A stakeholder meeting this week in Austin provided an update on a significant initiative under way in Texas to devise a new state measure of educator effectiveness. The Project on Educator Effectiveness and Quality, conducted under a contract with the Texas Education Agency by scholars at the University of Texas, is designed to ?develop a metric that measures a teacher?s effect on student achievement.? This project does not bear directly on the state system of teacher appraisal. But the metric being devised to gauge beginning teachers? effect on student achievement for the purpose of evaluating educator-preparation programs?as required by a legislative mandate enacted in 2009?is sure to become a key reference point for further debate on teacher evaluation methodology per se.
Regular Hotline readers will recall that proposed changes in evaluation methodology were hotly debated in the 2011 legislative session. Ill-conceived efforts to promote the misuse of students? scores on standardized state tests as a crucial factor in evaluations were thwarted. Regrettably, though, Texas AFT?s alternative proposal of local ?trials,? or pilot projects, to test evaluation options developed in partnership between teachers and their school districts also was blocked.
For now, that stand-off leaves the UT project on teacher evaluation for purposes of judging ed-prep programs as the main arena for discussion of this important topic. The UT scholars in charge of this project have said repeatedly that the new metric will have a limited purpose. But it is inevitable that their work product will influence the ongoing debate on changes in teacher evaluation generally.
The ?characteristics of an effective metric? identified by the UT project team sound sensible. They say: ?A metric to determine a teacher?s effect on student achievement should be comprehensive, useful, reliable, valid, and transparent.? They helpfully add that ?the metric should include observations of the teacher in the classroom and other indicators that capture information that test scores do not.? So far, so good.
The project team has come up with a definition of ?a comprehensive metric to determine a teacher?s effect on student achievement.? Such a metric, they say, is one that includes ?measures of growth in student performance, observations of teachers, principals? comprehensive assessment of teachers, and school-wide growth in student performance.? But here is where matters get sticky. The basis of measuring growth in student learning will be the state achievement test (TAKS, soon to be superseded by STAAR). The fact is that purported ?measures of growth,? including test-based valued-added methodologies, are available, but their merits are hotly disputed. The current state of the scientific evidence on value-added methodologies militates strongly against using them for high-stakes employment decisions, according to the broad range of disinterested experts in the field. This scholarly consensus prevails despite the current vogue for value-added methodologies among policy-makers who are taken with the latest fad or just looking for short cuts.
The UT scholars say ?the weighting of the metric?s components will be determined empirically and with input from stakeholders.? We shall see. Meanwhile the project moves ahead, with a student-teacher data link established by October and with a ?pilot metric? to be available in March 2012.
The end-product envisioned by 2013 is a metric that will allow a ?total score? to be assigned to individual first-year through third-year teachers based on the various components of the metric. These total scores will then be aggregated by educator-prep programs and used to gauge the quality of those programs.
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