Fixing Teacher Evaluation

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, when pedagogical theorists first began to revisit the evaluation structure in the face of growing evidence of significant drops in levels of student achievement, different theoretical protocols for evaluating teacher performance have come to polarize, even paralyze, the education community. Politicians, responding to parent concerns, have found teacher evaluation an effective campaign issue.

Overview

Since the late 1990s, when pedagogical theorists first began to revisit the evaluation structure in the face of growing evidence of significant drops in levels of student achievement, different theoretical protocols for evaluating teacher performance have come to polarize, even paralyze, the education community. Politicians, responding to parent concerns, have found teacher evaluation an effective campaign issue.

The conventional approach to teacher evaluations that was in place less than a generation ago and the theory that underpinned it have largely been discredited as ineffective and even counterproductive. Teacher evaluations were structured on the same premise as standard work evaluations in the business sector. The intention was to get rid of ineffective performers, weed out slackers, target workers who did not best represent the mission of the network, and eliminate human resource redundancy. The process was necessarily viewed as negative, a process fraught with anxieties that invariably impacted faculty morale negatively. Depending on the enrollment of the school and the number of classrooms, a principal would sit in on a class to observe the teacher, usually once a year. The principal would use a standardized checklist to rate the teacher, often a scale of 1 to 4 points or simply Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory.

The measures used to review performance had little to do with the curriculum because the principal would have to work on information gathered on a single visit. The areas evaluated were those that could be cursorily observed. Was the teacher dressed professionally? Did the teacher make eye contact? Did the teacher speak clearly? Did the class start on time? Did the teacher indicate the class goals at the beginning of class? Did the students maintain appropriate attention? Did the teacher know the students by name? The questions were designed for quick review—and at some point the principal and the teacher would meet to review the evaluation.

Teachers who were considered to have performed poorly were still protected from summary termination by union rules and tenure. The system produced few negative evaluations, and because evaluations were not tied directly to pay incentives or promotion considerations, the evaluation itself had little professional impact. Rather the process was often viewed as a kind of "gotcha" ordeal, while the school would instead rely on seniority and credentials to determine teacher rank and salary. The individual style and professionalism of the instructor, the amount of preparation that went into the class, and the short- and long-term impact of the lesson presented were not elements of the evaluation process. Because the presumed intention was simply to get rid of bad teachers, teachers who were given acceptable reviews were not offered the chance to engage in authentic feedback from peers or given constructive direction to grow as teachers.

Applications

Beginning in the 1990s, as a response to the widening perception of a decline in student achievement, the development and implementation of standards, or core competencies, was endorsed across the country, and attention inevitably focused on teacher performance. Network America was alarmed at the significant and growing lag in American students competencies in the sciences and mathematics even as the digital revolution was redefining business globally. In addition, student writing skills began to evidence significant decline as students grew more and more easily distracted by entertainment technologies, such as cable television, the Internet, and video games, at the expense of building reading skills critical to writing competencies.

Colleges called for reform of primary and secondary education, noting that students were entering college underprepared. With scores on a range of standardized tests steadily dropping, education theorists began a sweeping revision of classroom evaluation, one predicated on the urgency to get operations changed and changed quickly. That quick-fix mentality both energized protocols for fixing teacher evaluations and created enormous problems for any serious reformation movement. At the center of the growing conversation was the question of who was to blame for poor student performance. Although teachers and the unions that represented them cautioned against making instructors the scapegoats for underachieving students, a consensus emerged that the traditional teacher evaluation system of one classroom observation simply had not led to a significant optimization of teacher skills and/or opportunities in the classroom to maximize student competencies.

Since the revolution in public policy over the state of education and teacher competency triggered initially by the No Child Left Behind initiatives of the George W. Bush administration and the subsequent Race to the Top initiatives of the Barack Obama administration, school systems, pressured by a phalanx of parents groups, political action groups, business interests, and independent education watchdog organizations, have reassessed teacher evaluations along six related lines.

Make Evaluations More Particular and More Frequent. The New Teacher Project (2010) argued that teachers should have a "clear, rigorous" set of performance expectations and that these should be based on evidence that meeting these goals will result in student learning. Administrators, if they are going to rely on traditional classroom observation tactics, have increased the areas of competency evaluated into four broad areas: planning and lesson preparation, classroom environment, professional proficiency, and professional responsibility and bearing.

In turn, each of those broad areas can be further divided into specific areas and skills deemed critical to instruction. By increasing the reference points and by increasing the number of visits (including using drop-in visits rather than scheduled visits) evaluations allow a better response format. The teacher and the administrator, when the evaluation is reviewed, can discuss areas of professional development and strategies for motivating students. The evaluation process is thus restructured into a coordinated and cooperative effort to better the school's presentation of the curriculum (Teacher Evaluations, 2013).

