Teacher Evaluation

In recent years, the evaluation of classroom teachers has become an increasingly high profile and controversial issue, especially as many states began to require those judgments to be based — at least in part — on student test scores.

But the landscape is shifting once again, spurred on by changes in federal law. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which went into effect with the 2017-18 school year, ushered in a new era of greater state flexibility and decreasing federal oversight of teacher evaluations.

ESSA made the teacher evaluation landscape “messy and complicated,” Kimberly Kappler Hewitt, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who researches teacher evaluation policies, told Education Week.

“No two states are doing the same thing right now,” she said in the article.

Applying the Brakes

Prior to ESSA’s adoption in 2015, more than 44 states had spent sizable resources — funding and staff time, not to mention significant political capital — to create tougher teacher evaluations with an increased focus on student achievement results.

Now, many states and districts appear to be putting the brakes on any requirement to use student test results in their evaluations of teachers.  

Teacher evaluations in the U.S. typically are based on a variety of factors, including classroom observations, student surveys, lesson plan reviews and teacher self-assessments. The systems are usually governed by state laws, but are prepared and implemented at the local level, leading to wide variation in their requirements. Some are linked to tenure and promotion decisions, while many more are used to provide feedback to teachers and influence day-to-day lesson plans.

With the move away from test-based evaluations, some states are recasting their evaluation systems to focus on improving the quality of their teacher workforce. Brown University researchers John Tyler and John Papay have partnered with the Tennessee Department of Education to match top teachers in the state’s new evaluation system with colleagues who struggle.

Similar programs are already in place in Hillsborough County, Fla., and New Haven, Conn. In a 2015 review, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found that 30 states and the District of Columbia require teachers’ evaluations to inform their professional development.

That is a far less expansive vision than the one the Obama administration championed. In his 2012 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama said that that schools needed flexibility to implement test-based evaluations that “reward the best” teachers and “replace teachers who aren’t helping kids learn.”

ESSA Constrains Federal Role

But ESSA’s signing brought federal support for that experiment more or less to a close. The law terminated financial incentives for states to set up teacher evaluation systems based significantly on student test scores. And it effectively banned the U.S. secretary of education from mandating future teacher performance measures.

The new federal law also jeopardizes the push for a controversial approach to teacher evaluations, a statistical technique known as “value-added” modeling. Value-added models compare test scores students earn in any given year to the scores they were predicted to attain based on prior tests and a host of other variables; if students exceed their predicted scores, the difference is seen as the teacher’s “added value.”

For now, the influential Council of Chief State School Officers is holding firm. In its “Principles for Teacher Support and Evaluation systems,” released in March 2016, CCSSO promoted the inclusion of “evidence of student learning” in teacher evaluations. A handful of states are staying the course, including Indiana and Kentucky.

But many states and districts are delaying the use of student testing in their evaluations of teachers, if not barring the practice outright.

In a dramatic reversal, just weeks after ESSA’s adoption, New York suspended until 2019 the use of student test scores on statewide tests in teacher evaluations. This action came less than a year after Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo approved a measure that would have weighted test scores up to 50 percent in evaluations. In the meantime, teachers in New York will receive a “growth” score based on tests, but it will have no bearing on employment.

The national focus on test scores — in addition to widespread frustrations about overtesting — helped spark a parental “opt out” movement and more than a dozen lawsuits. For most states, the complex and costly federal demands of creating student growth measures moved faster than their technical capacity.

‘Scientific and Technical Limitations’

And questions remain about whether value-added policies work.

In 2015, the American Educational Research Association released a statement laying out  its view of the “scientific and technical limitations” of value-added models. It cautioned against giving them a high-stakes weight in teacher evaluations.

By early 2017, it was still too early to say whether the Obama-era push for tougher teacher evaluations had reaped benefits. It appears that the new rating systems did not change outcomes for teachers in many states.

In Indiana, for example, just .5 percent of educators were labelled “ineffective” in the second year under the new system — the same percentage that existed prior to the changes. New Jersey saw similar results. In its first year under the new evaluation system, 97 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.

But a study by Bellwether Education Partners offered some evidence that the Obama administration measures had pushed many states to have “meaningful conversations about instructional practice that were not possible with old, checklist-style evaluations.” It also pointed to some reformed district teacher evaluation systems that had helped improve overall teacher quality.

A recent study of the Chicago teacher evaluation system found that it influenced low-performing teachers to leave the profession, while retaining effective ones. A similar study of the District of Columbic school system found that its teacher evaluation system had influenced the voluntary exit of low-performing teachers and improved the performance of high-performing ones.

New Risks?

The Bellwether study warned of “new risks for teacher evaluation policies” if states and districts seized upon new flexibility to jettison student growth measures outright. But it noted that ESSA also freed states and districts to innovate, a potentially positive development if educators found meaningful ways to share promising practices.

“The next iteration in teacher evaluation policies will have much greater variation across states and among districts within states,” according to the paper. “This variation creates opportunities for learning — identifying both what works and what doesn’t among different approaches — but only if there are structures and capacity in place to do so.”

Published May 2017