Passing Muster Fails Muster? (An Evaluation of Evaluating Evaluation Systems)
The Brookings Institution has now released their web based version of Passing Muster including a nifty calculation tool for rating teacher evaluation systems. Unfortunately, in my view, this rating system fails muster in at least two major ways.
First, the authors explain their (lack of) preferences for specific types of evaluation systems as follows:
“Our proposal for a system to identify highly-effective teachers is agnostic about the relative weight of test-based measures vs. other components in a teacher evaluation system. It requires only that the system include a spread of verifiable and comparable teacher evaluations, be sufficiently reliable and valid to identify persistently superior teachers, and incorporate student achievement on standardized assessments as at least some portion of the evaluation system for teachers in those grades and subjects in which all students are tested.”
That is, a district’s evaluation system can consider student test scores to whatever extent they want, in balance with other approaches to teacher evaluation. The logic here is a bit contorted from the start. The authors explain