Details about the District’s new teacher evaluation system were discussed for the first time at a D.C. Council hearing yesterday, the Post’s Bill Turque reports. The plan, which has been in development with teachers and experts over the past several months, combines classroom observations (the focus of the current system) with standardized test scores and value-added measures of student learning. Schoolwide performance goals could also be established and used as part of the evaluations.
Rhee emphasized that “academic progress has to be measured by growth,” and criticized the Professional Performance Evaluation Program (PPEP) system currently in place as “inadequate” since it “does not reflect a teacher’s worth or how much he or she has helped students grow.”
From the available information, it appears that the proposed plan does a sound job of incorporating multiple measures to assess teachers’ effectiveness. Using test scores alone, for example, would ignore the fact that many D.C. students enter the classroom already behind. (If in the course of one academic year a teacher raises a 10th grader’s reading from a 6th to an 8th grade level, that 10th grader still isn’t going to score well on a standardized test, even though their teacher was doing a great job.) Implementing schoolwide goals is a way to motivate teachers to collaborate and share best practices. And the use of “external peer evaluators” to conduct observations is promising, since some teachers complain of bias or disorganization from their administrators.
But implementation of this system will prove tricky. Even under the PPEP (which is really just a lot of paperwork and three principal-conducted classroom visits), teachers frequently report logistical headaches or incomplete observations, and a more complex system could compound those problems. The challenge of value-added models is that there has to be good data in the first place – one can’t measure a student’s end of the year growth if their start of the year diagnostic was missing or incomplete. And Rhee didn’t elaborate on what the consequences of unsatisfactory evaluations might look like.
Despite these challenges, the details of this new process sound promising. Some critics argue that it’s unfair to measure teachers on student learning, since social factors outside the classroom can impact performance. But D.C. teachers’ current salaries are determined solely by seniority and graduate credits – a little more accountability is long overdue.
