Because teacher evaluation is such an important part of school reform and at the center of the Chicago teachers strike, I have published several pieces on the issue in the last week, here and her e and here. Below is a new historical look on the subject. It was written by Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt.

Schneider is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross and author of “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools.” Hutt is a doctoral candidate at the Stanford University School of Education and has been named “one of the world’s best emerging social entrepreneurs” by the Echoing Green Foundation. A version of this appeared on Larry Cuban’s blog on School Reform and Classroom Practice. Cuban is a former high school social studies teacher (14 years, including seven in Washington D.C.), district superintendent (seven years in Arlington, Virginia) and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years.

By Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt

Public school district leaders in Chicago, following the lead of reformers in cities nationwide, are pushing for a “value-added” evaluation system. Unlike traditional forms of evaluation, which rely primarily on classroom observations, policymakers in Chicago propose to quantify teacher quality through the analysis of student achievement data. Using cutting-edge statistical methodologies to analyze standardized test scores, the district would determine the value “added” by each teacher and use that information as a basis for making personnel decisions.

Teachers are opposed to this approach for a number of reasons. But educational researchers are generally opposed to it, too, and their reasoning is far less varied: value-added evaluation is unreliable.

As researchers have shown, value-added methodologies are still very much works-in-progress. Scholars like Heather Hill have found that value-added scores correlate not only with quality of instruction, but also with the population of students they teach. Researchers examining schools in Palm Beach, Fla., discovered that more than 40 percent of teachers scoring in the bottom decile one year, according to value-added measurements, somehow scored in the top two deciles the following year. And according to a recent Mathematica study, the error rate for comparing teacher performance was 35 percent. Such figures could only inspire confidence among those working to suspend disbelief.

And yet suspending disbelief is exactly what reformers are doing. Instead of slowing down the push for value-added, they’re plowing full steam ahead. Why?

The Chicago teachers strike has put the issue of teacher evaluation front and center in the education debate. The popular “value added” method of using student standardized test scores to figure out how effective a teacher is highly controversial; I wrote about it here. Here is a new important look by an education expert, Richard Rothstein.

Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. He was the national education columnist of The New York Times from 1999 to 2002, and is the author of several books, including “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right” and “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.” This appeared on the institute’s website.

By Richard Rothstein

It was bound to happen, whether in Chicago or elsewhere. What is
(Scott Olson/GETTY IMAGES) surprising about the Chicago teachers’ strike is that something like this did not happen sooner.

The strike represents the first open rebellion of teachers nationwide over efforts to evaluate, punish and reward them based on their students’ scores on standardized tests of low-level basic skills in math and reading. Teachers’ discontent has been simmering now for a decade, but it took a well-organized union to give that discontent practical expression. For those who have doubts about why teachers need unions, the Chicago strike is an important lesson.

Nobody can say how widespread discontent might be. Reformers can certainly point to teachers who say that the pressure of standardized testing has been useful, has forced them to pay attention to students they previously ignored, and could rid their schools of lazy and incompetent teachers.

But I frequently get letters from teachers, and speak with teachers across the country who claim to have been successful educators and who are now demoralized by the transformation of teaching from a craft employing skill and empathy into routinized drill instruction using scripted curriculum. They are also demoralized by the weeks and weeks of the school year now devoted to gamesmanship—test preparation designed not to teach literacy or mathematics but only to make it seem that students can perform in an artificial setting better than they actually do.

The Chicago teachers strike has raised a lot of passions about teachers and their unions, the issue taken up here by Corey Robin, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Robin writes about teachers, and he’s had some pretty great ones, having attended Yale and Princeton and Oxford universities. He is the author of “The Reactionary Mind:  Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” A version of this post appeared on his blog.

By Corey Robin

I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out why people — particularly liberals and pseudo-liberals in the chattering classes — hate teachers unions. One could of course take these people at their word — they care about the kids, they worry that strikes hurt the kids, and so on — but since we never hear a peep out of them about the fact that students
(Scott Olson/GETTY IMAGES) have to swelter through 98-degree weather in jam-packed classes without air conditioning, I’m not so inclined.

