Lessons on Teacher Evaluation From Charter Schools
The Center on American Progress released three papers yesterday on different aspects of teacher effectiveness. I'll be writing a bit about them over the course of this week (We Read So You Don't Have To!), but they're all worth checking out.
First up is a fascinating look at charter school evaluation policies, written by Heather Peske, formerly of the Education Trust and now at Teach Plus, a group that works to connect teachers to education policymaking, and Morgaen Donaldson, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education.
Charter schools typically have fewer rules and constraints and stronger "corporate cultures," so they should have more opportunities to innovate on evaluation policies, the theory goes.
So, in interviews with teachers, principals, and CMO staff, the authors took a look at three charter-management organizations, deemed "Northern," "National," and "Western." All three use a set of performance-based standards, and a series of structured observations coupled with detailed feedback, as the basis of teacher evaluations. None of the CMOs uses a "value added" methodology just yet for formal teacher reviews. And only one, the "Western" CMO, had unionized teachers.
Among the researchers' findings:
• The schools rely much more heavily on evaluations as a formative tool for improvement, through observation, coaching, and discussion of practices, rather than assigning a summative year-end rating. (I wrote about this tension in a few earlier items, here and here.)
• In the North and National CMOs, evaluation is directly tied to individual and collective professional development.
• The evaluations generally contributed to a much more collaborative enterprise that encouraged self-reflection, continuous improvement, and more transparent teaching practices.
• In schools in the nonunionized CMOs, unlike in most public schools, observations were not "formal" or "informal," "scheduled" or "unscheduled."
• In the North and National CMOs, evaluation is directly tied to individual and collective professional development.
• The evaluations generally contributed to a much more collaborative enterprise that encouraged self-reflection, continuous improvement, and more transparent teaching practices.
• In schools in the nonunionized CMOs, unlike in most public schools, observations were not "formal" or "informal," "scheduled" or "unscheduled."
