NYC requires more points to be rated proficient than other districts:
teachers in Fairfax County, Va., and
Philadelphia needed to earn 50 percent of the total available evaluation
points to be deemed proficient. But in Miami-Dade and New York City,
they needed to earn closer to 75 percent of the total points.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2017/11/test_scores_lower_teacher_evaluation_ratings.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2&M=58259317&U=24075
If you've been following the teacher evaluation debates at any point
over the last decade or so, you know that states and districts have
waffled on whether and how student achievement should be incorporated
into a teacher's rating.
Should value-added scores—which
aim to isolate how much a teacher has contributed to a student's
learning, as measured by tests—be a part of the calculation? Should they
count for 50 percent of the evaluation rating? Or 35 percent? Or 10?
And there are less-discussed questions about the elements of teacher
evaluation: Should student perceptions of a teacher be included? How
much should they count for? And out of the total number of points
available on an evaluation, how many should a teacher need to earn to be
considered effective?
It's fair to say that these decisions have often been made at the
state and district levels somewhat arbitrarily. If test scores made up
50 percent of an evaluation and that seemed too high, the state or
district might dial that back to 35 percent or 20 percent. (See Washington, D.C. and Tennessee as examples.)
A new study takes an in-depth look at how the weights and thresholds
used in an evaluation system affect teachers' ratings—and finds that
teachers with similar underlying scores (including observation,
value-added, and student survey measures) can get significantly
different outcomes from one place to the next.
"We've
invested huge amounts of time and money and political capital in
redesigning teacher evaluation systems, and there's a lot of moving
parts in those systems," said Matthew Kraft, an assistant professor of 
education and economics at Brown University and co-author of the study. "These features are critical."
The researchers looked at data from about 1,300 teachers who participated in the Measures of Effective Teaching study, a large-scale, multiyear research project that was funded by a $45 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
"We find that teacher proficiency rates change substantially as the
weights assigned to teacher performance measures change," says the study, recently published in Educational Researcher.
Proficiency rates also change substantially when "the same teachers are
evaluated using different performance ratings thresholds."
The chart on the right from the report puts evaluation systems
from eight districts onto a common scale. (These were systems used in
2013 and 2015.) Teachers are proficient if they are deemed Level 3 or 4.
As you can see, teachers in Fairfax County, Va., and
Philadelphia needed to earn 50 percent of the total available evaluation
points to be deemed proficient. But in Miami-Dade and New York City,
they needed to earn closer to 75 percent of the total points.
Ratings Still High Overall
Among the most important findings from this new study: When
value-added scores are incorporated into evaluations, the ratings tend
to go down. And the more weight a system puts on value-added scoring,
the lower the scores are likely to be, the study showed.
That's because value-added scores tend to be relative measures,
explained Kraft. Value added is generally "designed to just compare you
to your peers," he said. "Everybody can't be good with value added."
On the other hand, with classroom observation scores, everyone can be excellent, he said.
And that leads to a huge caveat in all of this: As it stands, despite the variation in systems, almost all teachers across the country continue to get positive ratings.
That's largely because observation scores make up the meat of most
teacher evaluation systems, said Kraft. And as we know from previous
research, principals tend to rate their teachers highly.
See also:
In NY our ELA tests do not accurately measure progress. The requirements under Danelson are unreasonable and often unrealistic. We are not evaluating teachers fairly. There is no data, no research no amount of bullshit that will change that fact. Our union and the politicians our union supports are doing nothing to bring us a fair and appropriate evaluation system. And no amount of bullshit can change that fact either. Blaming teachers for low test scores is akin to blaming doctors for the poor results of their patients' blood work, EKGs etc... Yesterday I witnessed a troubled student hallucinate. His teacher will be judged on his test scores and his teacher will be judged under Danielson--a rubric that requires the students to monitor and correct one another's behavior. Imagine a another child trying to correct the behavior of the hallucinating student. Imagine being told you are not highly effective because children can't control the behavior of other children. That's Danielson. This is just one scenario. I could list so many more scenarios to detail the absurdity of the evaluation system but why bother....teachers already know what's on the list and people who aren't teachers don't give a damn. Roseanne McCosh
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