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The Quick and the Ed » A Comprehensive Review of the MET Project:

A Comprehensive Review of the MET Project

by Chad Aldeman

On Tuesday the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project released its third and final series of reports. The media has reported the main findings: that we can measure and predict effective teaching. And, because the MET Project randomly assigned students to teachers, we can say that there is causality in this relationship, that teachers with high value-added scores in one year caused student achievement to rise in the following year.
But the reports also include a host of interesting detail and helpful suggestions to districts and states. Among them:

• Current state tests can be used to identify effective teachers. Assessments that require higher-order thinking skills are likely to be better at differentiating teachers, but even the current low-level tests that states are using are valuable in identifying effective teachers. Important, the same teachers who raised student achievement on low-level state tests also raised student achievement on more cognitively