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Jeff Bernstein

Fair To Everyone: Building the Balanced Teacher Evaluations that Educators and Students... - 1 views

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    In schools across America, teachers know who among their peers is doing the best work and who is not. Yet our evaluation systems tend to foster the notion that all teachers perform the same way, with the same results for students. Indeed, in an attempt at equality - uniform treatment for everyone - current evaluation systems often end up being fair to no one. Ideally, performance evaluations should serve to help teachers identify strengths and areas for development, as they work to improve their practice. Systems that work have the goal of lifting quality across the profession, aiding all teachers to become good and prompting good teachers to become great. This paper highlights key elements of evaluations that live up to these aspirations. Quality evaluation systems include regular classroom observations by trained evaluators with clear standards. They also include measurements that consider the contribution each teacher makes to student learning over a year's time, taking into account the achievement level and remediation needs students bring to the classroom. Ultimately, everyone stands to gain when teacher evaluation systems are designed to gauge teacher performance fairly, clearly, and comprehensively, with an eye to the kind of professional growth that fuels student learning. We hope this paper demystifies some of the newer approaches to evaluation for districts and states that might be considering them. Our aim is to illustrate why these new systems are better for teachers and students.
Jeff Bernstein

Setting The Record Straight On Teacher Evaluations: The Appeals Process | Edwize - 0 views

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    The recent agreement to clarify and refine the New York teacher evaluation law took up an issue that has a special importance for New York City public school educators- the appeals process for ineffective ratings on end-of-the-year summative evaluations. Readers of Edwize know that last December the ship of teacher evaluation negotiations for the 34 Transformation and Restart schools sunk on the rocky shoals of this very issue, when Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education refused to negotiate a meaningful and substantive appeals process. For there to be renewed progress on those negotiations, as well as on the negotiations for the evaluations of all New York City public school educators, the issue of the appeal process had to be resolved. The agreement settled the issue of the appeals process for New York City by guaranteeing vital and indispensable due process rights in the teacher evaluation process. With these rights, the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure. To understand the importance of the appeals process, and why the agreement secured what New York public school teachers need from due process in such a process, we must first examine the background and context of this issue.
Jeff Bernstein

Setting The Record Straight On Teacher Evaluations: Scoring and the Role of Standardize... - 0 views

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    The 2010 law that established a new framework for the evaluation of New York educators was a complex piece of legislation, and last week's agreement to clarify and refine that law with additional legislation added another layer to that complexity. The complexity is unavoidable. It is important to have evaluations based on multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, just as it is important to evaluate students based on multiple measures of their learning: more measures and more forms of evidence produce more robust, more accurate and fairer evaluations. Further, multiple measures allowed New York to avoid placing inordinate weight on standardized exams and value-added algorithms, as other states have done to very negative consequences. And it was essential that the bulk of the evaluations be established locally through collective bargaining, with the law only providing a general framework. These objectives necessarily led to a high level of complexity.
Jeff Bernstein

Aaron Pallas: A Sociological Eye on Education | Rigor mortis - 0 views

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    In the current discourse on teacher-evaluation systems, however, an evaluation system is deemed rigorous based either on how much of the evaluation rests on direct measures of student-learning outcomes, or the distribution of teachers into the various rating categories, or both. If an evaluation system relies heavily on NCLB-style state standardized tests in reading and mathematics-say, 40 percent of the overall evaluation or more-its proponents are likely to describe it as rigorous. Similarly, if an evaluation system has four performance categories-e.g., ineffective, developing, effective and highly effective-a system that classifies very few teachers as highly effective and many teachers as ineffective may be labeled rigorous. In these instances, the word rigor obscures the subjectivity involved in the final composite rating assigned to teachers.
Jeff Bernstein

