Further Thoughts on the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Study

In this interview with Michael Jonas in CommonWealth Magazine, Harvard professor and Measures of Effective Teaching project honcho Thomas Kane discusses MET findings. Four excerpts:

• “In math, a top-quartile teacher on the combined measure [test-score gains, classroom observations, and student survey data] generated 7.6 more months of learning in a typical school year than a teacher in the bottom quartile. To put it another way, that’s a quarter of the black-white achievement gap closed in a single year… In ELA, having a top-quartile teacher generates 2.6 additional months of learning in a single year relative to a bottom-quartile teacher.” 

• “Right now, the classroom observation instruments that school districts are implementing are content-agnostic. You could score well in terms of your questioning skills and your classroom management and your time management and be teaching incorrect stuff.”

• “Today, virtually [any teacher] willing to remain with a district for three or more years will be granted tenure, the equivalent of a long-term contract. And yet many of those teachers have measured performance below the average novice. Every time that happens, students are harmed, the status of the profession is diminished, and more effective teachers get a colleague that they will have to cover for.”

• “Paying bonuses to [a teacher] who would have stayed anyway may be fair, but it’s also costly. Paying bonuses to retain high-performing teachers who would have left can yield high returns for children. While it’s impossible to know if any given teacher would leave, we know it’s a greater risk early in their career, when turnover is highest.”

“Teacher Lessons” – An Interview with Thomas Kane by Michael Jonas in CommonWealth, Spring 2013 (Vol. 18, #2, p. 64-71), www.commonwealthmagazine.org 

From the Marshal Memo #481