Jeff Howard, a member of the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, may have put it best. “I can’t imagine a logic that would lead in any other direction,” he said at this morning’s meeting.
Howard was referring to proposed new regulations that would tie teacher evaluations in Massachusetts to MCAS scores and other measures of learning gains made by students in a teacher’s classroom. The board approved the new rules on a 9-2 vote, setting the stage for a dramatic change in how teachers are evaluated.
Under the new regulations, teacher evaluations must include use of student MCAS scores, where available, as well as other measureable, district-wide benchmarks that school systems currently use or that they must develop. Using these assessments, along with classroom observation of teachers’ instructional practice and other factors, principals will assign teachers one of four performance levels. Teachers in the bottom two categories – needs improvement or unsatisfactory – will be put on an improvement plan. Those whose performance is rated unsatisfactory will have no more than one year to move into one of the upper two categories – exemplary or proficient – or face possible dismissal. Those in the needs improvement category who do not move within a year to one of the upper two categories will be rated unsatisfactory and have no more than one more year to reach the two upper categories or face possible dismissal.
The federal Race to the Top competition, through which Massachusetts was awarded $250 million, requires states receiving the education funding to develop evaluation systems in which firm measures of student learning are “a significant factor” in a teacher’s review.
There are two big drivers behind the push from the federal education department: The increasing recognition that a highly effective teacher is the single biggest variable within a school that determines student progress, and the woeful state of existing evaluation systems. Most districts use a binary evaluation system, with teachers rated either satisfactory or unsatisfactory – and the overwhelming majority of all teachers are given a stamp of approval, suggesting the reviews are fairly perfunctory. A report last year from the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality found that only half of Boston public teachers had even been evaluated during a recent two-year period, despite the requirement for evaluations every two years. What’s more, less than 1 percent of those who underwent a review received an unsatisfactory evaluation.
A few dissenting notes were sounded at today’s board meeting by organizations such as Fair Test, which opposes the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. Meanwhile, some offered support for the new regulations even though they wanted to see an even stronger role for student achievement in the new rules. The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, which supported the new regulations, had called for multiple measures of student achievement to form at least 50 percent of the basis for evaluations, but the board declined to put a fixed number on how much weight to give to test scores and other measures of student performance. “We didn’t get that firm number,” said Linda Noonan, the organization’s executive director. But the regulations “take that major step of including student achievement.”
Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute, said he would have favored making 75 or 80 percent of the evaluation based on MCAS results. “It’s wandered pretty far afield from a laser-like focus on academics,” he said of the evaluation regulations.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s biggest teachers’ union, endorsed the new regulations, even though the union had concerns about whether evaluators will be adequately trained.
The new regulations also call for student feedback on teachers to become a part of the official review of teacher performance. “We’re very excited,” said Ayan Hassan, president of the Boston Student Advisory Council, a student group that lobbied hard for the inclusion of student feedback in the evaluation system. “We’ve been working on this for three years to have a student’s voice in evaluation,” said Hassan, who graduated this month from Boston’s Kennedy Academy for Health Careers and will be a freshman this fall at Northeastern University.
A study last year funded by the Gates Foundation found that student assessment of their teachers correlated very highly with student test score results, suggesting that students are good judges of teacher effectiveness. One implication of the study is that student feedback could be a reliable source of information on teacher effectiveness for those instructors who don’t teach grades or subjects where students take standardized tests.
Mitchell Chester, the state education commissioner, said the bottom line is that the new regulations “put student learning at the center of the process” and make it clear that “teachers matter.”
As state education board member Jeff Howard suggested, the logic of such an approach seems hard to argue with. Whether the regulations lead to rigorous evaluation of teachers and make a meaningful difference in the effectiveness of the state’s teaching force will be, of course, the true test of today’s action.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education favored using MCAS scores as the basis for at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. The organization believes that multiple measures of student achievement, not only MCAS, should form the basis for at least half an educator’s evaluation.
