Revisiting The Widget Effect
In 2009, The New Teacher Project (TNTP) released a report called “The Widget Effect.” You would be hard-pressed to find too many more recent publications from an advocacy group that had a larger influence on education policy and the debate surrounding it. To this day, the report is mentioned regularly by advocates and policy makers.
The primary argument of the report was that teacher performance “is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision making in any meaningful way.” More specifically, the report shows that most teachers received “satisfactory” or equivalent ratings, and that evaluations were not tied to most personnel decisions (e.g., compensation, layoffs, etc.). From these findings and arguments comes the catchy title – a “widget” is a fictional product commonly used in situations (e.g., economics classes) where the product doesn’t matter. Thus, treating teachers like widgets means that we treat them all as if they’re the same.
Given the influence of “The Widget Effect,” as well as how different the teacher evaluation landscape is now compared to when it was released, I decided to read it closely. Having done so, I think it’s worth discussing a few points about the report.
The first reaction I had was that the report’s primary empirical contribution, which, as is often the case, could have been expressed with a single table and a few paragraphs of text, was important and warranted much of the attention it received. Namely, it was the finding that, in the 12 districts included in the study, only a tiny minority (about 1-5 percent) of evaluated teachers received an “unsatisfactory” or equivalent rating (and thus, predictably, very few tenured teachers were dismissed during this time).
That was a bombshell of sorts. Even though these findings are sometimes portrayed inappropriately as national