John Thompson: Gates Foundation's MET Project Has Leaped Before Looking
The Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET) is the Gates Foundation's flagship effort to fill what they believe is a huge void in the teaching profession. According to them, up until this project, there was no way to know how effective any given teacher is. Their goal has been to develop scientifically accurate means to accomplish this.
I would have no problem with the Gates Foundation's Measuring Effective Teaching process if it was conducted as pure research. The MET's Tom Kane, in "Capturing the Dimensions of Effective Teaching," illustrates the good that could have come from the experiment had "reformers" considered evidence before imposing their theories on teachers across the nation.
The MET is a $45 million component of the "teacher quality" movement which studies test scores, teacher observations, and student survey data to isolate the elements of effective teaching. That's great. But the MET's