For the last four years, the Obama administration has provided funding and incentives for states to help build a teaching profession that is both respected and rigorous. Today, we're starting to see that investment pay off -- in expanded collaboration among teachers and improved performance among students. More teachers today are treated as true professionals, instead of as interchangeable cogs in an educational assembly line. Exhibit A: Tennessee.
Tennessee -- one of the first two states to win a federal Race to the Top grant -- recently released an important report on the first year of implementing its new teacher evaluation system. The report found that after one year, Tennessee's students made their biggest single-year jump in achievement ever recorded in the state. That is a remarkable accomplishment.
During the first two years of the Race to the Top grant, from 2010 to 2012, an additional 55,000 students in Tennessee were at or above grade level in math and 38,000 additional students were at or above grade level in science. But Tennessee's story also shows that reforming antiquated practices for evaluating teachers is hard, ongoing work -- work that is far from finished.
Few would dispute that the existing system for evaluating teacher performance is broken. Principals typically evaluate teachers' performance based on infrequent and informal observations and fail to take account of a teacher's impact on student learning. Great teachers are not recognized or rewarded. And struggling teachers neither get the feedback nor the professional assistance they need to improve.
Under the old Tennessee system, tenured teachers were evaluated just twice a decade. A teacher's impact on student growth did not factor at all into their performance evaluation. Not surprisingly, virtually all teachers received positive ratings.
Even so, many skeptics protested after Tennessee enacted a state law in 2010 that required 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation be based on student achievement data -- 35 percent on student growth, with the other 15 percent based on other measures of student achievement. The remaining 50 percent of the evaluation would be based on traditional qualitative measures, like observations of teachers by their principals.
The initial blowback to implementing the law was considerable. Critics argued that test score gains were too imperfect a measure to use in teacher evaluation.
Others said that for teachers in non-tested subjects like music or fine arts, it was unfair to base part of the evaluation on school-wide math and English test results. A New York Times reporter lampooned the new system, intoning, "in the end, it's all about distrust: not trusting principals to judge teachers, not trusting teachers to educate children."
But the Tennessee department of education didn't ignore the critics of the new evaluation systems -- in fact, it listened to them and sought their feedback.
Department officials met with 7,500 teachers around the state and surveyed 16,000 teachers and 1,000 administrators for input on the new evaluation system.
In Memphis, arts teachers were frustrated because they were being evaluated based in part on school-wide performance in math and English. So Dru Davison, a music teacher in Memphis, convened a group of arts educators to come up with a fairer system.
After surveying arts teachers in Memphis, Davison's committee developed a blind peer review evaluation to assess portfolios of student learning in the arts. It has proved so popular that Tennessee is looking at adopting the system statewide.
As a result of the feedback the state received -- and with the benefit of real evidence of teacher impact on growth in student learning from almost 20,000 teachers -- the department recommended a number of changes to the teacher evaluation system.
Their recently released report, for example, recommends that teachers who receive top scores should have a more streamlined evaluation the following year -- while teachers with low scores should receive additional observations and feedback from their principals.
What are some of the takeaway lessons from Tennessee's experience?
First, student growth can and should be one of a number of measures in evaluating the performance of teachers -- and it's important not to ignore a teacher's impact on student learning just because it is difficult to measure. Better evaluation systems improve classroom instruction. Delaware, the other state to win a first-round Race to the Top grant, has also seen big increases in student achievement.
Second, it's true that there is no perfect system of teacher evaluation, but Tennessee did not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. They insisted on asking the compared-to-what question -- how do the strengths and weaknesses of the new system compare to the old system?
And finally, because rigorous teacher evaluation systems are still a work in progress, it is vital that school leaders and administrators continue to solicit feedback, learn from their mistakes, and make improvements. One example: Tennessee's report found that principals are still largely unwilling to give weak teachers in need of assistance a poor performance review.
As Tennessee has shown, our children, our teachers, and our country will be better off when school leaders and educators finally undertake the challenging task of creating a meaningful and useful system for supporting and evaluating our nation's teachers.
