National Journal Online -- Education Experts -- Houston's Teacher Evaluation Policy

National Journal Online -- Education Experts -- Houston's Teacher Evaluation Policy

Despite fierce opposition from the local teachers union, the Houston Independent School District approved a policy last week to use value-added test scores, a statistical method used to measure teachers' and schools' impact on students' academic progress rates from year to year, as one of the criteria for teacher evaluation and teacher dismissal (some details about the policy are available here and here). This means that roughly 400 of the district's 13,000 teachers may be eligible for dismissal as a result of their students' poor performance on tests.

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RESPONDED ON FEBRUARY 16, 2010 9:44 AM

Students Need Evaluation Too

Diane Ravitch

Research Professor Of Education, New York University

If Houston has some really awful, ineffective teachers, they should be removed.
It is not clear that their intention to use value-added scores will necessarily be the right way to do it. As Randi Weingarten said, value-added scores should measure students at the beginning of the school year and the end of the school year to see how much progress they made in the classroom of a specific teacher of a specific subject. If Houston is comparing cohort to cohort, then they don't have accurate information because students are not randomly assigned, and cohorts are not necessarily comparable. The information will also be flawed unless it takes into account progress over three years. There is a solid body of research showing that value-added scores are not stable from year to year. A teacher who is the "best" one year may not be in the top category a year or two later; conversely, a teacher who got very low value-added scores one year may get very good results the next year or the one after. It would be interesting to see if there is a district anywhere in the U.S. that has used value-added scores to evaluate teachers and actually improved student performance. Tennessee has been doing it for some 20 years, and I can't see any big improvement in the state's performance on NAEP. Now, would Terry Grier, the superintendent in Houston, please come up with a plan to hold students accountable for doing their homework, showing up in class everyday, and taking their studies seriously? And while he is at it, how about an accountability plan for parents? Give them grades based on whether their children go to school ready to learn. Did they get breakfast? Do they have a quiet place to study? Are their TV and computer habits monitored? If we are serious about student performance, we must evaluate the teacher, but also the student and his or her family. Teachers are important but they are not the sole source of student performance.

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RESPONDED ON FEBRUARY 16, 2010 9:31 AM

Groping Our Way to the Future

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Honestly, the big point isn't the relative strengths and weaknesses or technical features of Houston's particularly approach. It's that Houston is now one of the pioneer cities that is helping to blaze a trail into the education future. It seems to me self-evident that twenty years from now we will take for granted in the United States that one key element in teacher evaluations (and sundry HR decisions affecting teachers) will be classroom effectiveness and that one key metric for gauging that effectiveness is going to be student academic achievement. This would be happening with or without Race to the Top but obviously the RTT competition is lending additional oomph. Sure, there will be a hundred different ways of doing this, sundry false starts and myriad technical issues to be worked through. But Randi Weingarten has already "recognized" in her way that this is part of the future of American public education and it's only a matter of time til it becomes ubiquitous. Hurrah for Houston--and its excellent new superintendent and board--for helping to blaze this trail.

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