Bring in Evaluation Teams. Rather than depend on in-house evaluations, a system inevitably given to institutional inertia as well as the inevitable politics within any organization, school systems hire outside evaluation teams actually qualified in the area and grade level of the teaching to be evaluated, outside evaluators who bring to that evaluation a wide familiarity with cutting-edge education practices and theories. The cost can be significant for a school system, but the response provides an entirely fresh perspective on classroom performance and offers teachers a wider array of options, often computer-based technologies, to enhance their classroom.

Broaden the Teacher's Role. Rather than reduce evaluations to a single classroom visit, school systems outline a far broader participation in the process for the teachers, including providing lesson plans, original instructional materials, personal teaching philosophy statements, and reflections of classroom performance, as well as short videos of different approaches used in the classroom. In addition, teachers can provide feedback they have received from the students and from parents.

Building such portfolios puts additional stress on teachers who are already facing enormous work expectations, but the portfolio gives the teacher a much greater voice in the evaluation process. In addition, school systems have begun to track what is termed Growth Rate—that is, observing achievement data for students as they move through a school system rather than using only data from a single year or a single semester of instruction to give some appropriate context to any one teacher's effectiveness.

Use Standardized Test Scores. Although one of the more controversial protocols for evaluation, using standardized test scores of students to evaluate teacher performance gained particular momentum in the wake of the No Child Left Behind and the Core Curriculum initiatives as school systems and politicians sought clean and clear measurements. By relying on standardized tests (termed value-added assessment) and by disseminating the material in advance of the test taking, school systems hoped to give teachers a clear curriculum to present. Funding for school systems, promotion decisions, and salary ranges all suddenly became data driven and tied to student test scores. But these decisions, while well-intentioned, were not grounded in reliable data (Strauss, 2015).

Focus on Teachers in Their First Five Years. By relying on seasoned educators to stay current in their field and to engage a wide network of colleagues, administrators can focus on those new to the field. Providing critical support staff can minimize the alarming number of new teachers who do not stay either at a particular school or in the field generally. Under this system, the school would assign new teachers to a mentor or to a cluster of mentors. Mentor teachers would work closely with the new teacher, assisting them in learning the network of operations as well as the range of programs and technology offered for students, what James H. Stronge terms evaluation by osmosis (2012).

Ideally, mentors and their teachers would have meaningful, specific, and regular conversations about the classroom. The discussions would offer support, specific help, and review to make the teacher feel more comfortable in the school system and more confident in their classroom presentation. Mentoring programs have been developed for one year up to three years of managed support and directed evaluation that center on regular conferences, often informal, among teachers whose guiding mission is not to "fix" any individual teacher but rather to better the entire school system by optimizing teacher performance. Mentors, in this system, learn as much from new teachers as new teachers learn from mentors.

Viewpoints

Any strategy for improving teacher evaluations, short term or long term, requires additional time and energy and money. Further, any investment in broadening teacher evaluation can increase counterproductive feelings of competition among faculty if pay increases, promotions, and network perks are tied to evaluation data that is not entirely reliable nor widely read exactly the same way. In addition, fixing teacher evaluations can only be effective if such investments are accompanied by willingness to look at a variety of factors that can impact classroom efficiency and productivity, ranging from textbook selection to class size.

Perhaps the most complicated issue involving teacher evaluations is what exactly to do with the data itself. For example, educators argued against using standardized test scores as a measure of teacher performance. Test taking itself is not always a viable measure of a student's ability to think analytically or critically. Taking the test can become a traumatic event in and of itself, that anxiety impacting score reliability. Studies revealed that factors ranging from the weather on the day of testing to the temperature in the testing facility could impact student scores. No data linked teacher competency and/or teacher performance and professionalism to students' performance on standardized tests. Expectations, often unrealistic, pressured teachers in school systems that could not or would not provide adequate resources or in-class support. Rogue teachers sought ways to influence student performances by encouraging strategies of cheating. Teacher unions cautioned against using standardized test scores to evaluate individual teachers and argued rather that entire school systems should be evaluated using scores.

As far back as 1987, education theorists disputed the value of tying teacher pay to the evaluation process (Murnane & Cohen). A study based on the New York City bonus program between 2007 and 2009 could find no correlation between merit bonuses and student achievement, calling education a "complex good" that does not lend itself to other models of evaluation (Goodman & Turner, 2010). Student learning accumulates over years and attributing achievement over a single school year to the current instructor raises fairness issues. Goodman and Turner found that while bonuses in some cases decreased absenteeism and increased effort, the improved performance of the teacher did not translate into higher standardized test scores for the students.

Educators at the primary and secondary level—indeed even instructors and professors at the college level—are paid within a largely single salary range. Unlike larger corporations or global networks wherein pay scales can widely range level to level as employees are promoted for effective work, the differences between salary steps in education are relatively slim. Given the widespread policies, backed by powerful teacher unions, of using seniority and credentials over evaluation data and the entrenched reluctance of many career teachers to engage in more data-driven models of evaluation, implementing merit-based teacher evaluations is not likely to be a national phenomenon. Efforts will more likely be concentrated where voters support data-driven, merit-based teacher evaluation reform.

