Home Teachers and Teaching Great Teaching

Great Teaching

Birdette Hughey could be the 2011 Mississippi Teacher of this year.

In February 2012, the New York Times took the unusual step of publishing performance ratings for up to 18,000 The big apple teachers dependant on their students’ test-score gains, commonly called value-added (VA) measures. This, which followed the same discharge of ratings in Chicago last year, drew new focus the growing usage of VA analysis for a tool for teacher evaluation. After decades of banking on often-perfunctory classroom observations to assess teacher performance, districts from Washington, D.C., to Are generally now evaluate the majority of their teachers based in part on VA measures and, sometimes, start using these measures as a cause for variations in compensation.

Newspapers that publish value added measures little doubt relish the interest they cook, even so the bigger question as we see it is usually VA should play any role inside the evaluation of teachers. Advocates reason that the application of VA measures in decisions regarding teacher selection, retraining, and dismissal will boost student achievement, while critics contend the fact that measures are a poor indicator of teacher quality and ought to play virtually no role in high-stakes decisions. The National government has thrown how light it is squarely behind the advocates, launching some programs that encourage states to create evaluation systems based substantially on VA measures.

The debate across the merits utilizing useful to confirm teachers stems primarily from two questions. First, do VA measures work? Put simply, will they have a accurately capture the negative impacts teachers place on their students’ test scores? One dilemma is that VA measures will incorrectly reward or penalize teachers to your combination students they get if students are designated to teachers determined by characteristics that VA analysis typically ignores.

Second, do VA measures matter in the long term? For example, do teachers who raise test scores also enhance their students’ outcomes in adulthood or could they be simply better at teaching to the test? Reserach has shown that high-quality early-childhood education has large impacts on outcomes including college completion and adult earnings, but no study has identified the long-term impacts of teacher quality as measured by useful.

We address these questions by analyzing school-district data from grades 3