Linda Darling-Hammond: Value-Added Evaluation Hurts Teaching - 0 views

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    As student learning is the primary goal of teaching, it seems like common sense to evaluate teachers based on how much their students gain on state standardized tests. Indeed, many states have adopted this idea in response to federal incentives tied to much-needed funding. However, previous experience is not promising. Recently evaluated experiments in Tennessee and New York did not improve achievement when teachers were evaluated and rewarded based on student test scores. In the District of Columbia, contrary to expectations, reading scores on national tests dropped and achievement gaps grew after a new test-based teacher-evaluation system was installed. In Portugal, a study of test-based merit pay attributed score declines to the negative effects of teacher competition, leading to less collaboration and sharing of knowledge. I was once bullish on the idea of using "value-added methods" for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. Why?
Jeff Bernstein

New state evaluation framework leaves much up to local districts | GothamSchools - 0 views

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    Teachers can expected unannounced observations to factor into their annual ratings under the terms of the evaluations agreement that Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced today. The unannounced observations are one of several ways that the State Education Department and state teachers union, NYSUT, agreed to flesh out the state's 2010 evaluation law, seen as so open-ended as to stymie implementation. The agreement, which Cuomo is set to turn into law through the state budget amendment process, resolves some major points of contention while continuing to leave many elements of districts' evaluation system subject to local collective bargaining. Districts and their unions have until the end of 2012 to turn the framework into a local evaluation system, or risk losing state aid.
Jeff Bernstein

Test Driving a Pilot Teacher Evaluation System - SchoolBook - 0 views

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    Ms. Moloney has been testing a new framework for evaluating teachers this year at the school, which is actually in Brighton Beach, after receiving training over the summer. It was designed by Charlotte Danielson who wrote a common-sense framework to help both teachers and administrators identify good teaching. It's similar to a tool kit, with 22 strategies every teacher should master. The city is trying out the Danielson framework at 107 schools to learn how much training principals need so they can become certified evaluators once the state's evaluation system goes into effect, said Kirsten Busch, executive director of the Office of Teacher Effectiveness. The city has until next January to negotiate an evaluation system with its teachers' union. At P.S. 100, Ms. Moloney and her teachers believe classroom observations are much more valid than a controversial rating system the city used that was based solely on student progress on state exams.
Jeff Bernstein

Leo Casey: Teacher Evaluation: Principals, Principles And Power | Edwize - 0 views

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    On the Schoolbook blog of the New York Times, Philip Weinberg takes issue with my two Edwize posts (Part 1 and Part 2) on New York's new teacher evaluation law. Weinberg is a principal of a New York City public high school and a supporter of the widely circulated Long Island principals' letter criticizing the New York teacher evaluation law, and he writes that my posts are a response to that letter. On this point, he is simply wrong: even a cursory reading of the posts makes it clear that I did not discuss the letter, but rather set out to provide a comprehensive explanation of the more important and complex features of the new teacher evaluation framework. But Weinberg's reading of the issues involving teacher evaluation is nonetheless worth addressing, as it brings much needed clarity to the underlying agenda of the principals' letter. And since the UFT's stance toward the Long Island principals' letter is a frequent matter of speculation, it provides an opportunity to explain where we stand.
Jeff Bernstein

Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching? : Education Next - 0 views

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    "The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional human resource-management tasks, namely, hiring, firing, and compensation. By contrast, very little is known about how the availability of new information, or the experience of being evaluated, might change teacher effort and effectiveness. In the research reported here, we study one approach to teacher evaluation: practice-based assessment that relies on multiple, highly structured classroom observations conducted by experienced peer teachers and administrators. While this approach contrasts starkly with status quo "principal walk-through" styles of class observation, its use is on the rise in new and proposed evaluation systems in which rigorous classroom observation is often combined with other measures, such as teacher value-added based on student test scores."
Jeff Bernstein

