Columbus Dispatch...
Good step, Evaluating teacher effectiveness will benefit students  
October 13, 2011 

As part of the federal government’s Race to the Top program, thousands of Ohio teachers recently received report cards unlike any before: a rating of how effective they were last school year, based on how much academic progress their students made. 

It’s a small step toward a big goal: knowing which teachers are the most and least effective at helping students learn, so that schools can keep and reward the best teachers, help the middling improve and get the weakest out of the classroom. It also lays the groundwork for a provision in the state budget that calls for all school districts to use such effectiveness measures in teacher evaluations.   

It also lays the groundwork for a provision in the state budget that calls for all school districts to use such effectiveness measures in teacher evaluations. 

The ability to judge and reward teachers objectively based on merit, rather than years in the job and credentials acquired, long has been the holy grail for education-reform advocates. They know that nothing inside the school building is more important for a child’s success than a strong teacher, and they want a reliable measure. 

Teachers’ unions have resisted merit-based pay, especially any system that would link teachers’ fortunes to their students’ performance. In fairness, student performance isn’t entirely under a teacher’s control, and that factor should be only a part of an evaluation. But it’s a critical part, and the movement toward measuring it will lead to a stronger corps of teachers, better schools and more-successful students. 

The U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative requires participating states to develop merit-based pay systems for teachers.  

Ohio has gathered “value-added” data for years by assigning every student a unique identification number and creating a multiyear record of each student’s performance  on standardized tests. Until now, that information has been compiled only at the school level and school-district level — not by linking students to individual teachers. 

For now, how to use the new information will be up to school districts. Ohio’s 2012-13 budget requires schools to have, two years from now, a teacher-evaluation system based at least half on how much academic progress a teacher’s students make. 

But the evaluations can be only a part, because they’re based on tests taken only by students in third through eighth grades, and only in reading and math. The search is on for tests that could reliably measure achievement in other subjects and other grades.   

Nor should the new reports be the basis for the bulk of anyone’s evaluation this year. A single year’s measurement isn’t enough to conclude, for example, that a teacher who had a lackluster year should be pushed out of the profession. 

But the fact that student-progress-based measurement of teachers has begun is good news. The concept is sound and fair: by measuring a student’s progress over the year — not simply how he performs on one day — teachers in poor schools with struggling students aren’t penalized. The goal for every teacher, regardless of how accomplished her students are on the first day of school, is the same: to help his students make at least a year’s worth of progress over the school year.   

Most teachers likely will average about a year’s worth of progress for their students each year. Those who consistently can accomplish more than that are exceptional, and when merit pay is fully in place, they can receive the better compensation they deserve. Just as important, principals can assign them to the schools where their exceptional skills are most needed. 

Those who consistently fail to foster a year’s worth of progress shouldn’t remain in the classroom.  

The eventual benefits will be an elevation of the teaching profession and better prospects for Ohio’s children. 

Read this and other articles at the Columbus Dispatch