Teacher Observation Less Reliable Than Test Scores
Gates Foundation MET Report:
Teacher Observation Less Reliable Than Test Scores
by Joy Resmovits
NEW YORK — A few years ago, Bill Gates decided to learn more about whether a teacher’s effect on student learning could be measured. Three years, 3,000 teachers and about $50 million later, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation thinks it has the answers.
On Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix, the Gates Foundation released the third and final component of the Measuring Effective Teachers project, a gargantuan effort spearheaded by Harvard economist Thomas Kane.
“Effective teaching can be measured,” the authors wrote in the latest installment. They’re sure of it because they used a randomized experiment to figure it out. Reliable teacher evaluations, the paper claims, include “balanced” proportions of teacher observation, students’ standardized test scores and student surveys. And for the first time, the randomized trial shows that teachers who perform well with one group of students, on average, perform