IMPACTed Wisdom Truth? | Gary Rubinstein's Blog - 0 views

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    Today, the day of the release of the New York City data, I received an email that I did not expect to come for at least a year.  In D.C. the evaluation process is called IMPACT.  About 500 teachers in D.C. belong to something called 'group one' which means that they teach something that can be measured with their value-added formula.  50% of their evaluation is based on their IVA (individual value-added), 35% is on their principal evaluation called their TLF (teaching and learning framework).  5% is on their SVA (school value added) and the remaining 10% on their CSC (commitment to school and community).  I wanted to test my theory that the value-added scores would not correlate with the principal evaluations so I had applied under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) to D.C. schools requesting the principal evaluation scores and the value-added scores for all group one teachers (without their names.)  I fully expected to wait about a year or two and then be denied.  To my surprise, it only took a few months and they did provide a 500 row spreadsheet.
Jeff Bernstein

Quality Control, When You Don't Know The Product - 1 views

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    Last week, New York State's Supreme Court issued an important ruling on the state's teacher evaluations. The aspect of the ruling that got the most attention was the proportion of evaluations - or "weight" - that could be assigned to measures based on state assessments (in the form of estimates from value-added models). Specifically, the Court ruled that these measures can only comprise 20 percent of a teacher's evaluation, compared with the option of up to 40 percent for which Governor Cuomo and others were pushing. Under the decision, the other 20 percent must consist entirely of alternative test-based measures (e.g., local assessments). Joe Williams, head of Democrats for Education Reform, one of the flagship organizations of the market-based reform movement, called the ruling "a slap in the face" and "a huge win for the teachers unions." He characterized the policy impact as follows: "A mediocre teacher evaluation just got even weaker." This statement illustrates perfectly the strange reasoning that seems to be driving our debate about evaluations.
Jeff Bernstein

Teacher evaluation: going from bad to worse? - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    "John King recently resigned as New York state's education commissioner after a tumultuous tenure in which he helped create and implement a controversial education evaluation system and rushed the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and aligned testing. (He is now going to work as a top assistant to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who apparently thought the controversy that King created was just fine.)  That evaluation system, known as APPR, required that 20 percent of an educator's evaluation be based on student standardized test scores. Now, New York Schools Chancellor Merryl Tisch wants to make new changes. What are they and why would they take a flawed evaluation system from bad to worse? This post explains."
Jeff Bernstein

Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Background Paper for Policy Makers - 0 views

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    There is a widespread consensus among practitioners, researchers, and policy makers that current teacher evaluation systems in most school districts do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making. For this reason, new approaches to teacher evaluation are being developed and tested.  There is also a growing consensus that evidence of teachers' contributions to student learning should be a component of teacher evaluation systems, along with evidence about the quality of teachers' practice. Value-added models (VAMs) for examining gains in student test scores from one year to the next are promoted as tools to accomplish this goal. Policy makers can benefit from research about what these models can and cannot do, as well as from research about the effects of other approaches to teacher evaluation. This background paper addresses both of these important concerns. 
Jeff Bernstein

The State of Teacher Evaluation: Part 2 - Education Week - 0 views

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    Yesterday, I shared some interesting facts from the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) October 2011 report, "State of the States: Trends and Early Lessons on Teacher Evaluation and Effectiveness Policies" about the evolution of state educator evaluation systems over the past few years. In particular, we learned that between 2009 and 2011, 33 states changed their teacher evaluation policies. This left me thinking about what has happened with evaluation policy in the other 17 states since NCTQ released their report. After considerable research, I found that there have been some dramatic changes. Here are a few updates
Jeff Bernstein

Linda Darling-Hammond and Edward Haertel: 'Value-added' teacher evaluations not reliabl... - 0 views

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    "It's becoming a familiar story: Great teachers get low scores from "value-added" teacher evaluation models. Newspapers across the country have published accounts of extraordinary teachers whose evaluations, based on their students' state test scores, seem completely out of sync with the reality of their practice. Los Angeles teachers have figured prominently in these reports. Researchers are not surprised by these stories, because dozens of studies have documented the serious flaws in these ratings, which are increasingly used to evaluate teachers' effectiveness. The ratings are based on value-added models such as the L.A. school district's Academic Growth over Time system, which uses complex statistical metrics to try to sort out the effects of student characteristics (such as socioeconomic status) from the effects of teachers on test scores. A study we conducted at Stanford University showed what these teachers are experiencing."
Jeff Bernstein

