In what could prove a turning point in favor of education reform, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten came out in favor of considering student performance on standardized tests as one part of teacher evaluations. If Weingarten turns her words into real actions, and if the teachers’ unions follow Weingarten’s lead, it will improve teacher quality across the country.
Support for using student test scores to evaluate teachers is a departure for Weingarten. Two years ago, when New York City planned to start using test scores as part of its teacher evaluations, it was Weingarten, then head of the city’s teachers’ union, who pushed state lawmakers to ban the city from doing so. The legislature caved. New York’s education reformers are working to eliminate the ban.
Improving teacher evaluations is vital, because they are the foundation underlying many promising education reforms. We cannot hope to make informed decisions about which teachers deserve tenure, higher salaries, and greater responsibility without a reliable system for differentiating between effective and ineffective teachers. Unfortunately, current public-school evaluation systems don’t nearly meet that burden of reliability.
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The nonprofit New Teacher Project recently analyzed teacher evaluations in twelve large school districts across four states. They found that in districts using a binary evaluation system — the only ratings being “satisfactory” and “not satisfactory” — over 99 percent of teachers received the thumbs-up rating. Even districts that used broader evaluation distinctions ranked 94 percent of teachers in one of the top two tiers and deemed just 1 percent “unsatisfactory.”
The consistently homogeneous results of teacher evaluations across the country not only run counter to a wide body of research showing large variations in teacher effectiveness; they also strain plausibility.
It’s particularly difficult to believe that so many teachers in struggling urban school systems are living up to expectations. In 2007, only 57 percent of fourth-graders in New York City and 44 percent of fourth-graders in Chicago could claim to be basically literate, according to a highly respected test administered to representative samples of students each year by the U.S. Department of Education. That same year, less than 2 percent of New York City’s 56,000 classroom teachers and less than 1 percent of Chicago’s 19,000 were deemed “unsatisfactory” in their official evaluations. The vast majority of teachers were rated well above par.
All teachers are not created equal, and any evaluation system that suggests otherwise is worse than useless. The evaluation system is a lost opportunity to identify those teachers who are successful, those who need assistance, and those whom we should show the door. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had it right when he lamented to a group of education researchers that “in California, they have 300,000 teachers. If you took the top 10 percent, they have 30,000 of the best teachers in the world. If you took the bottom 10 percent, they have 30,000 teachers that should probably find another profession, yet no one in California can tell you which teacher is in which category. Something is wrong with that picture.”
What’s wrong with the picture is that teacher-evaluation systems rely on entirely subjective assessments with inflationary incentives. But if used properly, now-ubiquitous standardized testing of students in America’s public schools can provide an objective benchmark capable of improving — though not entirely replacing — the modern teacher-evaluation system.
Current teacher evaluations overemphasize classroom observation, which, while valuable, cannot tell us everything we need to know about a teacher’s effectiveness. Besides, current classroom observations are conducted too infrequently to be informative. More than half of the districts evaluated in a recent U.S. Department of Education study evaluated tenured teachers just once every three years. In Chicago, tenured teachers whose last rating was Excellent or Superior — a distinction awarded to 93 percent of evaluations in that district between 2003 and 2006 — are evaluated once every two years.
