Cincinnati’s Intensive Teacher-Evaluation System Gets Results

From the Marshall Memo #453

In this Education Next article, Eric Taylor (Stanford University doctoral student) and John Tyler (Brown University professor) report on their research on evaluations of mid-career Cincinnati teachers using multiple, highly structured classroom observations by experienced peer teachers and administrators. Their aim was to see if giving teachers specific, individualized information about their work would improve teaching and learning by:

• Holding up a mirror to teachers about what they do in the classroom;
• Encouraging teachers to analyze their practice; and
• Creating conversations with colleagues about effective practices. 

Looking at student-achievement results, Taylor and Tyler found that students did markedly better on standardized math tests (up 4.5 percentile points) the year teachers were evaluated, and continued to improve in the next few years. The biggest gains were made by teachers whose performance was weakest beforehand. Taylor and Tyler believe this shows teachers can still make dramatic improvements after their formative years in the classroom – and that improved teacher evaluation may be a new portal for teacher professional development. 

Cincinnati’s Teacher Evaluation System (TES), begun in 2000-01, involves four classroom observations during the year (this occurs every five years for tenured teachers). Three observations are conducted by a trained peer evaluator from another school and one by the building principal or another administrator. Teachers are told which week the first evaluation will take place; the others are unannounced. Evaluators use a modification of Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching rubric, scoring teachers on a 4-3-2-1 scale. Teachers receive written feedback on each observation and meet with the observer at least once during their evaluation year. At the end of the year, teachers receive a summative score in each of the domains of the rubric, and these can have job consequences.

Taylor and Tyler report that the summative Cincinnati scores show some of the same “leniency” as teacher evaluation across the country: 90 percent of teachers get summative scores in the top two performance levels. But the detailed rubric scores are less lenient, with more scores at Level 2 and 1. “We hypothesize that this micro-level evaluation feedback is more important to lasting improvements than the final, overall TES scores,” say the authors. 

Taylor and Tyler raise some sobering questions: the infrequency of Cincinnati’s evaluations (every five years), the expense of training the peer evaluators, and the loss of those high-performing teachers to their students when they are doing peer evaluations. But the authors argue that the net effect is positive, since each peer evaluator is having a very positive effect on 10-15 teachers a year and the gains continue for several years. 

“American public schools have been under new pressure from regulators and constituents to improve teacher performance,” conclude Taylor and Tyler. “To date, the discussion has focused primarily on evaluation systems as sorting mechanisms, a means to identify the lowest-performing teachers for selective termination… In recent years, the consensus among policymakers and researchers has been that after the first few years on the job, teacher performance, at least as measured by student test-score growth, cannot be improved… Our work suggests optimism that, while costly, well-structured evaluation systems can not only serve this sorting purpose but can also enhance education through improvements in teacher effectiveness.” 

“Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching?” by Eric Taylor and John Tyler in Education Next, Fall 2012 (Vol. 12, #4, p. 78-84), 

http://educationnext.org/can-teacher-evaluation-improve-teaching/