Tag Archives: teacher evaluation

It ought to go without saying that an effective public education system should seek to identify classroom instructors who are successful and those who are not in order to reward and incentivize the former and to correct the latter. This was ostensibly the aim of the 2010 Senate Bill 191, the provisions of which continue to find themselves under near-constant attack nearly a decade after Gov. Ritter signed it into law.

An October 2018 report examines how initially controversial teacher evaluation systems have led to improved student outcomes. The report, Making a Difference: Six Places where Teacher Evaluation Systems are Getting Results was published by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The study analyzes several transformational teacher evaluation systems and how each impacted student achievement. A decade’s worth of reform has helped Tennessee climb from near the bottom, to the middle of the pack on the benchmark national education scores, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In Dallas, a teacher evaluation system has helped increase student proficiency seven percentage points in all grades and subjects. In Denver, students have consistently outpaced the average Colorado state student in English and math since the inception of their teacher rating system. Innovative teacher evaluation systems in the District of Columbia, Newark, and New Mexico have also benefited both students and teachers. These effective teacher evaluation systems are tied to incentives and supports and are designed to distinguish between teachers at different performance levels; reward effective teachers and keep them teaching; identify consistently less-effective teachers in order provide supports or end their contracts; create tailored teacher improvement strategies; recruit new effective teachers; and most […]

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s snowing outside. Like, a lot. The good news is that the snowstorm means I get to hang out at home, drink hot chocolate, and make snow angels. The bad news is that there is an approximately 63 percent higher chance of attack by abominable snowmen like this one: View post on imgur.com Okay, that’s a lie. Abominable snowmen aren’t real (I hope). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t abominable things afoot—like bills gutting accountability, performance pay systems, and tenure reform. I’m sure you all recall that my Independence Institute friend Ross Izard is a big believer in accountability and tenure reform. He recently co-authored a Denver Post op-ed on the importance of these things. Last session, he wrote a big, long article on the dangers of Republicans mistakenly teaming up with the teachers union to dismantle accountability systems. Ross is working on updating that article for this year, but we’ll go ahead and get a head start today. Abominable snowbills wait for no one. The two bills in question are HB 1121 and SB 105. HB 1121 would enable local school boards to pass policies allowing teachers who are certified by the National Board […]

To students like me, teachers are mythical creatures. Sure, I see them every day, but I can’t see behind the proverbial curtain. I don’t know how they judge their success or failure in different areas, how well they are serving their students as a whole, or how they communicate information about their teaching performance to their peers. In the absence of good evaluation systems, that same ambiguity extends to parents and administrators. As Ben Orlin recently pointed out in the Atlantic, teachers are only human. Some great teachers may portray their performance as mediocre or poor, and some less effective teachers may be inclined to exaggerate their success. In either case, it’s clear that some kind of evaluation system is necessary if we want our teachers to be fairly and accurately assessed. Here in Colorado, SB 10-191 ostensibly aims to provide such a system. Among numerous other things, the law requires all Colorado school districts to adopt new yearly performance ratings. These ratings have been in the “practice” phase for the past few years, but are due to be fully implemented in the coming school year. That means that teachers who receive ratings below effective for two consecutive years will […]

Hooray for Nancy Mitchell, and so glad she is working at Ed News Colorado these days. Her latest investigation probes the value of our current teacher evaluation system at identifying effective teachers, weeding out ineffective teachers, and providing support where necessary. The results? Not very good: Education News Colorado requested teacher evaluation data from the six largest districts, all in the metro area, which serve more than 40 percent of public school students statewide. The analysis found little difference between the results of evaluations given in affluent, high-performing Douglas County and those doled out in urban Denver Public Schools, where large numbers of students perform below average on state exams. Fewer than 2 percent of teachers in either district – or in Adams Five-Star School District or in Jefferson County Public Schools – were told they needed to improve their instructional skills.