Much of the recent focus of the education policymakers has been on improving the measurement of teacher effectiveness. Linking student growth to teacher effects has been a large part of reform efforts. To date , neither researchers nor practitioners have arrived at a consensus on how to treat test scores from students with disabilities in growth based teacher effectiveness indicators despite the fact that these students make up approximately 13% of the k-12 student population. In this study we leverage longitudinal data from the population of teachers in one state to explore practical questions related to including general assessment scores from student with disabilities in teacher evaluation . finding suggest that including test scores from students with disabilities allow more teachers to be evaluated and does not substantially affect teachers scores. Moreover including disability related covariates can allow for fairer evaluations for teacher with many students with disabilities in their class.
Evaluation by competent supervisors and peers , employing such approaches should from the foundation of teacher evaluation systems with a supplemental role played by multiple measures of student learning gains that where appropriate should include test scores. Given the importance of teachers collective efforts to improve overall student achievement in a school, an additional component of documenting practice and outcomes should focus on the effectiveness of teacher participation in teams and the contributions they make to school wide improvement , through work in curriculum development , sharing practices and materials, peer coaching and reciprocal observation and collegial work with students.
In some districts peer assistance and review programs using standards based evaluations that incorporate evidence of student learning supported by expert teachers who can offer intensive assistance and panels of administrators and teaching that oversee personnel decisions have been successful in coaching teachers , identifying teachers for intervention providing them assistance and efficiently counselling out those who do not improve. In other comprehensive systems have been developed for examining teacher performance in concert with evidence about outcomes for purposes of personnel decision making and compensation.
Given the range of measures currently available for teacher evaluation and the need for research about their effective implementation and consequences , legislatures should avoid imposing mandated solutions to the complex problem of identifying more or less effective teachers. School districts should be given freedom to experiments and professional organizations should assume greater responsibility for developing standards of evaluation that districts can use such work, which must be performed by professional experts should not be pre empted by political institutions acting without evidence. The rule followed by any reformer of public schools should be : “first do no harm”.
Evaluators may find it useful to take student test score information into account in their evaluations of teachers provide such information is embedded in a more comprehensive approach.
What is now necessary is a comprehensive system that gives teachers the guidance and feedback supportive leadership and working conditions to improve their performance and that permits schools to remove persistently ineffective teachers without distorting the entire instructional program by imposing a flawed system of standardized quantification of teacher quality.