One Teacher Feels Impact of ‘Value-Added’ Evaluations
Despite being described as “creative” and “motivating” by her
supervisor, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki found herself out
of a job when her students’ test scores didn’t improve as much as
required by the District of Columbia Public Schools’ complex
formula for evaluating her performance.
As the
Washington Post’s Bill Turque reports, Wysocki had
even been urged by her school’s assistant principal to
share her classroom techniques with other teachers. Just a few
months later, when her students’ test scores missed the mark,
Wysocki was fired. Positive classroom evaluations weren’t enough
to override the district’s “value-added” formula, which is
supposed to quantify the effect Wysocki had on her students’
learning.
Such formulas are not fool-proof, as researchers themselves are
quick to warn. Dale Ballou, a professor of education and public
policy at Vanderbilt University, said he’s concerned that the
current evaluation models are being oversold “as if they
represent the answer to all kinds of problems, and that they give
you the truth.”
What the formulas do offer are estimates, Ballou
said – and ones that are subject to error.
“You’ve got to recognize these are not flawless instruments,”
Ballou said. “Anytime you try to evaluate an individual based on
this kind of data, there’s a possibility you’re going to make a
mistake.”
(If D.C. Public Schools made a mistake by firing Wysocki, it’s
probably too late to correct it. She was quickly snatched up by a
public elementary campus in Fairfax County, Va., according to the
Washington Post.)
Few issues in the education arena are getting more attention
these days than teacher evaluations. Dozens of states are
grappling with the question of how to measure educator job
performance and whether to tie student achievement data to those
reviews.
To be sure, good teaching is hard to quantify. Value-added
formulas have been touted by the Obama administration as a more
equitable way of measuring performance.
Wysocki, who is settling in to her work in Virginia, makes it
clear that she knows she has much to learn, and she isn’t afraid
to ask for help.“Teaching is an art,” she said in the
Washington Post story. “There are so many things to
improve on.”
But is Wysocki right? Is teaching an art that requires a degree
of talent that simply can’t be quantified? Or is it a craft – a
profession — that with proper methodology can be taught?
The answer to the question of art or craft is, like most
education issues, more complicated than it first appears. While
there certainly may be a degree of magic to great teaching, that
doesn’t mean it’s impossible to identify the backbone of solid
instructional techniques and then replicate them.
Teaching “is not common sense, and it takes a high level of skill
that most people have to learn in order to do well,” said Deborah
Ball, dean of the University
of Michigan School of Education, which was
recently praised by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
as one of the nation’s standout teacher preparation
programs.
“There are people who have a gift for teaching, but they are in the minority,” Ball told me. “Most of what goes into teaching are highly learnable, technical skills. You don’t go out and pick a surgeon who hasn’t had careful training, so why would a teacher be any different?”
Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Contact Emily Richmond. Follow her on Twitter @EWAEmily.
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