Dive Brief:
- Since 36 states have embraced meaningful teacher-measurement systems under the Obama administration's pre-ESSA education incentives, ed policy expert and Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy researcher Thomas Toch writes in the Atlantic that it would be beneficial to continue this legacy.
- Toch says that a "growing body of research" and various policymakers, experts and others have said that more comprehensive evaluation systems and dependable teacher ratings systems help gauge instructional quality in schools.
- Further, data from teacher evaluations can be used to improve "performance-based teaching," Toch writes, encouraging districts not to cut back on evaluations despite the weakened federal mandate.
Dive Insight:
Under the new Every Student Succeeds Act, federal mandates around teacher qualifications and evaluations have been slashed in what many saw as a rebuke to former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's hardline policies. Individual states have not yet come up with their own unique plans to guide them in determining how well teachers are serving students.
Teacher evaluations are a controversial issue, and legal challenges to evaluations have been presented nationwide. Districts needs to move carefully when considering new measures, especially since such legal challenges have proven to be slow-moving in the courts, meaning they hold potential to drain a significant amount of funds and resources away from schools and towards legal defenses.
Evaluations have also proven to be a high-stakes endeavor. The use of student test scores as a measure used to determine how well teachers were doing their jobs created pressure on educators to perform in order to avoid job loss. It also gave some educators an incentive to increase scores and graduation rates by any means available, including, for example, illegal cheating in Atlanta and New York.
California, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska and Vermont have already decided against using student data in teacher and principal evaluations.