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Title: Teacher Evaluation

Teacher Evaluation

The Charge and the Challenges

by Kate O'Hara (Volume editor)
©2015 Textbook XVIII, 212 Pages
Education
Series: Counterpoints, Volume 455

Summary

The evaluation of teachers is at the forefront of national discussion, with the divide on the topic growing increasingly deeper. Teachers are under attack, in a war waged from the top down, complete with private entities, standardization, and a limited view of what it means to be «good» or «effective». In both teacher preparation programs and in our public schools, teachers entering the profession and practicing in classrooms face evaluation measures that are biased, unreliable, and reliant upon quantitative outcomes. Teacher Evaluation: The Charge and the Challenges aims to «talk back» to the national rhetoric about teacher evaluation and accountability measures, with a call for all educators, policy makers, activists, scholars, and reformers to engage in critical dialogue and democratic practices.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • Section 1: Critiques and Commentary: Framing the Evaluation Picture
  • Section 2: Dis/Connecting Practice
  • Section 3: Envisioning Change
  • References
  • Section 1: Critiques and Commentary: Framing the Evaluation Picture
  • Chapter 1. Teacher Evaluation in the Current Era: Implications for Teacher Education Policy and Pedagogy
  • Why Educate in a Democracy?
  • Teacher Evaluation Systems and Emerging Constructs for Public Schooling
  • Pillars of Public Schooling
  • The Case of Louisiana and the Expansion of Value-Added Models
  • The Case of Florida: A Political Victory
  • edTPA and Teacher Education
  • Conclusions
  • References
  • Chapter 2. Producing Professionals: Analyzing What Counts for edTPA
  • Structure of the Chapter
  • Thesis
  • Literature Review
  • The Format of edTPA
  • Evaluating the Act of Teaching
  • Rubric 2—Planning to Support Varied Student Learning Needs
  • Rubric 5—Planning Assessment to Monitor and Support Student Learning
  • Quantifying a Complex Process
  • What Is Missing?
  • Summary and Conclusion
  • References
  • Chapter 3. Measurement as Politics by Other Means: the Case of Test-Based Teacher Evaluation
  • Measurement’s Political Imposter
  • A Critique of Operationism
  • Operationism as Governance
  • The Arbitrary Content of the Operational Method
  • Test-Based Teacher Evaluation and Compensation: An Overview
  • The Operational Basis of Test-Based Teacher Evaluation and Compensation
  • The Political Functions of Measuring Effectiveness in New York State
  • An Invitation
  • Notes
  • References
  • Chapter 4. Evaluating Teachers: Making Meaning Out of the Madness
  • At the Start
  • Impact on Local Layers
  • Unfolding: Definitions and Disillusionment
  • Uncovering Flaws
  • Stopping the Madness
  • Notes
  • References
  • Section 2: Dis/Connecting Practice
  • Chapter 5. On the Ramparts: Edtpa and the Fight to Reclaim Our Beloved Profession
  • References
  • Chapter 6. Crash [dis-]Course: a Critical View of Teaching, Testing, and the Times
  • Critical Lens on Tests and Testing
  • Support: The Great Potential Equalizer
  • Metacognitive Experiences Versus Noncritical Thinking
  • Recasting and Revisioning: Teaching Worth Supporting
  • Learning as Community: Situated Learning
  • Closing Thoughts
  • References
  • Chapter 7. Remembrances of Things Past: Teacher Evaluation, High Stakes Testing, and the Marginalization of Social Studies and History Instruction
  • A History of “Quality” Teaching
  • Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching History—Looking for “Quality”
  • Still Searching
  • References
  • Section 3: Envisioning Change
  • Chapter 8. Curricular Relevance: Students’ Needs and Teachers’ Practice
  • Relevance Reviewed
  • Connections to Personal Interests
  • Connections to Culture
  • Connections to the Real World
  • The Study
  • Data Sources
  • Teachers Discuss Students’ Need for Relevance
  • The Discrepancy
  • The Question of the Disconnect
  • References
  • Chapter 9. Aligning Multidimensional Teacher Evaluation with Professional Development Centered on English Language Learners
  • Vision: Images of ELLs and Their Futures
  • Motivation: Reasons and Incentives
  • Reflection: Engaging in Reasoning
  • Knowledge: Uniting Content and Pedagogy
  • Practice: Classroom Instruction
  • Context: Power Relations and Professional Growth
  • QTEL Professional Development
  • Pedagogical Scaffolding
  • Principles of Quality Teaching for English Learners
  • Professional Development Design and Implementation
  • Triangulating Teacher Evaluation
  • Quality Teaching for English Learners Observation Instrument
  • Teacher Portfolios of Student Work
  • Challenges and Possibilities
  • References
  • Chapter 10. How do We Relate to Teachers as Revolutionaries in a System that Evaluates Them?
  • Evaluations and Outcomes
  • Improvising with the Script
  • Evaluation, Alienation, and Stress
  • Revolutionary Teaching Practice: A Marxist Revolutionary Postmodern Methodology
  • Zones of Proximal Development
  • Karl Marx, Let’s Change our Relationship
  • Investigations for Teacher Revolutionaries
  • A Performatory Social Therapeutic Approach to Teacher Evaluation
  • References
  • Contributors
  • Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Chris Myers and Shirley Steinberg for the opportunity to make my vision a reality, and to the authors for their insightful contributions. It has been a pleasure to work with all of you on this project.

