A number of educational systems in New England and around the nation are now attempting to incorporate student achievement gains into teacher evaluations. Such attempts face at least two important challenges: generating valid estimates of teachers' contributions to student learning and including teachers who do not teach subjects or grades that are tested annually.
A recently released report from the RAND Corporation, Incorporating Student Performance Measures into Teacher Evaluation Systems, considers these challenges in terms of the kinds of student performance measures that educational systems may use to measure teachers’ effectiveness in a variety of grades and subject areas. In this report, the authors examine how the five profiled systems are addressing assessment quality, evaluating teachers in nontested subjects and grades, and assigning teachers responsibility for particular students.
The authors also examine what is and is not known about the quality of various student performance measures used by school systems and offer recommendations to policymakers about approaches to consider when incorporating student achievement measures into teacher evaluation systems. These recommendations include:
- creating comprehensive evaluation systems that incorporate multiple measures of teacher effectiveness;
- attending not only to the technical properties of student assessments but also to how the assessments are being used in high-stakes contexts;
- promoting consistency in the student performance measures that teachers are allowed to choose;
- using multiple years of student achievement data in value-added estimation, and, where possible, using average teachers’ value-added estimates across multiple years; and
- finding ways to hold teachers accountable for students who are not included in their value-added estimates.
To access the complete report, please visit:
RAND: Incorporating Student Performance Measures into Teacher Evaluation Systems
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