Shanker Blog » The Weighting Game - 0 views

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    A while back, I noted that states and districts should exercise caution in assigning weights (importance) to the components of their teacher evaluation systems before they know what the other components will be. For example, most states that have mandated new evaluation systems have specified that growth model estimates count for a certain proportion (usually 40-50 percent) of teachers' final scores (at least those in tested grades/subjects), but it's critical to note that the actual importance of these components will depend in no small part on what else is included in the total evaluation, and how it's incorporated into the system. In slightly technical terms, this distinction is between nominal weights (the percentage assigned) and effective weights (the percentage that actually ends up being the case). Consider an extreme hypothetical example - let's say a district implements an evaluation system in which half the final score is value-added and half is observations. But let's also say that every teacher gets the same observation score. In this case, even though the assigned (nominal) weight for value-added is 50 percent, the actual importance (effective weight) will be 100 percent, since every teacher receives the same observation score, and so all the variation between teachers' final scores will be determined by the value-added component.
Jeff Bernstein

Researchers blast Chicago teacher evaluation reform - The Answer Sheet - The Washington... - 0 views

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    Scores of professors and researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area have signed an open letter to the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago school officials warning against implementing a teacher evaluation system that is based on standardized test scores. This is the latest protest against "value-added" teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much "value" a teacher adds to a student's academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a standardized test score. Researchers have repeatedly warned against using these methods, but school reformers have been doing it in state after state anyway. A petition in New York State by principals and others against a test-based evaluation system there has been gaining ground.
Jeff Bernstein

An Urban Teacher's Education: Teacher Evaluation: It Shouldn't Be That Important Right ... - 1 views

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    Teacher evaluation is at the top of the list of things to talk about in the education reform world. I've largely stayed away from writing about it on this blog because I think there are a lot of more fundamental changes that need to be made in public education before we spend time revamping teacher evaluation. It seems to me that a lot of new evaluation schemes are attempting to hold teachers accountable for factors they don't control and penalize them for shortcomings for which they are not responsible.
Jeff Bernstein

NYC Public School Parents: On teacher evaluation: the responsibility of the media to di... - 0 views

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    The mainstream media has contributed heavily to the rampant public confusion over the teacher evaluation debate in recent weeks.  Most recently, on Sunday the NY Times featured two superficial accounts of this issue.    The first, by Nick Kristof, told a familiar if touching story about an Arkansas school librarian named Mildred Grady, who bought  some books by a favored author and slipped them onto the shelves to appeal to one particular at-risk student who later became a judge--to prove the  notion that good teachers can change lives.  This story was apparently first told in a Story Corps 2009 piece on NPR radio. Kristof concludes that this example reveals how "we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers."    Not so fast.  The so-called "rigorous" system currently being promoted by the state and the mayor would base  teacher evaluation largely on unreliable test scores, combined with the opinion of a principal only, without any assurances that the sort of librarian described in this story would ever be recognized as "effective" and indeed could be "weeded-out" herself - as many librarians have already, due to recent budget cuts.
Jeff Bernstein

Shanker Blog » Trial And Error Is Fine, So Long As You Know The Difference - 0 views

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    It's fair to say that improved teacher evaluation is the cornerstone of most current education reform efforts. Although very few people have disagreed on the need to design and implement new evaluation systems, there has been a great deal of disagreement over how best to do so - specifically with regard to the incorporation of test-based measures of teacher productivity (i.e., value-added and other growth model estimates). The use of these measures has become a polarizing issue. Opponents tend to adamantly object to any degree of incorporation, while many proponents do not consider new evaluations meaningful unless they include test-based measures as a major element (say, at least 40-50 percent). Despite the air of certainty on both sides, this debate has mostly been proceeding based on speculation. The new evaluations are just getting up and running, and there is virtually no evidence as to their effects under actual high-stakes implementation.
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