Dive Brief:
- Principals are less compelled to rate their teachers as ineffective outside of a confidential setting and when stakes are attached to assessment results, finds a new study investigating the way 100 principals from Miami-Dade County public schools rated teachers in high-stakes and low-stakes environments.
- Inflated teacher ratings are an issue that has continued to gain attention, with more state taking actions to create more rigorous evaluation systems, reports Education Week. This new study from Jason Grissom and Susanna Loeb builds upon revelatory research from 2009, which showed that less than 1% of teachers are rated as being unsatisfying.
- Researchers found that while evaluations trended toward positive in both settings, the low-stakes setting yielded more "ineffective" responses to performance questions; and in some cases, teachers that were rated as ineffective in a low-stakes setting, were marked as effective when consequences were involved.
Dive Insight:
Good teaching is critical to student success in the classroom. In fact, numerous studies have already highlighted this relationship. For instance, Brown and Harvard University education researchers Matthew Kraft and David Blazar, in identifying skill development needed for a student's future success, found that key skills were all linked to, among other factors, “good teachers." They saw that teachers, which might be good at maintaining high test scores, may be ineffective in helping students cultivate other qualities necessary for life beyond school, like perseverance. But beyond being able to foster non-academic skills in students, many teachers are actually ineffective altogether. Karen Klein wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times last year that the majority of teachers in American schools are good, but not great. Klein writes that education experts estimate that 5% of teachers are terrible, meaning that students have at least two bad teachers throughout their K-12 career, formative learning years.
Even so, only about 1% of teachers are rated as ineffective, which means that teachers that should otherwise be fired for not teaching students properly, stay in schools and lower student outcomes. For administrators that continue to see poor performance data from students, but high marks for teachers, it can be difficult to figure out how to pinpoint issues in the student environment and fix them. Principals are often worried about maintaining good relationships with their teachers can often feel compelled to cheat data on their faculty, which ony creates issues for not only the administrators, but also students. Grissom and Loeb highlight a possible solution to this issue, which is to remove high-stakes from teacher evaluation systems, as they find that when principals are in confidential and unthreatening environments, they are more likely to evaluate their teachers honestly. Enhanced teacher evaluations are critical to understanding whether faculty are doing their jobs effectively; this research suggests that changing the method of data collection can reveal more than traditional evaluation systems.