Tag Archives: Teacher Effectiveness

Study: Performance of teachers can be tracked over time

5 Mar

Moi wrote in Report: Measuring teacher effectiveness:

Public Impact has a produced a report, Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation in 10 Sites which examines teacher evaluation efforts in three states. So, how is teacher effectiveness measured? Well, kids know good teaching when they see it. Donna Gordon Blankinship of AP reports in the Seattle Times article, How Do You Find An Effective Teacher? Ask A Kid

Adults may be a little surprised by some of the preliminary findings of new research on what makes a great teacher.

How do you find the most effective teachers? Ask your kids. That’s one of four main conclusions of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its research partners after the first year of its Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

Preliminary results of the study were posted online Friday; a more complete report is expected in April, according to the foundation….

The first four conclusions of the study are as follows:

-The average student knows effective teaching when he or she experiences it.

-In every grade and every subject, a teacher’s past success in raising student achievement on state tests is one of the strongest predictors of his or her ability to do so again.

-The teachers with the highest value-added scores on state tests, which show improvement by individual students during the time they were in their classroom, are also the teachers who do the best job helping their students understand math concepts or demonstrate reading comprehension through writing.

-Valid feedback does not need to come from test scores alone. Other data can give teachers the information they need to improve, including student opinions of how organized and effective a teacher is….

See, Students Know Good Teaching When They Get It, Survey Finds

https://drwilda.com/2012/06/13/report-measuring-teacher-effectiveness/

Sarah D. Sparks reports in the Education Week article, Best and Worst Teachers Can Be Flagged Early, Says Study:

New teachers become much more effective with a few years of classroom experience, but a working paperRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader by a team of researchers suggests the most—and least—effective elementary teachers show their colors at the very start of their careers.

“This is a fundamentally different time period for teachers, when we know they are going through changes,” said lead author Allison Atteberry, a research associate in the Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She discussed preliminary results of the study at a research meeting on K-12 and postsecondary education held by the Washington-based National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, known as CALDER, on Feb. 21.

“We know less about how these value-added measures work in the early career,” she added.

The study tracked the individual effectiveness of more than 7,600 incoming New York City teachers in mathematics and English/language arts. Each of the teachers taught 4th or 5th grade from 2000 to 2006.

The researchers analyzed teacher records from the New York city and state education departments, along with data on the teachers’ students, including achievement-test results in math and English/language arts, gender, ethnicity, home language, poverty, special education status, and absences and suspensions.

Predicting Performance

While incoming New York City teachers became more effective at improving their students’ mathematics and English/language arts performance in their first few years on the job, new research finds that they’re often still in the same performance quintile after four or five years. Researchers compared the mean effectiveness in the first two years with effectiveness in later years.

Ms. Atteberry’s co-authors are Susanna Loeb, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, and James H. Wyckoff, an education professor at the University of Virginia. They and Ms. Atteberry are all associated with CALDER.

For the incoming teachers who continued to teach for at least five years, the researchers compared the mean value-added effectiveness at improving student achievement in math and English in their first two years of teaching with their effectiveness for the next three years.

Overall, the teachers improved significantly in their first two years in their value-added score. While more than 36 percent of teachers were rated in the lowest of five levels of effectiveness at the start of their careers, only 12 percent were still rated in that same quintile by their third year of teaching.

Limited Growth?

However, when teachers at each initial level of effectiveness were tracked individually over time, their growth was much less significant. Compared with other teachers who started at the same time they did, teachers in the lowest 20 percent were still likely to be in the lowest 20 percent three to five years later.

“When you look at teachers who in the future are low-performing, very few of those come from the initially highest quintile of performance, and the same is true in the opposite direction,” Ms. Atteberry said. “We see that even more at the high end: Teachers who are initially highest-performing are by far the most likely to be in the highest quintile in the future….” http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/03/06/23teacher.h32.html?tkn=MOYFY6ibw6ZMewuL2mU5P2GmWgqqd0wVbbr2&cmp=clp-edweek&intc=es

Citation:

Do First Impressions Matter? Improvement in Early Career Teacher Effectiveness

Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff

CALDER Working Paper No. 90

February 2013

Abstract

There is increasing agreement among researchers and policymakers that teachers vary widely in their ability to improve student achievement, and the difference between effective and ineffective teachers hassubstantial effects on standardized test outcomes as well as later life outcomes. However, there is notsimilar agreement about how to improve teacher effectiveness. Several research studies confirm that onaverage novice teachers show remarkable improvement in effectiveness over the first five years of their careers. In this paper we employ rich data from New York City to explore the variation among teachers in early career returns to experience. Our goal is to bet ter understand the extent to which measures of teacher effectiveness during the first two years reliably predicts future performance. Our findings suggest that early career returns to experience may provide useful insights regarding future performance and offer opportunities to better understand how to improve teacher effectiveness. We present evidence not only about the predictive power of early value-added scores, but also on the limitations and imprecision of those predictions. http://auth.calder.commonspotcloud.com/publications/upload/wp90.pdf

