When I reflect on that period, my mind goes back to a rarely referenced finding from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) research project to explain why the promise of teacher evaluations was never realized. When MET lined up the ~3,000 teachers who volunteered for the research based on 'effectiveness' as determined using multiple measure (observations, assessments of teacher content knowledge, value-added assessment results, and student feedback), it produced a curve where the bottom 5-10% were demonstrably worse than the average teacher and the top 5-10% were demonstrably better than the average teacher. In fact, the differences at the ends of the curve (between the 0 to ~10th percentile teachers and the ~90 to 100th percentile teachers) was twice the difference of the vast 'flat' middle of the curve (from ~10th to ~90th percentile teachers). Furthermore, from one year to the next, the bottom 5-10% generally stayed at the bottom while the top 5-10% generally stayed at the top. However, there was quite a bit of movement both up and down in the middle of the curve from one year to the next. So, when 80-90% of teachers are 'average', this is not a 'teacher' problem, but rather it is a 'systems' problem. Unfortunately, whether intended or not or perception v. reality, the teacher evaluation movement put the full weight of accountability on ALL teachers rather than just the 5-10% of teachers who were consistently lower performing and needed to improve quickly or find another profession.
I have a genuine question: have you, or the majority of your readers ever been a classroom teacher? It seems like not. Everyone has an opinion about teachers but no one asks us or gives us a platform to speak.
From my perspective as a teacher: you were, and likely are, part of an offensive by the employer class against teacher unions and public education at large. Your description of the ed reform movement, for example seems hilariously out of touch. Maybe civil rights groups and middle class reformsters were the pawns, but that is all. The real movers are the billionaires and their political puppets.
And then folks have the nerve to wonder why teachers unionize. Otherwise we would be at the mercy of ed reformsters who not only do not understand a worker perspective, but who actively dismiss and are hostile to it!
Appreciate the candor and the courage to engage in this reflection publicly Tim. I do believe the underlying models of how teachers grow as professionals weren't really in place, so in some sense we were putting the cart before the horse as a field. In the future, we should assess how much change we're layering on at once. To do eval AND Common Core AND turn around low performing schools was too much. Why didn't we see this at the time???
Interesting article. One of the problems in education is the search for the one right solution , leading schools to adopt then dump literacy and math programs, evaluation systems, and be overly dependent on unreliable data. Teachers go to the professional development to learn yet another curriculum, set of standards, etc., but those who do the evaluations (principals) do not. The quality of the evaluation is very weak, and I hope to hear more about that. In this day and age, principals have spent minimal time as a classroom teacher and don't know what to look for and they don't know the students well enough to distinguish between a thoughtful decision by the teacher and an inattentive student.
The use of data to evaluate teachers: I'm from Mass., a state with an excellent public schools. We have the a state test that is given in May. Here's the problem: the results for an individual class or grade are reported laterally, rather than longitudinally. The teacher is evaluated on the results of two entirely separate groups of students. This is done statewide - comparing the results of two completely different cohorts of students. No one has any idea as to whether an individual student or cohort of students has improved or not. To make matters worse, the state will not allow the teachers to see the tests, so the results come back in September to a new teacher, and all s/he/they see is the student missed item #19 - the correct answer was C and the student chose B - but the teacher doesn't know the question was or the possible answers. Please explain to me how this is helpful to anyone.
I've said it before, but principals need to receive professional development on how to evaluate teachers. And like it or not, the personal vendetta thing has more reality to it than people realize. Every teacher knows to stay in the principal's good graces during an evaluation period. In 45 years, I received excellent evaluations 43 times. The other two were after a period of discord. The evaluations were mediocre and I refused to sign them and both times the evaluations were rewritten to reflect my strengths and weaknesses more accurately.