It is, of course, difficult to fix a system while it is operation. Fixing teacher evaluations, according to a frustrated principal in Tennessee, is akin to "building an airplane while it flies across the sky" (Anderson, 2012). Can a teacher whose students are performing well at grade level because of the successes of past teachers be fairly evaluated against teachers whose students are performing below grade level because of the failure of previous teachers to provide a strong foundation? Can a teacher be held accountable for factors that are out of his or her control, such as poor student health and nutrition, lack of parent support, or peer pressure? A growth model evaluation contextualizes an individual teacher's performance by tracking and taking into account the performance of students from grade to grade, but such a model requires time and considerable resources to implement.

What educators, administrators, parents, politicians, and even the students agree on is that fixing teacher evaluation systems requires three critical elements. First, evolving an effective teaching corps versed in technology and certified to teach takes time. It cannot be done in a single election cycle. Second, funding is crucial. Schools need to create resource banks, software programs, and improved salary ranges to encourage teacher improvement. Finally, community support is foundational to professional development. An environment where teachers work in isolation, without administrative or parent support, and in fear of termination is not conducive to performance improvement. In many communities, however, education itself has become a polarizing political issue pitting liberals against conservatives, rich against poor, cities against suburbs, urban against rural, and the white establishment against a host of minority populations with specialized education needs.

Terms & Concepts

Common Core: An education reform protocol dating to the 1990s jointly sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State Education Officers that details specific competencies students should master at each grade level from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Growth model evaluation: A template for teacher evaluation that looks at the progress of a student's education across a number of academic years.

No Child Left Behind: An education reform protocol initiated by the George W. Bush administration and enacted by congress that established standards-based education as a model, particularly for disadvantaged students in underfunded public school systems. NCLB tied government funding to state initiatives to set standards and hold school systems accountable, through standardized tests, to meet those standards.

Merit pay: Also known as performance pay. A salary reward system in which teacher pay is increased according to students' performance on standardize tests.

Race to the Top: A multi-billion dollar education reform protocol initiated by the Barack Obama administration (2009) that rewards school systems using a point system for creative and innovative classroom strategies as a way to enhance student performance on standardized tests and in completing competencies.

Value-added assessment: The controversial practice of using hard data from student scores on standardized tests as an element of teacher evaluation.

Bibliography

Anderson, J. (2012, February 19). States trying to fix quirks in teacher evaluations. Retrieved December 25, 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/education/states-address-problems-with-teacher-evaluations.html

Edwards, H. S. (2014, October 30). The war on tenure. Retrieved December 25, 2015 from http://time.com/3533556/the-war-on-teacher-tenure/

Goodman, S., & Turner, L. (2010). Teacher incentive pay and educational outcomes: Evidence from the NYC bonus program. Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series. Harvard Kennedy School. Retrieved December 25, 2015 from http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/MeritPayPapers/goodman%5Fturner%5F10-07.pdf

Murnane, R. J., & Cohen, D. K. (1986). Merit pay and the evaluation problem: Why most merit pay plans fail and a few survive. Harvard Educational Review 56(1): 1–18. Retrieved March 22, 2015 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=19800293&site=ehost-live

Polikoff, M. S. (2015). The stability of observational and student survey measures of teaching effectiveness. American Journal of Education, 121(2), 183–212. Retrieved December 27, 2016, from EBSCO online database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=100461426&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Strauss, V. (2015, January 1). Teacher evaluations: Going from bad to worse? Washington Post. Retrieved January 5, 2015 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/01/01/teacher-evaluation-going-from-bad-to-worse

Stronge, J. H. (2012). What's wrong with teacher evaluations and how to fix it: Observation equals evaluation. The Whole Child. Retrieved December 25, 2014 from www.wholechild.org.

Toch, T. (2008). Fixing teacher evaluations. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Retrieved December 25, 2014 from www.ascd.org.

Teacher Evaluations. (2013). The Institute for Public Policy & Economic Development. Retrieved December 25, 2014 from www.institutepa.org

Teacher Evaluations 2.0. (2010) New Teachers Project. Retrieved December 25, 2014 from www.tntp.org

Suggested Reading

Behrstock-Sheratt, E., et al. (2013). Everyone at the table: Engaging teachers in evaluation reform. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2013). Getting teacher evaluations right: What really matters for effectiveness and improvement. New York: Teachers College Press.

Good, T. G., & Lavigne, A. (2015). Issues of teacher performance stability are not new: Limitations and possibilities. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23(1/2), 1–16. doi:10.14507/epaa.v23.1916. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=100306079&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Marzano, R. & Toth, M. (2013). Teacher evaluation that makes a difference: A new model for teacher growth and student achievement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.