Forgive me then if I essay an admittedly more impressionistic analysis drawn from my own experience.

Like many of these journalists, I hail from an upper middle class background. I grew up in Chappaqua, an affluent suburb of New York. My parents moved there in 1975 for the schools, which were—and I believe still are — terrific. From elementary school through senior year, I had some of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered.

Two of my social studies teachers — Allan Damon and Tom Corwin — had more of an impact on me than any professor I ever had in college or grad school. In their classes, I read Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” E.H. Carr’s “What Is History?,” Michael Kammen’s “People of Paradox,” Hobbes, Locke, Richard Hakluyt, Albert Thayer Mahan, and more. When I got to college, I found that I was considerably better prepared than my classmates, many of whom had gone to elite private schools in Manhattan and elsewhere. It’s safe to say I would never have become an academic were it not for these two men.

We also had a terrific performing arts program. Phil Stewart, Chappaqua’s legendary acting teacher, trained Vanessa Williams, Roxanne Hart, Dar Williams, and more. We put on obscure musicals and  destabilizing plays like “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Ronald Dunn, our choral teacher, had us singing Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” and the works of Fauré. So inspiring were these teachers that many of us went onto organize our own plays, musicals, and a cappella groups, while we were still in high school.

Here’s an interesting look at research on the impact of technology. This was written by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His newly published book is “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.” This appeared on his Science and Education blog.

By Daniel Willingham

The importance of a good relationship between teacher and student is no surprise. More surprising is that the “human touch” is so powerful it can improve computer-based learning.

In a series of ingenious yet simple experiments, Rich Mayer and Scott DaPra showed that students learn better from an onscreen slide show when it is accompanied by an onscreen avatar that uses social cues.

Eighty-eight college students watched a four-minute Powerpoint slide show that explained how a solar cell converts sunlight to electricity. It  consisted of 11 slides and a voice-over explanation.

How teachers are evaluated has become one of the big issues in the ongoing strike by Chicago public school teachers as well as in the many debates on school reform being conducted around the country.

Assessment experts say that the method of using student standardized scores to gauge a teacher’s effectiveness is unreliable, but reformers still insist on using this “value-added” method of evaluation. Some reformers, such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, want as much as half of a teacher’s evaluation to be linked to student test scores.

“Value added” scores sometimes label very effective teachers as ineffective, and vice versa. How can that happen? Here’s a case that tells you how an excellent teacher got a low value-added score. This story is not an aberration.

It was written by Sean C. Feeney, principal of The Wheatley School in New York State and president of the Nassau County High School Principals’ Association. He is the co-author of an open letter of concern about New York state’s new test-based educator evaluation system that has been signed by thousands of people.

By Sean C. Feeney

New York State schools are back in session! With the new school year comes a new responsibility for principals across the state: the need to inform teachers of their “growth score” based on the New York State assessments their students took in the spring. This teacher growth score
(Linda Davidson/THE WASHINGTON POST) is one of the parts of the New York State APPR system that was implemented last year in a rushed manner against the very public objection of over one-third of the New York State principals along with thousands of other teachers, administrators, parents and concerned citizens (see www.newyorkprincipals.org for more information).

These state-supplied scores were the missing piece in a teacher’s final end-of-year score — potentially determining whether or not a teacher is deemed Ineffective and therefore subject to requiring a Teacher Improvement Plan (TIP) within 10 days of the start of the school year. These scores were not available to schools until the third week of August. So there you have it: high-stakes information that can potentially have a serious impact on a teacher’s career being supplied well past any sort of reasonable timeframe. Welcome to New York’s APPR system!

As a principal, I sat with each of the teachers who received a score from the state and tried to explain how the state arrived at these scores out of 20 points. One of the first teachers with whom I did this was Ashley.

Ashley is the type of teacher that all parents want for their child: smart in her content area and committed to making a difference in her students’ lives. Ashley works incessantly with her students, both inside and outside of the classroom.