A heartfelt thank you to my family and friends, especially my dad, Bill O’Hara, for lending his wordsmith skills at a moment’s notice; Meg and Will, my children, for their love, laughter, and late night chats; Kathi Cochran and Jim Martinez for their friendship and support; and Georgia, Bennie, and Red for their good company. ← ix | x →

← x | xi →

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TEACHER EVALUATION IN THE CURRENT ERA: IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION POLICY AND PEDAGOGY

Kevin Froner and Nicholas M. Michelli

Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the “essentials” of elementary education are the three R’s mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals. Unconsciously it assumes that these ideals are unrealizable; it assumes that in the future, as in the past, getting a livelihood, “making a living,” must dignify for most men and women doing things which are not significant, freely chosen, and ennobling to those who do them; doing things which serve ends unrecognized by those engaged in them, carried on under the direction of others for the sake of pecuniary reward.

John Dewey, Democracy and Education

As public schools prepare for a myriad of new teacher evaluations, including the standardization and in many ways nationalization of our education system, educators (including those in preservice programs) must consider how the emerging culture of accountability, measurement, and general mistrust of teachers will influence their experiences in the classroom. Furthermore, teacher educators must consider how new forms of assessment will likely be used in the evaluation of teacher education programs. As public K-12 schools ← 3 | 4 → prepare students for the global economy, it appears that the overutilization of teacher evaluation models tied to state examinations is causing some to reconsider why we educate in a democracy and others to question the very purpose of public education.

As a former dean of education at two universities and a current New York City principal, it is not our intention as authors to claim that the Common Core State Standards, edTPA (derived from California’s Performance Assessment of California Teachers and the basis for the evaluation of pre-service teachers in an increasing number of states), or teacher evaluation frameworks are the problem in and of themselves, although we point out issues with some of them. Standards and evaluations can be quite valuable if applied in the right context, especially when measuring the more significant educational goals in a democracy.

We will argue, however, that the value-added models increasingly being adopted, in part as a response to Race to the Top, have proven inherently problematic and unreliable when used to make judgments of individual educators (Amrein-Beardsley, 2008; Darling-Hammond, Amrein-Beardsley, Haertel, & Rothstein, 2012; Ladd & Walsh, 2002). One of our greatest concerns is that as the assessment of public education becomes increasingly centered on high-stakes examinations, components that are not easily measured become undervalued. Furthermore, the effect of the current emphasis on high-stakes assessment jeopardizes the culture and climate of schools by increasing stress for principals, teachers, and students.

Let us begin by examining what we believe to be the earliest contexts for public education, including the democratic and civically inspired pillars of schooling.

