Observations: “Where Most of the Action and Opportunities Are”
In a study just released on the website of Education Next, researchers discuss results from their recent examinations of “new teacher-evaluation systems in four school districts that are at the forefront of the effort [emphasis added] to evaluate teachers meaningfully.” The four districts’ evaluation systems were based on classroom observations, achievement test gains for the whole school (i.e., school-level value-added), performance on non-standardized tests, and some form of measure of teacher professionalism and/or teacher commitment to the school community.
Researchers found the following: The ratings assigned teachers across the four districts’ leading evaluation systems as based primarily (i.e., 50-75%) on observations — not including value-added scores except for the amazingly low 20% of teachers who were VAM eligible — were “sufficiently predictive” of a teacher’s future performance. Later they define what “sufficiently predictive” is in terms of predictive validity coefficients that ranged between 0.33 to 0.38, which are actually quite “low” coefficients in reality. Later they say these coefficients are also “quite predictive,” regardless.
While such low coefficients are to be expected as per others’ research on this topic, one must question how authors came up with their determinations that these were “sufficiently” and “quite” predictive (see also Bill Honig’s comments at the bottom of this article). The authors of this article qualify these classifications later, though, writing that “[t]he degree of correlation confirms that these systems perform substantially better in predicting future teacher performance than traditional systems based on paper credentials and years of experience.” They explain further that these correlations are “in the range that is typical of systems for evaluating and predicting future performance in other fields of human endeavor, including, for example, those used to make management decisions on player contracts in professional sports.” So it seems their qualifications were based on a “better than” or relative but not empirical judgment (see also Bill Honig’s comments at the bottom of this article). That being said, this is Observations: “Where Most of the Action and Opportunities Are” |:
