The Impact of IMPACT: A Teacher’s Perspective
Introduction
This piece is a response to a recently published report titled, ”Incentives, Selection, and Teacher Performance: Evidence from IMPACT” by Thomas Dee, and James Wyckoff (2013). This response attempts to offer a ground-level perspective from a teacher working within a high poverty neighborhood public school. It’s not trying to undermine the report’s findings. In fact, I believe we need more research conducted on the effects that the IMPACT teacher evaluation system has on the DCPS teacher workforce. Below, you will find certain passages I’ve selected, and my response to the claims and assertions made by authors of this report. Again, this isn’t an attempt to undermine or contradict this report’s findings; rather, it’s an attempt to shed light on the effects of IMPACT from a teacher’s point of view.
#1: Regarding the uniqueness IMPACT, Dee and Wyckoff (2013) claim:
A second unique feature of IMPACT is that its incentives are linked to a multi-dimensional measure of teacher performance (e.g., multiple classroom observations as well as test scores) that is likely to have more validity than test scores alone (e.g., MET 2013). This targeted performance measure may also enhance the efficacy of IMPACT’s incentives because it places some weight on actions teachers control more clearly and directly (e.g., how their classroom