Who Grades the Graders?
While we had mixed feelings about President Obama’s plans for reworking the No Child Left Behind Act, he got it right when he called on the states to create credible systems for evaluating teachers and principals. But emulating the small number of schools that already have those systems will not be easy. It will mean creating a new school culture and redefining not just the roles of teachers, but the roles of principals and superintendents.
That message comes through in a study from the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank that has recently been zeroing in on this aspect of school policy. The study, by the researchers Morgaen Donaldson and Heather Peske, takes an illuminating look at the evaluation systems used in schools in three high- performing charter networks that educate mainly poor and minority children.
Charter schools run on public money but are often exempt from union contracts that can influence how and when teacher evaluations are done. In many conventional schools, for example, tenured teachers are evaluated only once every three or four years. Evaluations typically consist of one or two short classroom visits. Nearly every teacher passes, even at failing schools, and an overwhelming majority get top ratings.
The charter networks have developed a “culture of accountability,” in which every teacher receives a major evaluation every year. Beyond that, teachers get frequent observations — sometimes even weekly — accompanied by detailed feedback throughout the academic year. Student test scores factor into the evaluation, but the teachers are also rated on planning, presentation and whether or not they reach disparate groups of students by exploring material from different vantage points.
Only one of the of three charter school organizations in the study operates union-organized schools. The other two regard teachers as at-will employees who can be released at any time. Nevertheless, dismissal rates are low for all three, partly because they provide newcomers with extensive supports and work to retain them once they master the job.
Doing this kind of work means reallocating resources. Two of the charter networks, for example, have invested heavily both in evaluators and in administrators who shoulder the burden of running school operations so that principals can spend more time helping teachers and attending to the education portion of the job. Given the high tests scores and graduation rates in these schools, these changes have been well worth it.
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