By Charles Barone, Policy Director & Mac LeBuhn, Assistant Policy Analyst
In case you missed it, the New York Times had an article in its Sunday edition with a familiar theme: “Curious Grade for Teachers: Nearly All Pass.”
Unfortunately, the article was about recent results from new teacher evaluation systems being implemented by three states: Florida, where 97% of teachers were deemed “effective” or “highly effective;” Michigan, where 98% were rated “effective;” and, Tennessee, where 98% of teachers “met expectations.”
These are the very same TNTP “Widget Effect” results that new teacher evaluation systems were intended to remedy. Mac likened this to “someone who finds out that she spent $100,000 on improvements to her Neon only to end up with a Jetta.”
Here are three things to keep in mind when interpreting these results and using them to inform future efforts.
1) The problem underlying this lack of differentiation and failure to provide feedback according to high standards is not a technical one. Rather, it is part of a deep-seated culture that operates throughout the education system.
Here are a few examples:
- The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has found that the GPA’s of education majors – which average 3.41 nationwide – are higher than those for other majors such as social science (2.96) and science (2.67).
- NCES also found that education majors’ GPAs show much less variability than other tracks. In contrast to the GPAs of college students majoring in other subjects, which are spread out along a traditional bell-shaped curve (from 1.0-4.0), the GPAs of education majors range almost exclusively between 3.0 and 4.0. In other words, the vast majority of education majors receive grades that indicate they are either doing very well or excellent.
- Unlike other university-based professional preparation programs such as law or medicine, most of those that train teachers report passage rates on state licensing exams at or just below 100% due to statistical sleights of hand and exploitation of regulatory loopholes that they helped design.
Sound familiar?
Technical changes alone won’t fix teacher evaluations. Change will only come from more fundamental challenges to the culture of mediocrity in the world of mainstream education. This change will have to extend from the recruitment of teachers all the way through the ethos and norms adopted by school administrators who, as is clear in the NYT article, are part of what is holding teacher evaluation systems back from being more meaningful and rigorous.