Every population of kids is different and they arrive at school at various points on the ready to learn continuum. Schools and teachers must be accountable, but there should be various measures of judging teacher effectiveness for a particular population of children. Perhaps, more time and effort should be spent in developing a strong principal corps and giving principals the training and assistance in evaluation and mentoring techniques. Really, it comes down to each population of kids should have solutions tailored for their needs. There really should not be a one size approach to education.

Related:

Is classroom practice the missing ingredient in teacher training?                                                                     https://drwilda.com/2012/10/04/is-classroom-practice-the-missing-ingredient-in-teacher-training/

The teacher master’s degree and student achievement https://drwilda.com/2012/07/23/the-teacher-masters-degree-and-student-achievement/

Urban teacher residencies                                            https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/urban-teacher-residencies/

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The teacher master’s degree and student achievement

23 Jul

In Education Trust report: Retaining teachers in high-poverty areas, moi said:

Every population of kids is different and they arrive at school at various points on the ready to learn continuum. Schools and teachers must be accountable, but there should be various measures of judging teacher effectiveness for a particular population of children. Perhaps, more time and effort should be spent in developing a strong principal corps and giving principals the training and assistance in evaluation and mentoring techniques.

The Ed Trust report, entitled “Building and Sustaining Talent: Creating Conditions in High-Poverty Schools That Support Effective Teaching and Learning,” examines how several districts have handled the issue of teacher retention:

Specifically, districts should take the following steps:

• Recruit talented school leaders to their highest need schools, an get them to stay. In addition to the districts spotlighted earlier, the District of Columbia Public Schools has taken a rigorous approach to principal recruitment. The district scours student achievement data from school districts around the country (especially those close to D.C.) and then actively recruits principals of top-performing schools.

• Put in place teacher and school-leader evaluation systems that differentiate educator effectiveness in order to identify top performing teachers and leaders. Using these systems in conjunction with data on working conditions and attrition, districts can study which teachers are more and less satisfied, as well as which ones are staying and leaving — and why.

• Provide teachers in the highest need schools with meaningful professional growth and career ladders as well as opportunities to collaborate with other teachers, as Ascension Parish and Boston Public Schools have done.

• Avoid isolating their most effective teachers and, instead, build teams of highly effective teachers in the district’s most challenging schools, as both Boston Public Schools and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools have done.

• Concentrate not just on recruiting new school leaders and teachers to high-need schools, but on developing the skills and instructional abilities of existing employees, as have Fresno and Ascension Parish.

• Implement a tool to measure teacher perceptions of their teaching environment, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ working conditions survey, and then use data from the tool to identify target schools and determine primary issues that need to be addressed. For example, Pittsburgh Public Schools works with the New Teacher Center to implement a district-wide survey on working conditions. The district requires all schools to use the data to identify a plan of action and pays special attention to the plans of schools with the poorest survey results to ensure that the planned interventions align with the identified areas of need.

• Once better evaluations are in place, districts should make working conditions data part of school and district-leader evaluations. North Carolina requires that survey data on working conditions are factored into school-leader evaluations, which encourages leaders to take the survey results seriously and to act on areas identified as needing improvement.

CONCLUSION

To date, the conditions that shape teachers’ daily professional lives have not been given the attention they deserve. Too often, a lack of attention to these factors in our highest poverty and lowest performing schools results in environments in which few educators would choose to stay. For too long, the high levels of staff dissatisfaction and turnover that characterize these schools have been erroneously attributed to their students. But research continues to demonstrate that students are not the problem. What matters most are the conditions for teaching and learning. Districts and states have an obligation to examine and act on these conditions. Otherwise, we will never make the progress that we must make to ensure all low-income students and students of color have access to great teachers.                                                                                                                                http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/Building_and_Sustaining_Talent.pdf

Melanie Smollin has an excellent post at Take Part, Five Reasons Why Teacher Turnover Is On The Rise See, Report: Make Improving Teacher Working Conditions a Priority http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2012/06/report_make_improving_teacher_working_conditions_a_priority.html

https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/education-trust-report-retaining-teachers-in-high-poverty-areas/

The Center for American Progress has released the report, The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement: De-emphasizing the Role of Master’s Degrees in Teacher Compensation written by Raegen Miller and Marguerite Roza.

