Cutting it at the Front of the Classroom

The American Federation of Teachers has released a statement on a report we published yesterday. The report's called “Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education.” As the title suggests, it looks at the ways school systems figure out who’s cutting it at the front of the classroom and who isn’t. It’s a pretty important issue, given that the nation spends $400 billion a year on public school salaries and benefits.

The AFT’s statement declares that the report “acknowledges” what the union has “long known,” that “current testing systems are not accurate or strong enough to become the basis of a good teacher evaluation program.” The union went on to say that the report is “thoughtful and balanced.”

I appreciate people saying nice things about my work. I deserve far more compliments than I get. But I suspect that the kind words from my friends at the AFT might have something to do with the fact the union’s largest local, the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, is waging war against a recent proposal by New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein to rate teachers in the nation’s largest school system on the basis of their students’ test scores.

It’s a radical idea in public education, where teachers’ credentials have always mattered more than their performance. For the record, it’s an idea that I support. Teaching is, after all, primarily about student achievement.

But I argue in “Rush to Judgment,” which I wrote with Bob Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, that test scores should play a supporting rather than a leading role in teacher evaluations.

That’s because only about half of public school teachers teach subjects or at grade levels where students are tested, eliminating the prospect of a system that’s applied fairly to all teachers. A second problem is that most standardized tests in use today measure a narrow band of mostly low-level skills and thus disadvantage excellent teachers able to move their students beyond the basics.

Kevin Carey, Education Sector’s policy manager, noted in a post here several days ago the progress that has been made in figuring out how to distinguish individual teachers’ impact on their students’ reading and math scores from the myriad of other influences on student achievement. It’s not defensible to use test scores in teacher evaluations without separating signal from noise in this way. And to their credit, Joel Klein and his deputy, Chris Cerf, the architect of the New York testing plan, are taking steps to do the right thing on this point. But there aren’t a lot of school systems in the country with the technical know-how to do what New York is doing.

As a result, test scores are best suited to play a secondary role in teacher evaluations and school systems should use schoolwide scores in their evaluation calculations, rather than individual teachers’ scores.

A key to stronger teacher evaluations, in both New York and nationwide, is taking a lot more seriously the scrutiny of teachers’ work in their classrooms. The typical teacher evaluation in public education today consists of a quick classroom visit by an untrained principal wielding a checklist that often doesn’t even focus directly on the quality of a teacher’s instruction.

As we argue in our report, evaluations should be based on clear, comprehensive standards of strong teaching practice that have emerged in recent years. And they should be based on multiple observations by multiple evaluators, with a substantial role going to teams of trained school system evaluators free of the inclinations to favoritism and conflicts of interest that plague principal-led evaluations—and that led to the rise of credential- and seniority-based pay scales in public education 80 years ago.

Credible, comprehensive classrooms evaluations supplemented with student test scores used responsibly is a strategy that the AFT should be able to buy into, at least if it likes our report.