This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Missouri is moving ahead with developing a system to evaluate how well teachers are doing their jobs, but parents and others interested in public schools shouldn’t count on seeing the results.
Instead, education officials say, the results will be used only by schools and districts to help make their teachers better. And another system being developed by the state is designed to help ensure that would-be teachers have what it takes to succeed before they even get their certification.
The twin goals are to make sure that people who want to be teachers get the right training, and once they are working with students, they are performing as effectively as possible.
“Our job,” says Paul Katnik, Missouri’s assistant commissioner with the office of educator quality, “is to give superintendents and principals the best tools to get the best information they can, so they can provide great teachers in each and every classroom. That way, parents don’t have to worry about whether students are going to get a good teacher.”
In the school year that is coming to a close, 105 districts and charter schools in Missouri took part in the first part of a pilot evaluation program. The state did not tell the schools precisely how the evaluations were supposed to be conducted, only that they were supposed to follow seven guiding principles, from how much student achievement grew to how much feedback educators got on their performance.
Responses this year will be used to modify the evaluation program during the summer for another round this fall. Under Missouri’s waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind program, approved last June, all public schools in the state will take part in the program beginning in the fall of 2014.
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The state board of education voted on Tuesday to give final approval to the model evaluation system.
"Quality educators are key to student learning," said education commissioner Chris L. Nicastro in a news release following the vote. "An effective evaluation system provides teachers and school leaders with feedback that will contribute to their development and performance throughout their careers."
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Meanwhile, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is working on a program known as Missouri Educator Gateway Assessments, or MEGA, that is designed to make sure that anyone who wants to become a teacher has the knowledge and the temperament to make it in a profession known for a high burnout rate.
Using the same principles as the teacher evaluation system, the assessments being devised now will try to ensure that the teacher preparation programs in the state are both rigorous and realistic.
“It’s not designed to be something to cut people off at the knees, if they want to be a teacher,” said Gale “Hap” Hairston, Missouri’s director of educator preparation, retention and recruitment. “We want to make them aware of what teachers need to know and do.”
Evaluating current teachers
The pilot evaluation program introduced at the beginning of the current school year operates on seven basic principles that should be used to judge how well teachers are doing their jobs:
- Measuring performance based on research-based and proven practices
- Using differentiated levels of performance
- Highlighting the probationary period as a significant time of intensive support
- Including measures of growth in student learning as evidence of performance
- Providing regular, timely and meaningful feedback on performance
- Including standardized and ongoing training for evaluators
- Using evaluation results to inform employment decisions and policy
The pilot program began with districts using those principles but without the state creating specific forms for districts to use when applying those principles to evaluations. The purpose, Katnik said, was to make the plan broad enough to guide all districts but flexible enough to let them figure out how the principles should be applied.
Data from the districts in the first year of the effort are still being collected and analyzed, but Katnik said some common threads are already becoming evident.
“The theme I think I heard the most was that people are talking about the different kinds of conversations they are having now,” he said. “They were moving out of the world of compliance, something they did every year but had limited value, to something that was really meaningful. It made people really think about how they practiced and how they could improve.
“The focus was around student achievement. When you think about evaluating teachers, student achievement is kind of a new paradigm. It’s a hard adjustment to make, how you make that the centerpiece of why you do evaluation at all.”
But achievement scores aren’t the sole focus. Katnik emphasized the importance of a balanced approach, using not only how well students did on tests but looking at how teachers helped to get them there.
“At one time,” he said, “we did a lot of observation but not so much anything else. Now you can look at surveys, at data about how kids are performing and at other measures that can be pulled in. You get your best, most reliable ratings when you have balance.”
He wants to make sure that comments from those districts that have actually used the evaluation program are incorporated into revisions.
“It’s just not something you can do really quickly if you want to do it right,” he said. “There’s building something in the garage, and there’s driving it down the road. Those are two different things.”
There’s also the question of how the evaluations are going to be used. Legislation introduced in the Missouri General Assembly in the past few years would have used student test scores and other measures of a teacher’s performance to determine hiring, firing, promotion and other actions. The bills have failed to win approval, at least so far.
And in some states, a teacher’s ratings have been made public, often to loud criticism from teachers’ unions and others. A recent article in the publication Education Week noted that efforts to tighten how many people may see the results of evaluations are moving ahead in several states.
Missouri law exempts such results from public disclosure, unless districts want to release them, and Katnik said he doesn’t see any value in having them available outside of the individual districts, even in the aggregate, without names attached.
