In conclusion
New approaches to teacher evaluation should take advantage of research on teacher effectiveness. While there are considerable challenges in using value-added test scores to evaluate individual teachers directly, using value-added methods in research can help validate measures that are productive for teacher evaluation.

Research indicates that value-added measures of student achievement tied to individual teachers should not be used for high-stakes, individual-level decisions, or comparisons across highly dissimilar schools or student populations. Valid interpretations require aggregate-level data and should ensure that background factors — including overall classroom composition — are as similar as possible across groups being compared. In general, such measures should be used only in a low-stakes fashion when they’re part of an integrated analysis of teachers’ practices.

Standards-based evaluation processes have also been found to be predictive of student learning gains and productive for teacher learning. These include systems like National Board certification and performance assessments for beginning teacher licensing as well as district and school-level instruments based on professional teaching standards. Effective systems have developed an integrated set of measures that show what teachers do and what happens as a result. These measures may include evidence of student work and learning, as well as evidence of teacher practices derived from observations, video- tapes, artifacts, and even student surveys.

These tools are most effective when embedded in systems that support evaluation expertise and well- grounded decisions, by ensuring that evaluators are trained, evaluation and feedback are frequent, mentoring and professional development are available, and processes are in place to support due process and timely decision making by an appropriate body.

With these features in place, evaluation can be- come a more useful part of a productive teaching and learning system, supporting accurate information about teachers, helpful feedback, and well-grounded personnel decisions.

Kappan magazine - Teacher evaluation

The Shanker Institute has a very comprehensive look at the year in corporate education reform research. It covers 3 basic areas

Charter schools
Performance pay
Value-added in evaluations

All topics we have covered in some length at JTF. You can view a lot of the research we have brought forward at our document center at SCRIBD.

If 2010 was the year of the bombshell in research in the three “major areas” of market-based education reform – charter schools, performance pay, and value-added in evaluations – then 2011 was the year of the slow, sustained march.

Last year, the landmark Race to the Top program was accompanied by a set of extremely consequential research reports, ranging from the policy-related importance of the first experimental study of teacher-level performance pay (the POINT program in Nashville) and the preliminary report of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project, to the political controversy of the Los Angeles Times’ release of teachers’ scores from their commissioned analysis of Los Angeles testing data.

In 2011, on the other hand, as new schools opened and states and districts went about the hard work of designing and implementing new evaluations compensation systems, the research almost seemed to adapt to the situation. There were few (if any) “milestones,” but rather a steady flow of papers and reports focused on the finer-grained details of actual policy.*

Nevertheless, a review of this year’s research shows that one thing remained constant: Despite all the lofty rhetoric, what we don’t know about these interventions outweighs what we do know by an order of magnitude.

Alas, the piece concludes with much the same problem we have been documenting all year long, the headlong, unreasoned, non collaborative rush to implement corporate education reform policies whose impacts at best are unknown and at worst are highly damaging to student achievement and the public education system

Overall, then, it was a productive research year in the three areas discussed above, and it might have been even more productive but for the fact that, in too many cases, the policy decisions this work could have guided had already been made.

It has been a difficult year for those seeking to defend public education from the plethora of corporate reform policies, and next year is bound to see the continuation of this struggle. But once where there were few voices opposing these damaging policies of privatization, there are now many more.

The corporate education reformers are going to have to work a lot harder and be more accountable than they have ever have.

Popular modes of evaluating teachers are fraught with inaccuracies

A difficult year