New Report on Teacher Effectiveness

Posted by on June 15, 2009

An indictment of teacher evaluation

In public school districts nationwide, parents are asked to trust that their children are receiving a quality education, even though no one can tell them whether they have a quality teacher, according to a study from the New Teacher Project. “Were you to examine the district’s teacher evaluation records yourself,” state the authors, “you would find that, on paper, almost every teacher is a great teacher, even at schools where the chance of a student succeeding academically amounts to a coin toss, at best.” This failure to distinguish between good, fair, and poor teachers is, in the words of the report, “The Widget Effect” — a tendency of districts to assume effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher, with teachers seen less as individual professionals than as interchangeable parts. “In its denial of individual strengths and weaknesses, it is deeply disrespectful to teachers,” the study says. “In its indifference to instructional effectiveness, it gambles with the lives of students.” To reverse the phenomenon, the report, which drew on research from 12 districts in four states, recommends adopting more comprehensive and credible evaluation systems and gathering better information about instructional quality, which can be used to inform other important decisions over who teaches in our schools.

Read more: http://widgeteffect.org/downloads/TheWidgetEffect.pdf