challenges faced by new evaluation systems, early evidence from around the country suggests that some evaluation systems are having the desired effect. When properly implemented, evaluation reforms can dramatically improve teacher quality, build trust with teachers, and contribute to improving other a host of educational institutions, such as teacher preparation programs.
In the largest and most high-profile study of any new evaluation system, professors from Stanford and the University of Virginia presented evidence that D.C.’s IMPACT system is having the desired effect. While previous work from The New Teacher Project suggested highly effective D.C. teachers and ineffective D.C. teachers left the system at the same rate, under IMPACT teachers rated highly effective are staying more often while more of those rated ineffective are choosing to leave.
And many experts suggest that such results are only the beginning. Sandi Jacobs insists that giving feedback to teachers is the “overwhelming purpose of these evaluation systems.” Jacobs and others believe that they can significantly increase the quality of everyone in the system through an increase in the amount of feedback and the linking of feedback to professional development.
The same study of IMPACT suggests that D.C. is a model for this effort, concluding that teachers who stayed within the system showed statistically significant improvements in their evaluation ratings. Jason Kamras told the HPR that the system’s comprehensive approach not only evaluates teachers but also “provide(s) great professional development [and] financial incentives.”
The use of evaluations to shape retention and professional development might only be the beginning of how these new policies transform American education systems. Teacher preparation programs, long reauthorized without evaluation for the quality of teachers produced, can now be held accountable for the evaluations of the teachers they graduate. Master teachers can be paid extra to serve as mentors to their less accomplished colleagues. School systems interested in improving results for particularly low achieving schools can offer their now-identified best teachers financial incentives to move to the schools where they are most needed.
Many advocates of reform are optimistic that even teachers themselves, once so skeptical, will eventually come to accept the role of the evaluation systems. Professor Mark Elhert, who conducted major surveys of Tennessee teachers as their evaluation systems went into effect, found that teacher faith in the system significantly improved in the first years of the evaluation systems. In particular, he found that teachers were significantly more likely to approve of the system if they felt feedback was targeted towards helping them improve to meet standards.
Jason Kamras, who taught math in DCPS for years before designing the IMPACT system, agrees. “Teachers don’t mind being held accountable,” he insists, “they’re here to do hard work, they just want to know where the bar is.” While persuading all teachers that the bar is fair and consistent will take time, American students are likely to benefit from the fact that we have begun to set a bar at all.