Schools Matter: Teachers in High Poverty Schools Get Lower Evaluation Scores

Schools Matter: Teachers in High Poverty Schools Get Lower Evaluation Scores:

Teachers in High Poverty Schools Get Lower Evaluation Scores

Did you ever believe that using test scores to evaluate and reward teachers could be a disincentive to teaching in high poverty schools?  You were right.

From Chicago:

Teachers who score the lowest under the district’s relatively new evaluation system are overrepresented in schools with the highest concentration of poor students, according to a new report that looks for the first time at how teachers’ scores correlate with characteristics such as student poverty, teacher race and school climate.

Issued Tuesday by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, the report shows that 30 percent of teachers with the lowest observation scores teach in the district's highest-poverty schools, while just 9 percent teach in lower-poverty schools. Conversely, more than a third of the best-scoring teachers work in lower-poverty schools, and just 6 percent are in the district's poorest schools.

That means students who attend the poorest schools are not only “more likely to be taught by teachers with the bottom scores on observations, they are also the least likely to be taught by teachers who have the top scores.”

Teachers at higher-poverty schools who scored in the top 20 percent on their observations also Schools Matter: Teachers in High Poverty Schools Get Lower Evaluation Scores: