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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > December > 10
Friday, December 10, 2010
Guest column: Ohio needs a better way to grade teachers’ impact
This commentary was written by Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education research organization that is a supporter of charter schools.
Taxpayers invest a lot in their teachers, and good ones are worth every penny. Nothing impacts student performance more than great teachers. Conversely, weak teachers can do irreparable damage. This alone should prompt Ohio to glean as much information as possible about teacher effectiveness.
Moreover, in the face of Ohio’s impending budget cliff and the teacher layoffs the financial crisis will force, defining teacher effectiveness has become more urgent. Consider two pots of federal money that have propped up Ohio’s education spending: the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the August 2010 infusion of “Ed Jobs” money.
Ohio received nearly a billion dollars for education alone from ARRA (funding that dries up in July 2011), which saved or created about 9,000 education jobs. Ed Jobs funding expires in 2012. That $361 million saved about 5,000 teaching jobs.
To say that layoffs will occur en masse is an understatement. As Ohio bides its time waiting for federal dollars to run out, it must come up with strategies to keep the most effective teachers in classrooms.
We know very little about the effectiveness of teachers in Ohio beyond anecdotal evidence. Current teacher evaluations do not distinguish highly effective teachers from the rest, nor do they weed out poor performers.
Further, archaic human resources practices prevent us from retaining, rewarding and supporting teachers based on their effectiveness.
In fact, we pay long-serving, but ineffectual, teachers more than we pay less senior high-fliers. We reward teachers for their credentials and advanced degrees, but offer the same pay for teachers whether their students thrive or languish. And we lay off teachers based solely on seniority.
Since 2007, Ohio has collected value-added data in both reading and mathematics that can be used to help determine teacher performance. This information is already used to measure performance of individual schools and entire districts, and it plays a key role in determining whether persistently low-performing charter schools should be shut down.
Further, the well-regarded Battelle for Kids has been doing excellent work to help educators use value-added data as a diagnostic tool for improving instruction.
It is time to start using value-added data as a key component of teacher evaluations. With teacher layoffs looming, superintendents and principals need the tools to dismiss or furlough their least productive teachers while keeping their most successful ones. Although not perfect, the best metric for measuring teacher effectiveness is value-added data. This data works in the same fashion as the state’s current value-added model for assessing school performance.
In short, the tests attempt to measure whether students actually make a year’s worth of academic progress, whether or not they started the school year behind or ahead of where they should be for their grade level.
Data from a few students might not be enough to reach any definitive conclusions about teacher effectiveness, but looking at achievement gains across multiple students and multiple years provides the clearest snapshot of a teacher’s effectiveness.
Critics argue that since existing test results are lacking, or because they currently only exist for math and reading in grades 4-8, that they shouldn’t be used to evaluate teachers. That logic is upside down.
Even if we only know what’s occurring with math and reading teachers, that’s not a reason not to use that data. And we should speed up efforts to collect information on student progress in other subject areas.
Value-added measures shouldn’t be the only criterion used to decide dismissals, tenure, salaries and school placement, but they have to be part of the equation.
As Ohio tackles a historic budget deficit, school districts have to be allowed to keep their best teachers — as measured by what students are really learning.
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