Miller and Roza write in the issue brief:

All teachers in Finland have a master’s degree, and they get extraordinary results from their students. If we want be(er results in U.S. schools, then, we should require teachers to have a master’s degree, so the argument goes.

But this argument has two fatal flaws. First, teachers in Finland hail from the top 10 percent of their graduating class.25 “is selectivity is woven into a set of policies that Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford University, has astutely described as a “teaching and learning system.”26 “e Finnish system could scarcely be more diferent than our domestic grab bag of policies arising from approximately 15,000 separate school districts carrying out their responsibility to provide public education, variously conceived by the diverse states of a country with an unmatched tolerance, at least among wealthy industrialized nations, for inequity in school funding and facilities.

Secondly, Finnish teachers hold master’s degrees that augment their knowledge and skills in a way that’s deliberately connected to their instructional challenges. Secondary teachers earn a master’s in the subject of instruction, and the master’s degree required of elementary teachers equips them with specialized knowledge and skills often found only among special education teachers and school psychologists in U.S. schools. “us, holding master’s degrees means Finnish teachers either have a serious grasp on academic content or are well equipped to problem solve around the individual learning needs of their students.

“The typical master’s degree held by a U.S. teacher and the associated skills a(ached pale in comparison. Moreover, it’s unlikely to move in this direction barring a tectonic shift in the higher-education landscape. Institutions of higher education, of course, won’t be at the vanguard of efforts to repeal legislation that inflates demand for one of their most lucrative products, master’s degrees in education. In addition, it bears mentioning, for example, that Connecticut’s requirement that teachers seeking a professional license hold a master’s degree was unscathed by recent reform-conscious legislation in that state. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/07/pdf/miller_masters.pdf

In Is it true that the dumbest become teachers? Moi said:

There is a quote attributed to H.L. Mencken:

Those who can — do. Those who can’t — teach.

People often assume that if a person could do anything else, they probably wouldn’t teach. Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. has an interesting article in the Washington Post.

In Do teachers really come from the ‘bottom third’ of college graduates? Di Carlo writes:

The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers “come from the bottom third” of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates…

Overall, then, the blanket assertion that teachers are coming from the “bottom third” of graduates is, at best, an incomplete picture. It’s certainly true that, when the terciles are defined in terms of SAT/ACT scores, there is consistent evidence that new teachers are disproportionately represented in this group (see here and here for examples from the academic literature).

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/do-teachers-really-come-from-the-bottom-third-of-college-graduates/2011/12/07/gIQAg8HPdO_blog.html

https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/is-it-true-that-the-dumbest-become-teachers/

There isn’t really a definitive answer. Miller and Roza’s analysis of the importance of the masters degree in Finland means that more training might be useful in student education achievement.

Related:

Urban teacher residencies                                        https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/urban-teacher-residencies/

Study: When teachers overcompensate for prejudice https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/study-when-teachers-overcompensate-for-prejudice/

The teaching profession needs more males and teachers of color https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/the-teaching-profession-needs-more-males-and-teachers-of-color/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

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Report: Measuring teacher effectiveness

13 Jun

Public Impact has a produced a report, Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation in 10 Sites which examines teacher evaluation efforts in three states. So, how is teacher effectiveness measured? Well, kids know good teaching when they see it. Donna Gordon Blankinship of AP reports in the Seattle Times article, How Do You Find An Effective Teacher? Ask A Kid

Adults may be a little surprised by some of the preliminary findings of new research on what makes a great teacher.

How do you find the most effective teachers? Ask your kids. That’s one of four main conclusions of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its research partners after the first year of its Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

Preliminary results of the study were posted online Friday; a more complete report is expected in April, according to the foundation….

The first four conclusions of the study are as follows:

-The average student knows effective teaching when he or she experiences it.

-In every grade and every subject, a teacher’s past success in raising student achievement on state tests is one of the strongest predictors of his or her ability to do so again.

-The teachers with the highest value-added scores on state tests, which show improvement by individual students during the time they were in their classroom, are also the teachers who do the best job helping their students understand math concepts or demonstrate reading comprehension through writing.

-Valid feedback does not need to come from test scores alone. Other data can give teachers the information they need to improve, including student opinions of how organized and effective a teacher is….