Why Educate in a Democracy?

How and why we educate in a democracy is a question that has been explored since the establishment of our common school system at the turn of the 18th century, but the current zeitgeist may find its roots in the early twentieth century with the rarely discussed fracture of the Progressive Era education reform movement. During this period, John Dewey and the pedagogical progressives opened schools built on experiential and authentic learning with an emphasis on the development of student-centered classrooms. Some of these institutions are still open today, ironically operating as elite private schools, ← 4 | 5 → serving primarily the most affluent among us. We know that some schools of education still teach Dewey, incorporate the more significant pedagogical ideologies, and prepare candidates who understand constructivism and student-centered learning, but the spirit of the movement has mostly been replaced with the measurable and “scientific.”

The current discourse on measuring effectiveness did not begin with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) but dates back to at least the early 1900s when scientific management swept the private sector and infiltrated our schools (Callahan, 1964). The “cult of efficiency” touched everything and buoyed the reforms of the progressive administrators, who viewed the school as a medium to reform society. A noble idea indeed, but in the end, the progressive politicians built large comprehensive public schools lacking both the rigor from the classic curricula that preceded it and the creativity and inquiry-based approaches fostered by Dewey’s pedagogues (Labaree, 2005). The alignment we find today between the private sector and public schools was arguably augmented during this period as curricular reform led to policy aligned with business interests, including the removal of Greek and Latin, which were replaced with vocational programs. The comprehensive factory-like high schools continued well into the 1980s, when our manufacturing sector collapsed and the advent of the knowledge economy required a rethinking of public education and postsecondary training.

The second dominant theme emerging out of the post-Progressive Era and continuing into the second half of the 20th century was the issue of equity. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision marked a major turning point in integration and the belief that separate was not equal. This was followed by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, the Higher Education Act (HEA) in that same year, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975. It can be argued that all were established to further equal opportunities for educational achievement. The Equality of Educational Opportunity Report published in 1966 (Coleman et al.) emerged from the decade’s milieu, finding that economic conditions played the most significant role in student achievement, a reality understood by most. The report also suggested that beyond socioeconomic limitations, teachers provided the greatest opportunity to effect change within schools. This led to decades of research on teacher effectiveness, the growth of value-added models or measures (VAMs), and most recently, econometric education studies that measure students’ future economic gains correlated with their teachers’ VAM ← 5 | 6 → scores (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2011; Hanushek, 2008; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2005; Haycock & Crawford, 2008; Hopkins & Stern, 1996).

Quantitative research in this field, built on regression analysis that correlates student test scores and future earnings, has been used to bolster the 21st-century economic-education discourse (Chetty et al., 2011; Hanushek, 2010) on the monetary value attributed to quality teaching. The underlying assumptions in such studies have been that effective teachers produce higher student test scores and higher test scores yield more economic opportunities, resulting in higher future earnings for students. The results often produce gross exaggerations and misleading economic implications. With a growing emphasis on public schooling and its role in the economy, we ask the following two questions: What role does civic education and social justice play inside this framework? How is educating for the economy reshaping our goals? Answering these questions is essential to understanding the context for the new evaluation systems and accountability measures.

Teacher Evaluation Systems and Emerging Constructs for Public Schooling

As the new teacher evaluation systems infiltrate nearly every element of public education, including preservice teacher education programs, we find a general lack of resistance to the new measurements beyond very sparse protest and academic critiques that have been overwhelmed by an extraordinary political will to solidify rigid structures for teacher accountability. Systematized and concretized, the art of the possible is being eviscerated in public school classrooms.

