TEACHERING TO THE TEST:

The Amazing Randi: A brave union official endorses a commonsense reform to improve accountability (Marcus A. Winters, 1/18/10, National Review)

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. [...]

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.

A teacher’s job is far too complex to be evaluated with observations of a single class period or less, once every year or so. In the Miami-Dade school system, according to the collective-bargaining agreement, the required annual official evaluation need not last longer than 20 minutes.

Exacerbating the problem of inflated teacher evaluations is the fact that principals have neither the incentive nor, often, the power to correctly identify an ineffective teacher. For starters, the rarity with which teachers are identified as unsatisfactory itself tends to reduce principals’ willingness to use the designation, because it implies that the recipient is not only unsatisfactory but in fact egregiously incompetent — often a far stronger signal than the principal intends to send. The collective-bargaining agreements that govern many school systems give teachers powerful means to fight back if they do not agree with their evaluation, thus burying the principal in paperwork. And tenure ensures that the principal can’t remove an ineffective teacher, no matter how poor his or her rating. In sum, identifying an ineffective teacher brings a principal few benefits and many headaches.

So classroom observations need to be supplemented with other useful, objective information about a teacher’s classroom performance — both to give a more complete picture and to provide principals with empirical support for their decisions. Test scores are an obvious and accessible way to do that.

In the last decade, researchers have developed statistical tools capable of measuring teachers’ independent contribution to their students’ learning, as reflected by their scores on standardized tests. When carefully applied, these measures can separate the influence of the teacher on a student’s test scores from the influences of other factors, such as the student’s background characteristics and even the quality of his home life.