A new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says students’ gains in test scores is one of the strongest predictors of teacher effectiveness, apparently validating D.C.’s controversial teacher evaluation tool and drawing fire from union critics. The preliminary findings of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project say that teachers’ past ability to raise student performance on state exams is one of the biggest predictors that the teacher would continue to oversee big test gains, and is “among the strongest predictors of his or her students’ achievement growth in other classes and academic years.”
Teachers with these high “value-added scores” — named for increasing a student’s achievement level
— were also more likely to increase students’ grasp of math concepts and reading comprehension through writing practices.
The landmark contract between D.C. Public Schools and the Washington Teachers’ Union, brokered in June, holds District teachers responsible for student test scores for the first time, with 50 percent of a teacher’s effectiveness based on students’ scores. The evaluation tool, Impact, has been contested by the 165 teachers who were fired by then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee for their poor evaluations and has come under fire from the new union president, Nathan Saunders.
“Student achievement is more than just a test score,” Saunders said through a spokesman after reviewing the report. “A test score is just a snapshot of a given day.”
Saunders urged the project officials to keep in mind other factors that he said affect test scores, “such as social conditions beyond a teacher’s control that include poverty and family dysfunction.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the national teachers union, said she was disappointed that the report, which analyzed only partial data, was “rushed out.”
“The hope of METS was to figure out the kind of instructional practices that would help improve student achievement over time, but this preliminary report does not do that,” Weingarten said. “It seems that only one piece of the study was ready — some data on the controversial value-added method — of which the project’s director, Dr. Tom Kane, is a well-known advocate.”
The Measures of Effecting Teaching Project, started in fall 2009, observed 13,000 classrooms last school year with the goal to “help build fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and feedback to help teachers improve and administrators make better personnel decisions.”
The Gates Foundation will publish more results in the spring and final results next winter.