I don't know if you will address this in future versions of this series, Tim, but one problem from my seat (head of HR in a public school district) is that in order to do successful performance management, you have to have good people leaders. In a relatively short amount of time, the job of Principal went from operations manager/discipline lead to "instructional leader" to evaluator of instructional practice (mind you, while still having to manage discipline and operations). I don't recall much focus on what it takes to build relationships grounded in trust in order to effectively have the tough feedback conversations. I do recall a lot of training on "critical conversations," but not the foundational work it takes for those conversations to be heard and acted on by the receiver. It's more than that, but it's a critical piece that I don't think gets talked about enough.
Thanks for the honest 'mea culpa'... when philanthropic $ is the driving force behind "reform", too many people in the ed reform 'space' drink their own Kool-Aid and ignore any dissenting voices, however experienced and helpful they might have been...for the record, some of us formerly in the trenches tried in vain to inject constructive criticism and tamp down the unrealistic expectations of the donor class to no avail; no one wanted to hear the harsh truth that schools weren't exactly being overrun with wild-eyed professionals willing to work long hours for low pay and even less respect...instead, the oft-repeated fairy tale was that 20-something 'idealists' just out of college would save the profession / stay in it for life / and become expert teachers! As a bonus, good or great teachers stood to gain THOU$ANDS in extra pay for putting in the extra effort, mentoring the newbies, and doing a stellar job! As a result, students couldn't help but succeed in school / ace their standardized tests / and love learning! Regardless of student learning / achievement most teachers were ALWAYS going to be renewed because of the dearth of qualified individuals going into the profession in the first place...schools simply can't afford to lose bodies to teach kids in the classroom, whether they are 'good' teachers or not.... and it's only gotten worse with phones and social media....plus, I suspect you can now make more driving for Uber or Lyft or stacking shelves for Amazon with a HS diploma than you do as a starting teacher in most states across the country...it's not rocket science no matter how much ed policy research you invest in the topic....
Signed, a DFER staffer at the time of R2Top; former HS Civics teacher; former CO State Senator; former Vice-Chairman of the Senate Education Committee; and lifelong Ed Reformer.
When I reflect on that period, my mind goes back to a rarely referenced finding from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) research project to explain why the promise of teacher evaluations was never realized. When MET lined up the ~3,000 teachers who volunteered for the research based on 'effectiveness' as determined using multiple measure (observations, assessments of teacher content knowledge, value-added assessment results, and student feedback), it produced a curve where the bottom 5-10% were demonstrably worse than the average teacher and the top 5-10% were demonstrably better than the average teacher. In fact, the differences at the ends of the curve (between the 0 to ~10th percentile teachers and the ~90 to 100th percentile teachers) was twice the difference of the vast 'flat' middle of the curve (from ~10th to ~90th percentile teachers). Furthermore, from one year to the next, the bottom 5-10% generally stayed at the bottom while the top 5-10% generally stayed at the top. However, there was quite a bit of movement both up and down in the middle of the curve from one year to the next. So, when 80-90% of teachers are 'average', this is not a 'teacher' problem, but rather it is a 'systems' problem. Unfortunately, whether intended or not or perception v. reality, the teacher evaluation movement put the full weight of accountability on ALL teachers rather than just the 5-10% of teachers who were consistently lower performing and needed to improve quickly or find another profession.
I have a genuine question: have you, or the majority of your readers ever been a classroom teacher? It seems like not. Everyone has an opinion about teachers but no one asks us or gives us a platform to speak.
From my perspective as a teacher: you were, and likely are, part of an offensive by the employer class against teacher unions and public education at large. Your description of the ed reform movement, for example seems hilariously out of touch. Maybe civil rights groups and middle class reformsters were the pawns, but that is all. The real movers are the billionaires and their political puppets.
And then folks have the nerve to wonder why teachers unionize. Otherwise we would be at the mercy of ed reformsters who not only do not understand a worker perspective, but who actively dismiss and are hostile to it!
see my comments above yours...I am a former HS social studies teacher...but I believe in 'ed reform' that is realistic and achievable...
