Teacher Evaluation That Improves Classroom Performance

From the Marshall Memo #434

In this Harvard Educational Review article, Brown University professor John Papay notes three points of agreement among researchers and practitioners:

• Teachers are the most important school-level factor in student learning.
• There is wide variation in different teachers’ impact on achievement.
• The teacher evaluation system in most districts is not working well.

“In such a system,” says Papay, “not only do administrators and policy makers gain no real information about teacher effectiveness, but teachers receive no meaningful feedback to help them improve their instructional practices.”

This situation has led many districts to consider using value-added student achievement data to evaluate individual teachers. Although this approach appears to be sophisticated and seems to make sense, Papay questions its accuracy, reliability, and validity. He concludes that it’s no better than the traditional classroom observation process in measuring classroom effectiveness – and that’s not saying much!

Which brings him to his main point – that teacher evaluation needs to go beyond measuring classroom performance and focus much more on helping teachers get better. “If teacher evaluation is to improve student learning systematically,” he says, “it must be used as a tool to promote continued teacher development. Using teacher evaluations in this manner holds much more promise for comprehensive change than identifying (and rewarding or sanctioning) the best and worst performers.” 

In most cases, Papay says, value-added data do very little to help teachers develop their skills. Classroom observations, on the other hand, have that potential – if visits are frequent and unannounced, based on clear standards of good teaching, with well-trained administrators giving teachers candid, helpful comments on what they see. “Effective evaluators must be willing to provide tough assessments and to make judgments about the practice, not the person,” says Papay. “They must also be expert in providing rich, meaningful, and actionable feedback to the teachers they evaluate.” 

This can be done by peers as well as administrators, he notes, which reduces the burdens on overworked principals and assistant principals. The Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program does just this.

“Refocusing the Debate: Assessing the Purposes and Tools of Teacher Evaluation” by John Papay in Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2012 (Vol. 82, # 1, p. 123-141), 

http://her.hepg.org/content/v40p0833345w6384/