Why Do Schools Keep Changing the Way They Grade Teachers?
Last week, the District of Columbia Public Schools district announced major changes to its teacher evaluation program, called IMPACT. Again. Administrators have tweaked the program constantly since implementing it in 2009, mirroring a troubling national trend: The way teachers are graded in the U.S. has changed so many times in so few years that teachers have lost faith in a system meant to make them better. You couldn’t blame parents for giving up on it, either.
Since 2009, more than 25 states have overhauled their teacher-evaluation systems—some making changes every single year. One Wisconsin elementary school teacher, in the classroom for just six years, told Slate last year that she’s been evaluated using three completely different systems. Last spring, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo implemented the use of outside evaluators and a 50 percent reliance on test scores in teachers’ evaluations; by December, after 20 percent of students across the state sat out of state math and reading tests in protest, the state Board of Regents, following Cuomo’s recommendation, eliminated the use of test scores (at least through 2018–19) altogether.
This kind of seesawing within education is common. No single education reform has seen a more “dramatic transformation” in the past decade than teacher evaluations, according to a National Council on Teacher Quality report that tracks the state of teacher evaluations in all 50 states.* Many of those changes came as states scrambled to qualify for President Obama’s now-defunded Race to the Top grant program or to adjust to the Common Core educational standards. But the changes were often hasty, leading to years of tweaks if not outright overhauls, furtherintensifying the reform fatigue that many teachers have felt for years. But despite a decade of change and experimentation, most teachers are still rated as effective, a major criticism of the old, insufficiently stringent evaluation systems. On the other hand, some teachers complain that the new wave of evaluations became too punitive and were ultimately unhelpful in improving their practice.
D.C.’s IMPACT system emerged under the leadership of controversial education-reform leader Michelle Rhee. Since its 2009 debut, the school district has used a team of outside “master educators” to evaluate teachers, a method praised by some researchers. The latest changes will eliminate them completely, returning the responsibility of evaluations back to principals, a method that teachers, unions and researchers alike have criticized at times. The district will also reintroduce the controversial “value-added” model, which uses student test scores to judge teacherDCPS changed its teacher-evaluation system—again. Why can't schools settle on a method?: