Dive Brief:
- Brown and Harvard University education researchers Matthew Kraft and David Blazar identified four measures of student skill that have been linked to future success for a recent study, looking at whether “good teachers” were actually good at developing all of them.
- The Hechinger Report writes that teachers who are good at raising student math scores are not necessarily good at fostering good behavior among students, happiness in class, or perseverance in the face of difficulty, the factors Kraft and Blazar measured.
- So far, teachers are evaluated primarily on test scores, even though these other areas are also important to students’ long term success, but Kraft and Blazar argue that seeing these teaching skills as significant and distinct can lead to better training and measurement of teacher progress.
Dive Insight:
In a time when data-driven decision-making has been seen as so important to school improvement, districts have been limited by their access to good data. Standardized test scores are easy to measure and compare so they have become a primary tool for assessing teacher and entire school performance. It is time for administrators to move forward.
Data collection techniques are becoming more nuanced and new teacher evaluation strategies can help school and district leaders look at teachers more holistically and support their growth in concrete ways. The Every Student Succeeds Act no longer requires schools to evaluate teachers, but as the federal government shifts away from a laser focus on test scores for accountability, many hope schools take the opportunity to keep teacher evaluations and make them a more useful tool for improvement.