{"id":6328,"date":"2015-12-21T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coreeducationllc.com\/blog2\/?p=6328"},"modified":"2015-12-16T11:20:45","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T15:20:45","slug":"state-of-the-states-2015-evaluating-teaching-leading-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coreeducationllc.com\/blog2\/state-of-the-states-2015-evaluating-teaching-leading-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading, Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"National_Council_on_Teacher_Quality_(NCTQ)_logo\"<\/a>A new report from the<\/span> National Council on Teacher Quality<\/span><\/a> (NCTQ) examines the policy landscape of teacher and principal evaluations, as well as various states\u2019 successes in using evaluations to inform teacher practice and administrative decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n

As of 2015, twenty-seven states require annual evaluations for all teachers, and forty-five require annual evaluations for all new, probationary teachers. Forty-three states require objective measures of student achievement to be included in teacher evaluations; seventeen use student growth as the \u201cpreponderant\u201d criterion for evaluations; and an additional eighteen count growth measures as \u201csignificant\u201d criteria.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite these new policies, however, NCTQ sees a \u201ctroubling pattern\u201d: The overwhelming majority of teachers are still labeled as \u201ceffective\u201d or \u201chighly effective.\u201d NCTQ notes this could be the result of several factors, including the fact that few states utilize multiple observations and multiple observers\u2014which is problematic because many principals are either unable or unwilling to \u201cmake distinctions about teacher skills\u201d when conducting observations. In addition, Student Learning Objectives (SLOs)\u2014which are required or allowed by twenty-two states\u2014are often a poor measure of teacher performance because teachers either lack the data and assessment training to select the best achievement goals or are indirectly incentivized to set low goals. (The other problem is that managers<\/span> won\u2019t give bad reviews<\/span><\/a> to staffers they can\u2019t fire, which is still the case in the vast majority of schools.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Thirty-four states also require annual evaluations for all principals. Despite this majority, many principal evaluation policies lack important features. For instance, policies in twenty-two states do not identify who is responsible for conducting principal evaluations, and only twenty-seven states actually require principal evaluators to receive training. Most worrisome, there are ten states where teachers\u2014but not principals\u2014can be dismissed based on evaluation results. Given the monumental importance of effective school leadership, this is indeed troublesome.<\/span><\/p>\n

NCTQ concludes the report with the following recommendations:<\/span><\/p>\n