See, Students Know Good Teaching When They Get It, Survey Finds

Here is the press release about ConnCan’s teacher effectiveness report which was produced by Public Impact:

New Report Analyzes How Multiple Measures Can Be Used to Evaluate Teacher Effectiveness

ConnCAN-Commissioned Report Looks at the Teacher Evaluation Implementation in 10 Sites, including New Haven, to Begin Charting Best Practice

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — May 31, 2012

Contact:  Patrick Riccards, ConnCAN

Tel:  203-772-4017 x15

Email: patrick.riccards@conncan.org

New Haven, Conn

NEW HAVEN (May 31, 2012) – As states and school systems across the nation work to implement processes for evaluating educator effectiveness, a new research report offers a detailed look at 10 teacher evaluation models, looking at how they tackled key evaluation components such as student achievement measures, classroom evaluation, and other non-academic measures.

Conducted by Public Impact, Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: A Look “Under the Hood” of Teacher Evaluation in 10 Sites examines teacher evaluation efforts in three states (Delaware, Rhode Island, and Tennessee), five large districts (Hillsborough County, FL; Houston, TX; New Haven, CT; Pittsburgh, PA; and Washington, DC), one charter management organization (Achievement First), and the Relay Graduate School of Education. ConnCAN and 50CAN jointly commissioned the report, with support of the H.A. Vance Foundation.

“There are few factors as important to student success than that of an effective educator,” ConnCAN CEO Patrick Riccards said. “To ensure that every child has that effective educator, we must implement comprehensive evaluation models. Measuring Teacher Effectiveness is an important tool in understanding what teacher evaluation leaders are doing and what components must be factored into a meaningful evaluation model.”

As part of this effort, Public Impact, ConnCAN, and 50CAN have provided a research brief, a cross-site analysis that looks across all 10 sites, 10 detailed profiles of the teacher evaluation systems in each of the featured sites, and a library of documents that are the building blocks of the 10 systems. All of these products can be found at: http://conncan.org/learn/research/teachers/measuring-teacher-effectiveness

The report pays particular attention to the design and implementation challenges that many states and districts face in putting an evaluation system into place. These challenges focused on five areas: 1) student achievement measures; 2) classroom observations; 3) other non-academic measures; 4) accuracy, validity, and reliability; and 5) reporting and using evaluation results.

Each site is working to continuously improve their evaluation systems with the belief that the challenges they encounter can be overcome. As Measuring Teacher Effectiveness reports, “None of these systems claims to have cracked the code for teacher evaluation. Nonetheless, we consistently heard that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.”

“There is no magic bullet when it comes to effective educator evaluation,” Riccards said. “But there is also no need to reinvent the wheel. By taking a close look at many of our evaluation trailblazers, we can see the necessary components for evaluation, the challenges our states and districts face in doing it right, and the unanswered questions we must still pursue if we are to provide all students with exemplary teachers.”

The findings of Measuring Teacher Effectiveness are particularly important as Connecticut is in the midst of developing the state evaluation model that will be in line with the teacher evaluation framework unanimously adopted by the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC) in January 2012 and approved by the State Board of Education in February of 2012. This fall, the state plans to begin the evaluation pilot established under S.B. 458.

“The analyses of New Haven Public Schools and Achievement First, in particular, provide policymakers, educators, and administrators with a solid understanding of the good work currently being done in Connecticut,” Riccards said. “These case studies, along with the other eight, serve as important tools in the completion of Connecticut’s educator evaluation system.”

Citation:

Doyle, D., & Han, J.G. (2012). Measuring teacher effectiveness: A look “under the hood” of teacher evaluation in 10 sites. New York: 50CAN; New Haven, CT: ConnCAN; and Chapel Hill, NC: Public Impact. Re­trieved from http://www.conncan.org/learn/research/teachers/measuring-teacher-effectiveness

©2012 50CAN, ConnCAN, and Public Impact

The authors encourage the free use, reproduction, and distribution of this paper for noncommer­cial use. We require attribution for all use. For more information and instructions on the commercial use of our materials, please contact us at http://www.publicimpact.com.

TO ORDER ADDITIONAL COPIES:

Please contact ConnCAN at info@conncan.org or 203 772 4017

ConnCAN

85 Willow Street

New Haven, CT 06511

http://www.conncan.org@conncan

Every population of kids is different and they arrive at school at various points on the ready to learn continuum. Schools and teachers must be accountable, but there should be various measures of judging teacher effectiveness for a particular population of children. Perhaps, more time and effort should be spent in developing a strong principal corps and giving principals the training and assistance in evaluation and mentoring techniques. Really, it comes down to each population of kids should have solutions tailored for their needs. There really should not be a one size approach to education.

Related:

The attempt to evaluate teacher colleges is getting nasty https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/523/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

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