“The data will be part of the personnel files maintained by districts,” he said. "It’s not anything we have at this level that we will share with anybody.
“It will be used not only to decide who you keep employed and who may be doing a different line work, but more than that, it helps you find your assets. They can be much more than someone teaching a room full of kids. They can help other teachers do their jobs better.”
Asked whether parents and others should have access to the ratings to help them see how well schools are performing, and perhaps help steer their children to the best teachers, Katnik said the data are best kept confidential.
“We have measures on how well kids are learning,” he said. “As a parent, I know that what I care about the most, whether my kids are learning what they need to learn, not so much personnel data on individual teachers.”
To Barry Nelson, assistant superintendent for human resources in the Pattonville School District, that outlook makes sense.
Pattonville was one of the 105 districts in Missouri that took part in the evaluation pilot program this past school year. He says parents can already get test score data for their own children, and they can also get a summary of the district’s teacher evaluation results as part of data submitted to DESE. So, he says, making individual teacher ratings available to the public would not be using the information as it is intended.
“We consider them to be personnel records that are not available to the public to view per se,” Nelson said. “But we use them to help teachers get better at their craft. So administrators will be working with teachers, based on those criteria.”
He said Pattonville is generally pleased with how the first year of the pilot program went.
“We liked the direction the state is taking with evaluations,” Nelson said. “It helps teachers go deep in specific areas of focus. In the past, the evaluation system was much more broadly focused, and this one goes mile deep. It’s intense and focuses on certain areas of instructional process.
“One thing we do know would make it more efficient is we need to figure out some way to do it more electronically.”
Assessing would-be teachers
The same principles used to judge whether teachers are effective in the classroom are also the basis for developing standards to try to determine who should be a teacher in the first place.
The MEGA program is designed to determine not only whether would-be teachers have a solid grounding in the subject matter they will be teaching but also whether they have the disposition to thrive when dealing with students.
“If there are challenges out there with a candidate,” said Hairston, head of Missouri’s teacher preparation program, “if he or she doesn’t have the temperament, it will be picked up early in the experience.”
With 24 public and 15 private teacher preparation programs in the state, MEGA is designed to bring a degree of uniformity to the process. Draft standards were approved in April, with the expectation that refinements will be made as the program attracts suggestions and comments.
A general education assessment is set to be available this September, and assessments of both content and teacher technique are scheduled to be available in September 2014.
The general education assessment includes five areas – English, writing, math, science and social studies – but teachers who specialize in one of those areas will also be expected to have a general knowledge of all of them.
For example, the guidelines say, even someone who is studying to teach English will be expected to “perform arithmetic operations on polynomials” and “demonstrate knowledge of the physiology of multicellular organisms.”
Asked why teaching candidates in one area need that level of knowledge in other disciplines, Hairston said a general education background can help anyone succeed in education.
“What is that baseline of knowledge a beginning teacher should have?” he said. “The reality is this: Will everybody pass that section on polynominals? Probably not. But will that sink them? No. That’s just one part of it.”
But it’s a part that has raised some questions about the process, says Sam Hausfather, dean of the school of education at Maryville University.
“There is some controversy right know about that basic skills test,” Hausfather told the Beacon last week as he drove back from a Jefferson City meeting on the program. “The standards they are using include a lot of things that are a little bit too specific.
“I would say that an English teacher should have some understanding of the nature of science, but they shouldn’t have to be tested in chemistry, biology, physics and earth science. You have to be a well-rounded person to be an effective member of a school community.
“We’re going away from teaching as an event where the classroom doors are closed and it’s just you and the kids. It’s more of a collective enterprise. You may be an English teacher, but you’re also a member of a school community, and part of your concern should be everything that is being taught, even if you’re not going to teach it all.”
To get the so-called best and brightest people into teaching – and as important, to keep them there – Hausfather said screening needs to be balanced, and he likes Missouri approach overall.
“It is looking at both standardized tests on content as well as performance evaluations, which I think is essential. You can’t say a good teacher is just someone who knows their content. I’m sure you had teachers in college classes who really knew their stuff but couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag.”
Observation of candidates interacting with students is crucial, Hausfather said.
“To know whether someone has the disposition to teach, the attitude to teach, you have to see them in the classroom,” he said. “Most teacher ed programs have increased greatly the amount of time their candidates have to spend in classrooms before we certify them as teachers, some more than others.
“It’s going in the right direction, but it’s a very complex calculus. It’s one piece that will help us get better teachers. It’s something I wish they would do even more.”