--Arne Duncan is the U.S. Secretary of Education
Follow Sec. Arne Duncan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ArneDuncan
He once praised the superintendent of Atlanta's school, heralding her as Superintendent of the Year, but then turned out the district had scores by oppressing teachers, warping education into test drilling, and, to top it off, heading up a systematic cheating scandal that permeated the system.
No doubt, like Romney, Duncan's going to have to walk this back, too, as more comes out about what's going on.
To make a simple, yet fundamental point, it should be no surprise that scores go up if the emphasis is on raising those scores--but that is no evidence that the kids are any better educated--just better test takers.
Anyone who is falling for the Duncan-Gates-Obama approach to school reform should read Finnish Lessons or the widely available news stories and interviews dealing with its education. Fantastic results with 95% union members, no regular standardized testing AT ALL, creative and caring teaching, no merit pay etc. yet results that are among the best in the world!!
I worked for four different private businesses, two in New York City, one in California, one in Pennsylvania. (One was the largest advertising agency in the world.) None of them evaluated me or any other employee according to anything resembling the value-added handiwork promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U. S. Department of Education. Arne claims this scheme will increase teacher professionalism. Please tell me one profession that evaluates people this way.
Regardless, Arne should put his money where his mouth is. If he is so high on student testing as measures of speedy success he should work to have every charter school that is scoring worse or no better than its associated public schools closed immediately. By most measures that is at least three quarters of them. Get on that Arne! We haven't time to lose!
Of course, there'd be one major downfall. By the fourth or fifth paragraph, you'd be WRECKED.
Some interesting points that make one wonder how much impact this could have had:
Administrators rated 75% of Tennesee teachers as exceeding expectations and only 2.5% as below expectations. In other words, principals and administrators gave the usual rubber stamp evlaluations. Makes you wonder how much really changed other than more paper work for all involved.
16% of teachers were below expectations for the test score component of the evaluation. The vast majority of these were rated as meeting or exceeding expectations by their administrators. Hmm... Is there anything in this process that is consistent? We know the value added component will be wildly inconsistent from year to year. It will be interesting to see if administrator's ratings are consistent from year to year. Gotta believe they are going to get pressure to lower their evaluation ratings to be more in line with the test score component.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/bloombergs-new-schools-ha_n_1695536.html?utm_hp_ref=education
What is disappointing is that I'm not sure that Secretary Duncan understands that it is impossible to tell from what he presents whether or not the Tennessee story is a success. Many educational policymakers have little educational experience and have naiive ideas about what test scores do and don't tell us.
Many people do not understand the many ways in which test scores can improve without real improvements in learning occurring. There are many sobering tales of scores going up in districts only to turn out to be illusory--cramming or cheating or narrowing the curriculum means children aren't really more competent, but we've made them look like they are. Test scores are often very poor indicators of real world competence, and scores can rise or fall for a half dozen reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of teaching.
It seems reasonable that part of the evaluation is based on observations, but some teachers observations are based on what teaching behaviors lead to faster test scores increases, not better real learning. Thus, much more than 50% of this teacher evaluation may unofficially but really be tied to test scores.
The other reality is that such efforts usually create some collateral damage. Only time and much more data will tell us whether or not this was a success.
On a side note, it's very much not fair to those of us who actually teach in a testing grade. Now there's more pressure.
and Risley did a great study on vocabulary with children. By age 3, low income children have 600 fewer words than children of upper income families. By grade 2 that gap has increased to 4000 words. It starts from such a young age, these children hearing millions less words a year, and it makes such a huge difference later on. Two years ago I got asked what a board was, a piece of lumber... last year 'what's a screen and why is it slamming?'
It's simply not fair to ask a child to write a 5 paragraph essay on 'a snow day off from school' when they've never experienced snow. And this is what I'm going to be graded on? It's not fair to them and it's not fair to those of us who work in urban districts.