Better ways of grading our teachers, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

We all hope our kids will get the best teachers but how will we know if they do? More importantly, how do districts know when a teacher is in trouble?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent three years studying the question of teacher performance. Lead Researcher Steve Cantrell says they first had to determine whether it would be possible to create an accurate measurement at all.

“We weren’t clear going into this study whether that was even going to be possible,” says Cantrell. “We found that it is possible to measure effective teaching.”

The next step, according to Steve Cantrell, was to name those things we should look at to get accurate gauge of a teacher’s effectiveness. He says looking at test scores and principle evaluations isn’t enough.

One of the three pillars needed for an accurate measure of teacher effectiveness, what the Gates Foundation calls an MET, is evaluation by the students.

“What the students told us was very frank and revealing, and was actually quite predictive of their learning results as well,” says Cantrell.

But they are not ready to throw out student testing entirely. Cantrell says those scores are also an important piece of this puzzle.

“We also found that it was equally important to have trained observers inside the classroom giving teachers feedback on the behaviors that help support what it is that they are teaching,” adds Cantrell.

The idea of these three pillars, student evaluations, test scores and trained observers, falls in line with what teacher’s unions have been saying for some time now.

Cantrell says the best thing about a system using these techniques is that it works for every type of educator. It can inform the novice teacher on the best practices moving forward as well as provide better support for expert teachers.

The project was done with the help of university researchers, including some from the University of Washington, and volunteer school districts across the country. Three-thousand teachers were included, but none of those teachers were in the Seattle area. The most western state studied was Colorado.

They looked at student achievement from the 2009-2010 school year, then compared that with how the kids were performing the following year. They found that the teachers who measured higher in their MET analysis also had kids who were averaging better gains in performance year over year.

You can read more about the Gates Foundation’s study “Measures of Effective Teaching” here.