Improvements, Challenges in Chicago's Teacher Evaluation System
Results from year one of a pilot teacher-evaluation system in Chicago show a much broader range of ratings under the new system than under the district's existing one, with at least 8 percent of pre-tenured teachers receiving at least one "unsatisfactory" rating, according to a new paper out from the Consortium on Chicago School Research. (The Web link isn't up yet. I will post it as soon as it is available.)
Although Chicago is not the only district putting a new teacher-evaluation system in place, it is certainly one of the few that's paying a lot of attention to implementation, studying it, and documenting the results. The system, based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, was rolled out in 44 schools in 2008-09 and expanded to 100 in 2009-10. The data here is from the first year of implementation and used "matched" observations to determine whether an administrator and external observer gave the same rating.
According to the data, over a third of teachers received all "proficient" or "distinguished" scores from their principals on the various strands of the observation framework, and about a third received a mix of "basic" and "proficient" scores.
Consistency among the parties performing the teacher observations was high in the aggregate, but less so on individual strands of the evaluations and in terms of outliers. For instance, at the high end of the ratings scale, principals were more likely than observers to give the highest rating of "distinguished" versus a rating of
Although Chicago is not the only district putting a new teacher-evaluation system in place, it is certainly one of the few that's paying a lot of attention to implementation, studying it, and documenting the results. The system, based on Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, was rolled out in 44 schools in 2008-09 and expanded to 100 in 2009-10. The data here is from the first year of implementation and used "matched" observations to determine whether an administrator and external observer gave the same rating.
According to the data, over a third of teachers received all "proficient" or "distinguished" scores from their principals on the various strands of the observation framework, and about a third received a mix of "basic" and "proficient" scores.
Consistency among the parties performing the teacher observations was high in the aggregate, but less so on individual strands of the evaluations and in terms of outliers. For instance, at the high end of the ratings scale, principals were more likely than observers to give the highest rating of "distinguished" versus a rating of