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Columbus
Dispatch...
Op Ed: Evaluation of
teachers must improve
By Terry Ryan
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Effective teachers are the most valuable education asset that Ohio (or
any state) has. Statistics don’t lie when it comes to their impact on
children’s learning. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, who recently
testified before a joint hearing of the Ohio House and Senate education
committees, reports that “having a high-quality teacher throughout
elementary school can substantially offset or even eliminate the
disadvantage of low socio-economic background.” Similarly, a weak
teacher can blight a child’s prospects.
Given how powerfully teachers can alter students’ life trajectories, it
is not only prudent but imperative to push reforms that enable
education leaders to distinguish effective teachers from ineffective
ones. With a fair and rigorous system that measures gradations of
teacher effectiveness - not just binary ratings such as “satisfactory”
and “unsatisfactory” - school systems can reward their ablest
instructors and put them in the classrooms where they are most needed,
target support to teachers who need it and weed out those who are not a
good fit for the profession. For Ohio, where low-income and minority
children reach proficiency at far lower rates than their wealthier
peers, the stakes are enormous.
But the evaluation system isn’t working nearly as well as it needs to.
As U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has noted: “Everyone agrees
that teacher evaluation is broken. Ninety-nine percent of teachers are
rated satisfactory and most evaluations ignore the most important
measure of a teacher’s success - which is how much their students have
learned.”
In Ohio, districts pay long-serving but mediocre teachers more than
they pay less senior high-fliers. They reward teachers for credentials
and advanced degrees, as well as years on the job, yet they offer the
same pay for teachers whether their pupils thrive or languish. Layoffs
are based on seniority. This may once have been acceptable, if only
because there were few valid alternatives. But many states and
districts have begun to craft evaluation systems that move the
profession forward. It’s Ohio’s turn to do the same.
Gov. John Kasich’s budget and the recently enacted Senate Bill 5 seek
to move the state toward evaluations that identify the impact of
individual instructors on student learning, in order to inform
decisions around retention, pay, hiring and dismissal. This is a huge
opportunity to raise the needle on student achievement. But Ohio has to
get the details right. Systems that measure and reward performance are
still at the pilot stage, and no jurisdiction has yet developed a
perfect system.
The good news is that Ohio is better positioned than most places to
build a modern and fair system for gauging teacher effectiveness
because it has a relatively sophisticated system of value-added
analysis of student achievement in reading and math in grades four
through eight, and has accumulated these data since 2007. Value-added
data - how much a child learns during a given school year - should be
an important component for measuring teacher effectiveness.
Second, some Ohio districts, with the cooperation of their teachers
unions, have been working to create better approaches to evaluating the
effectiveness of classroom instructors. One of the best is Cincinnati’s
Teacher Evaluation System. It helps identify which teachers are more
effective - and a recent study found that it has contributed to
teachers significantly improving their instruction. In other words, it
doesn’t just judge teachers; it makes them better at their craft.
Cincinnati’s efforts and others like it need to inform where Ohio goes
with it teacher-evaluation efforts.
Third, Ohio’s Race to the Top proposal for federal funding committed
the state and participating school districts to creating quality
teacher-evaluation systems that incorporate student performance. The
Ohio Department of Education has money, expertise and a mandate to
develop such systems.
Creating better teacher-evaluation systems in Ohio is not as daunting
as some would have us think. The key will be to encourage district and
teacher participation. Don’t wait for the state to do it - and don’t
expect to create a one-size-fits-all evaluation system to cover every
local circumstance. Instead, press districts to come up with systems
that incorporate common data elements from the state while also
incorporating measures such as expert and peer evaluations, building-
and district-level performance metrics, and even student evaluations.
Ohio is well-positioned to lead the nation in the development of
high-quality teacher-evaluation systems. It has many of the necessary
pieces already in place and it has the political momentum to get this
done. Now is the time to do it.
Terry Ryan is vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas
B. Fordham Institute.
Read it at the Columbus Dispatch
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