By Amber Arellano/Education Trust-Midwest
Students in Michigan are increasingly falling behind their peers in other states, including states that are making major investments in their teachers.
Michigan, meanwhile, has struggled to develop its teachers. A report by my organization, the nonprofit Education Trust-Midwest, helps to explain why: Our local school districts and charter schools have diligently tried, but failed, to produce constructive, reliable teacher evaluation systems that lead to real classroom improvements for students.
The good news is state political and educational leaders have a chance in the coming months to create Michigan’s first teacher support and evaluation system, with a focus on giving teachers the feedback and training they deserve — yet so often fail to receive.
If we’re serious as a state about raising student learning, there is nothing more important than investing in strategies to help our teachers improve. Research shows that teaching quality is the most important in-school factor in a student’s success.
Amber Arellano is executive director of Education Trust-Midwest, whose “goal is to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement for all children, particularly those from low-income families or who are African American, Latino or American Indian, in Michigan and beyond.”
Unlike leading states, Michigan lacks a common definition of effective teaching, leaving it up to every school, administrator or teacher preparation program to develop their own visions of quality teaching. That must change.
What will it take? Three things:
* This winter, the Legislature and Governor’s Office must fund a serious, research-based teacher evaluation system for use by next fall.
* Experts on the Michigan Council for Educator Effectiveness must develop such a system by the spring, including rigorous state standards for those local districts and charters that seek to use their own model. The state must also provide feedback and oversight, particularly in the first years of implementation.
* The Legislature needs to approve the council’s work by June 2013.
Clearly, the patchwork of local evaluation systems isn’t cutting it. Our report examined the quality of more than two dozen systems created by local districts and charters across Michigan for the 2011-12 school year. Despite their hard work, these systems all lacked at least one key, research-based component that would ensure high-quality evaluation and professional development.
That’s not a knock on local officials – they simply do not have the expertise or the capacity to develop these complex systems.
Where did these systems falter?
* Reliability. State law requires that part of a teacher’s evaluation be based on how much students learn during the school year. Yet not one of the 28 models surveyed contained a student growth measure that was technically sound. Some schools also did not apply the same performance criteria to all teachers.
* Master teachers. Smart evaluation takes time that many administrators lack. Michigan must develop new roles for high-performing teachers to assist administrators with evaluations and share their expertise with colleagues.
* Clear methods and feedback. Many districts or charter networks used checklist-style observation forms that tell teachers almost nothing about how they might improve. Most systems also were unclear on how to combine student growth with other performance measures. Teachers may not get fair evaluations without proper scoring frameworks.
Despite these challenges, we recognize that much good is coming out of local efforts to develop evaluation systems. Still, our schools clearly need the guidance and resources that leading states provide. Michigan leaders need to ensure that greater accountability for teacher performance comes with greater support. To make teacher evaluations truly about helping teachers improve, we also need to ensure that individual teacher evaluation ratings will not be released to the public. Why is this so important? By forcing schools to make such information public, as a new bill proposes, it would have a chilling effect on districts’ efforts to give honest evaluations, which would help prevent struggling teachers from getting the help that they need.
That would be a disservice to everyone, especially children.
It is imperative that Michigan gets this work right. It’s important to teachers, who work long hours and never stop trying to get better. And it’s essential for students, whose academic futures are inextricably tied to teacher performance.
The new state data find that about 97% of the state’s 96,000 teachers were rated effective or highly effective during the 2011-12 school year — the first year districts had to assign one of four ratings to teachers. Those ratings were: highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.
Some of the state’s worst-performing schools doled out favorable ratings to teachers: 48 of the state’s 146 priority schools — so named because they are in the bottom 5% academically — rated all of their teachers in the top two categories. Several said all of their teachers were highly effective.
But state data also show that more teachers in priority schools were rated in the bottom categories than other schools.
The data isn’t surprising given that it was the first year districts had to report the effectiveness ratings, said Jan Ellis, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Education.
The ratings will likely change, she said, “once there’s a more common system and a common measurement.”
That common system will come via the work of the Michigan Council for Educator Effectiveness, a panel working to develop a statewide system for evaluating educators, as well as guidelines for districts that opt to develop their own system.
The fact that few teachers were rated ineffective makes the work of the council crucial, experts say.
It tells the council “that districts need a lot of support and assistance in how to move forward,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president and managing director of state policy for the National Council on Teacher Quality.
That point is also illustrated in a report out today by the Education Trust-Midwest, which analyzed the evaluation systems in 28 school districts and found few of the systems met a set of standards they say research indicates are necessary for a strong system.
“All of them fell short on at least one component. Many fell short on all of them,” said Drew Jacobs, a data and policy analyst for the Education Trust-Mid-west, a Royal Oak-based nonprofit education policy organization.
Among those standards: having annual observations; using state test data in evaluating teachers for whom the data is available; providing specific directions on how to score all criteria that teachers are evaluated on, and having a sophisticated observation process.
The observation process — in which an evaluator comes into a teacher’s classroom to observe — is where schools tend to struggle, said Robert Floden, co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University.
What’s missing, he said, are resources. Teachers should be observed multiple times by an evaluator, but that’s often difficult given the amount of time that goes into multiple observations.
“The system we have — and Michigan is not unique — says it’s really important … but the system does not invest resources in making that happen,” Floden said.
Those resources are crucial, however.
“In order for this to have the kind of impact educators and families want to see … there needs to be a significant amount of investment so teachers really benefit and grow as educators,” said Nate Walker, a policy analyst at the American Federation of Teachers-Michigan.
Grading teachers proves tricky
97% given favorable ratings from schools, underscoring need for statewide standard
A first look at how effective teachers are across the state provides a clear picture of just how far school districts must go to have strong evaluation systems in place that give teachers the kind of feedback they need to improve.
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