Appreciate the candor and the courage to engage in this reflection publicly Tim. I do believe the underlying models of how teachers grow as professionals weren't really in place, so in some sense we were putting the cart before the horse as a field. In the future, we should assess how much change we're layering on at once. To do eval AND Common Core AND turn around low performing schools was too much. Why didn't we see this at the time???
Interesting article. One of the problems in education is the search for the one right solution , leading schools to adopt then dump literacy and math programs, evaluation systems, and be overly dependent on unreliable data. Teachers go to the professional development to learn yet another curriculum, set of standards, etc., but those who do the evaluations (principals) do not. The quality of the evaluation is very weak, and I hope to hear more about that. In this day and age, principals have spent minimal time as a classroom teacher and don't know what to look for and they don't know the students well enough to distinguish between a thoughtful decision by the teacher and an inattentive student.
The use of data to evaluate teachers: I'm from Mass., a state with an excellent public schools. We have the a state test that is given in May. Here's the problem: the results for an individual class or grade are reported laterally, rather than longitudinally. The teacher is evaluated on the results of two entirely separate groups of students. This is done statewide - comparing the results of two completely different cohorts of students. No one has any idea as to whether an individual student or cohort of students has improved or not. To make matters worse, the state will not allow the teachers to see the tests, so the results come back in September to a new teacher, and all s/he/they see is the student missed item #19 - the correct answer was C and the student chose B - but the teacher doesn't know the question was or the possible answers. Please explain to me how this is helpful to anyone.
I've said it before, but principals need to receive professional development on how to evaluate teachers. And like it or not, the personal vendetta thing has more reality to it than people realize. Every teacher knows to stay in the principal's good graces during an evaluation period. In 45 years, I received excellent evaluations 43 times. The other two were after a period of discord. The evaluations were mediocre and I refused to sign them and both times the evaluations were rewritten to reflect my strengths and weaknesses more accurately.
I don't know if you will address this in future versions of this series, Tim, but one problem from my seat (head of HR in a public school district) is that in order to do successful performance management, you have to have good people leaders. In a relatively short amount of time, the job of Principal went from operations manager/discipline lead to "instructional leader" to evaluator of instructional practice (mind you, while still having to manage discipline and operations). I don't recall much focus on what it takes to build relationships grounded in trust in order to effectively have the tough feedback conversations. I do recall a lot of training on "critical conversations," but not the foundational work it takes for those conversations to be heard and acted on by the receiver. It's more than that, but it's a critical piece that I don't think gets talked about enough.
Thanks for the honest 'mea culpa'... when philanthropic $ is the driving force behind "reform", too many people in the ed reform 'space' drink their own Kool-Aid and ignore any dissenting voices, however experienced and helpful they might have been...for the record, some of us formerly in the trenches tried in vain to inject constructive criticism and tamp down the unrealistic expectations of the donor class to no avail; no one wanted to hear the harsh truth that schools weren't exactly being overrun with wild-eyed professionals willing to work long hours for low pay and even less respect...instead, the oft-repeated fairy tale was that 20-something 'idealists' just out of college would save the profession / stay in it for life / and become expert teachers! As a bonus, good or great teachers stood to gain THOU$ANDS in extra pay for putting in the extra effort, mentoring the newbies, and doing a stellar job! As a result, students couldn't help but succeed in school / ace their standardized tests / and love learning! Regardless of student learning / achievement most teachers were ALWAYS going to be renewed because of the dearth of qualified individuals going into the profession in the first place...schools simply can't afford to lose bodies to teach kids in the classroom, whether they are 'good' teachers or not.... and it's only gotten worse with phones and social media....plus, I suspect you can now make more driving for Uber or Lyft or stacking shelves for Amazon with a HS diploma than you do as a starting teacher in most states across the country...it's not rocket science no matter how much ed policy research you invest in the topic....
Signed, a DFER staffer at the time of R2Top; former HS Civics teacher; former CO State Senator; former Vice-Chairman of the Senate Education Committee; and lifelong Ed Reformer.