VAMs, new teacher performance assessments, and teacher evaluation frameworks have provided means to measure teacher effectiveness and are becoming the dominant instruments for teacher assessment. As the teacher evaluation systems coalesce and align, a construct of teacher accountability has ignited a power transfer from our public schools and schools of education to government bureaucracies and private entities like Pearson. From schools led by educators we are moving to a reliance on complex algorithms that promise to accurately identify teacher effectiveness and student growth. These students are learning and those are not. These teachers are effective and those are not. These programs to prepare teachers are effective and those are not. ← 6 | 7 →

Research shows, however, that VAMs have margins of errors so wide that an ineffective teacher might in fact be very effective and an effective teacher might be thoroughly ineffective, depending on the error or variables absent from the algorithm (Briggs & Domingue, 2011; Darling-Hammond et al., 2012). Politicians and pundits now call for the release of teacher ratings, and scores have been published for school districts and individual schools. What we find is an environment of mistrust, competition, and at times disdain for educators, a culture often absent in many other developed nations. Finland, often cited as an exemplar in public education, has only one major standardized test, and the responsibility of student assessment is afforded to educators, who enjoy a highly regarded status shared with the Nordic nation’s doctors and lawyers. The teachers, not the state, oversee student progress, the design of rigorous assessments, and the creation of learning experiences that encourage the growth and development of all students (Sahlberg, 2007).

The solidification of the current public education construct in the United States is doing just the opposite, with standardized testing at almost every grade level, evaluation frameworks tied to unreliable VAMs, and new performance assessments that appear to transfer the responsibility of evaluating preservice teachers, at least in part, from faculty in schools of education and K-12 schools to Pearson, a multibillion dollar international education company. Furthermore, as the Council for the Accreditation of Education Programs (CAEP) finalizes its new standards, it is clear that VAMs and new teacher evaluations will weigh heavily on schools of education as evidence of success.

Albert Einstein, in several contexts, said, “Not everything that matters can be counted, and not everything we count matters.” What a perfect statement describing the dilemma we face, as some of the most significant goals of public education have become minimized by the overemphasis of testing. In the current public education environment, we find that everything not reduced to quantifiable form is deemed less important or simply ignored.

There is serious evidence, beginning with NCLB, that when the focus of tests is on one or two content areas—in this case language arts and mathematics—those subjects become the focus almost exclusively, with a great deal of time devoted to test preparation. The net effect is a narrowing of the functions and objectives of education to what is included on those tests. ← 7 | 8 →

Pillars of Public Schooling

We believe that there are four purposes of education in a democracy. The first purpose is to prepare students with a deep knowledge of subjects to the level that they can think critically about that knowledge. The second purpose is that learning to live and communicate in a socially just democracy is the very foundation of a civically educated society. This means that we must teach students to listen carefully to others and their positions, to argue for their own position effectively and with evidence, and to compromise within the limits of integrity. The third purpose is to prepare students to take advantage of life’s chances to reach the highest possible levels in society. This involves helping them know what is needed for success and to imagine themselves in colleges and positions that they may not have considered.

Maxine Greene’s (2001) admonition that “we cannot become what we cannot imagine” (p. 47) says a great deal. Do we foster imagination, helping students envision what they can become while raising their hopes and expectations? Do we provide opportunities for them to interact with professionals to understand what they do? Not if we are simply preparing them to take high-stakes tests. The fourth purpose of education is to prepare students to lead rich and rewarding personal lives by helping them develop a love for both fiction and nonfiction, to engage with art, to critique what they read, to become physically fit, and to have a global perspective. Anyone looking at K-12 public schools in our society, and, increasingly, at colleges of education, might conclude that indeed, education exists to prepare students for high-stakes tests.

Details

Pages
XVIII, 212
Publication Year
2015
ISBN (Softcover)
9781433123542
ISBN (PDF)
9781453913932
ISBN (MOBI)
9781454197973
ISBN (ePUB)
9781454197980
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433123559
DOI
10.3726/978-1-4539-1393-2
Language
English
Publication date
2014 (January)
Keywords
national discussion standardization rhetoric
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien, 2015. 212 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Kate O'Hara (Volume editor)

Kate E. O’Hara, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Education at New York Institute of Technology and also an independent curriculum designer and instructional technology specialist. Her scholarship focuses on teacher education in relation to contexts of power, oppression, and social justice as well as the effective use of technology by both teachers and students to develop literacies and enact a critical pedagogy.

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Title: Teacher Evaluation