Teachers matter: Measures of teacher effectiveness in low-income minority schools

Abstract

Teachers make a difference in student academic growth. Students from low-income, minority communities attend schools with less resources and less qualified teachers than students in wealthier communities. The Race to the Top (RTTT) policy by the U.S. Department of Education has attempted to address the achievement gap based on SES and the disparity in the quality of teachers between communities. The policy stipulates that teacher effectiveness be determined, in significant part, by student growth measures and supplemented with multiple observation-based assessments. The emphasis placed on student outcomes to indicate teacher effects has served to link teacher evaluations with teacher effectiveness. This review article examines the reported benefits and critical responses to the use of a prominent student growth measure, the Education ValueAdded Assessment System (EVAAS), in terms of its implementation as an evaluation tool of teacher effectiveness in low-income, minority schools. Models of observational teacher evaluations, taking into consideration common attributes of effective teachers in low-income schools, are presented as supplemental measures to provide more in-depth information to interpret value-added analyses and to minimize possible misinterpretation of student growth data or the misclassification of teachers' effectiveness for teachers in low-income schools. Information obtained from a combination of evaluation measures can be used to identify both effective and ineffective teachers, to target areas in need of improvement to increase teacher effectiveness, and to make decisions concerning the equitable distribution of effective teachers, especially for students who are most in need.

Assessing the quality of teachers’ teaching practices

“…With the increasing call for use of observation-based assessments to evaluate the quality of teaching (Fenstermacher and Richardson 2005;Mangiante 2011), the results of this study confirm that the AQTR is a reliable and valid observational assessment tool to distinguish the quality levels of teachers' teaching practices in classroom settings. Although the performance indicators of each critical teaching component in the AQTR are specific to the context of physical education teaching, the four essential dimensions in the AQTR represent essential dimensions of quality teaching practices and are generic to teaching across subject areas.…”

“…Although the performance indicators of each critical teaching component in the AQTR are specific to the context of physical education teaching, the four essential dimensions in the AQTR represent essential dimensions of quality teaching practices and are generic to teaching across subject areas. Meeting the critical needs for multiple measures of quality teaching (Mangiante 2011), this study suggests that the AQTR could be used as an observational tool to assess the quality of teachers' teaching practices both in the field of physical education and general education.…”

What do professional learning policies say about purposes of teacher education?

“…In the United States there has been an exponential growth in the use of 'value added teacher evaluation' model (see Chetty, Friedman & Rockoff, 2011), which supports both human capital and socialisation purposes of teacher education, but undoubtedly thwarts notions of subjectification. Critics of the valueadded teacher evaluation approach point to the unintended effects of such wholesale performativity measures, warning that being measured in such a way is likely to discourage teachers from working with students who are less likely to score highly on standardised tests (Mangiante, 2011). This approach, focusing very much on a human capital view of teacher education, arguably works against democratic principles and the furthering of a wide, generic education which emphasises skill and attitudes, and not just knowledge.…”

interpretative phenomenological analysis exploring teacher experiences of educator evaluation in Massachusetts

“…Educational reform initiatives in recent decades have led to the enactment of policies that have expanded the federal government's influence in the realm of public 121 education. Legislation that called for greater school accountability was eventually superseded by efforts to revise educator evaluation mechanisms to better reflect student achievement (Amrein-Beardsley & Collins, 2012;Mangiante, 2011). As a Race to the Top recipient, Massachusetts amended its education regulations, and superintendents were informed that their districts needed to modify their evaluation methods to comply with the regulations.…”

“…Over time, NCLB's requirements became increasingly burdensome for school districts, and critics claimed that the legislation could never realize its intended objectives if student achievement was measured using standardized tests (Gay, 2007 (Mangiante, 2011). Often referred to as Race to the Top (RTTT), this federal initiative committed millions of dollars in federal support to states that adopted measures to more accurately determine the value a teacher adds to student learning from year to year (Amrein-Beardsley & Collins, 2012).…”