The impetus for
meaningful teacher evaluation reform from many sectors set the stage for the major changes we are now witnessing in the direction and scope of teacher performance evaluation.
In this episode of the EdNext podcast, Marty West talks with Chad Aldeman, a principal at Bellwether Education Partners who worked as a policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education, about what went right and what went wrong
with teacher evaluation reform.
When Governor Cuomo and the legislature passed meaningful
teacher evaluation reforms last year, and then followed up with specific mandates and guidelines this year, they did so because they wanted to ensure that every classroom has the best possible teacher.
To be sure, mistakes were made: Not understanding the limitations or unintended consequences of federal leadership on education; a disastrous, ill - timed excursion
into teacher evaluation reform; a technocratic impulse that was insufficiently sensitive to parents» concerns about issues like student privacy; and on and on.
Click here to learn more about New Mexico's education reform story, or, to learn more
about teacher evaluation reform, read «The Teacher Evaluation Revamp, in Hindsight,» by Chad Aldeman from our Spring 2017 issue.
Rather than turning away
from teacher evaluation reform, we should learn from the massive Obama - era effort: what worked and what didn't work and why.
Malloy failed to tell the public that Connecticut already has one of the longest teacher probation periods in the nation (4 years) and the
major teacher evaluation reforms that became law in 2010 will finally require school administrators to do their job and remove teachers who are not up to the job.
Thomas Toch — education policy expert and research fellow at Georgetown University, and founding director of the Center on the Future of American Education — just released, as part of the Center, a report titled: Grading the Graders: A Report on
Teacher Evaluation Reform in Public Education.
For one thing,
teacher evaluation reform seems to me to have been enormously difficult politically in most places, and my point is precisely that for all of the political oxygen that's been consumed the actual impacts have often been muted.
School officials felt like they were held hostage when Mr. Cuomo refused to release district - by - district state aid figures with his proposed budget in January until legislators agreed with
his teacher evaluation reforms.
What if the reason that
teacher evaluation reform was so disappointing — with 98 percent of teachers still rated effective — was because we misdiagnosed the problem?
Contrary to claims that
teacher evaluation reforms are leading to strict, one - size - fits - all policies, data suggests that local districts are implementing state - based teacher evaluation reforms inconsistently.
The teacher evaluation reforms encouraged by RTTT and ESEA waivers were sold with promises that they weren't meant to punish teachers, but instead as a means to help them improve.
Unfortunately, as a country, we've learned the wrong lesson from Race to the Top and
teacher evaluation reforms.
It's how you end up with exciting victories like the federal School Improvement Grant program, the Common Core, or
teacher evaluation reform, that look a lot less victorious in hindsight.
Similar benefits were not observed in schools implementing the same program the following year with less support from the central office, suggesting the importance of sustained support for
teacher evaluation reform to translate into improved student performance.
Mostly the to - and - fro isn't about the standards themselves, but related issues: The Obama Administration's role in their adoption, concerns about data privacy, pushback on
teacher evaluation reform — the list goes on.
Contrary to claims that recent
teacher evaluation reforms are leading to strict, one - size - fits - all policies, state - level data actually suggests local districts are implementing state - based teacher evaluation reforms inconsistently.
Kraft is the guy who documented a couple years ago (along with Temple's Allison Gilmour) that
teacher evaluation reforms were having almost no impact on the share of teachers rated effective.
In other words, there's no evidence that
these teacher evaluation reforms have attracted talented applicants.
These data call into question many of the common explanations for changes to teacher turnover rates among public school teachers, such as No Child Left Behind,
teacher evaluation reforms, or the Common Core.
Donaldson, who has studied
teacher evaluation reform over the past eight years, shares insights from a study of 14 Connecticut districts that have implemented the state's 2012 teacher evaluation reforms.