Tyler: Projects
Identifying Effective Classroom Practice Using Student Achievement: Evidence from Cincinnati’s Teacher Evaluation System
In the search for effective teachers, a growing number of school districts are turning to two different approaches. One approach seeks to measure teachers’ productivity on the job directly, using the achievement of their students (adjusted for each student’s prior test scores) as an indicator of effective teaching (value-added). A second approach seeks to measure and evaluate the use of effective instructional practices in the classroom.
While sometimes seen as alternatives to one another, we believe that these two approaches are complementary. First, in order to design tools for evaluating effective teaching practices, school leaders need to a fact base on which classroom practices to encourage. The value-added approach provides a non-circular way for validating those practices deemed as effective. Second, value-added estimation of teacher effectiveness itself has significant limitations. For instance, this approach is currently limited to a handful of grades (typically 4th through 8th grade) and subjects (math and language arts) where students are tested on an annual basis. This means that roughly two-thirds of teachers are not “covered” by this approach. As school leaders still need instruments to evaluate performance in these classrooms, practice-based rubrics will be necessary. Third, because of the small number of students in a given classroom and other sources of statistical imprecision, “value-added” measures are subject to measurement error. Practice-based measures could supplement value-added measures to provide a more complete assessment of a teacher’s effectiveness.
In this joint project with Prof. Tom Kane of Harvard, we propose to study the potentially complementary relationship between value-added measures of teacher effectiveness and a well-developed practice-based evaluation system in Cincinnati – the Teacher Evaluation System (TES). We will seek answers to three general questions:
- Which of the standards included of the TES (there are sixteen standards) have the most predictive power in identifying high “value-added” teaching? How should the various components of the TES be weighted to maximize the ability to identify high “value-added” teachers? (In the current system, all 16 are given equal weight.)
- Does the TES measure improvement in instructional practice? In other words, is there any evidence that those teachers whose TES scores improve (or decline) over time have larger (or smaller) impacts on their students’ achievement?
- Are some principals or peer assessors better than others at identifying high value-added teachers? Are all raters equally good at using the TES scoring rubric to identify effective teaching? If not, what are the characteristics of the more successful raters?