A Few Thoughts on MET
by Frederick M. Hess • Jan 16, 2013 at 9:37 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
I've been preoccupied the past few weeks while the Gates Foundation issued its big, final Measures of Effective Teaching report. A lot has already been said summarizing and discussing the findings. No need for me rehash all that. Instead, thought I'd just take a moment to offer three thoughts on the whole thing.
First, as much fun as it is to pick on Gates, I found MET a pretty exemplary case of strategic foundation investment in schooling (Full disclosure: Gates is, of course, a major funder of mine.) The foundation didn't get bored or embrace a new fad midway, paid close attention to research, showed patience, and plunked down hundreds of millions in a creative and coordinated manner that would've been much tougher (and unaffordable) for IES or NSF. It prompted several heralded avatars of teacher observation to test their mettle by comparing their evaluations against one measure of student learning. We now know a ton more about value-added, student surveys, and teacher observations than we did five years ago. Moreover, the residue of this vast private investment is a trove of data, thousands of videos of classrooms available for analysis, and a body of basic research that nobody else was going to provide.
Second, the hundreds of millions spent on MET were funny in that, on the one hand, this was a giant
