Back to school: How to measure a good teacher

For most of her 11 years of teaching elementary school, Amanda Newman was considered a perfect teacher. She almost always walked out of her principal's annual evaluations with a score of 144 out of 144, a smile on her face, and no suggestions for improvement. She knew she was good at turning out second-graders who could add, subtract, and spell – but she suspected her "perfect" evaluations masked much that she could do better.

Indeed, when her Hillsborough County, Fla., school district overhauled its teacher evaluation program two years ago, Ms. Newman was no longer considered "perfect." But, with new specific guidelines and feedback on her teaching technique, Newman explains, she began to push the kids in ways she never would have thought second-graders capable of, and their performance soared. The mean standardized test score for reading in her second-grade class moved from the 41st percentile in 2010 to the 60th this year; in math the mean moved from the 50th to the 69th percentile.

In the past decade of national anxiety over the quality of American public education, no area in education reform has gotten more attention than teacher quality, and few reforms have encountered as much pushback as the efforts to change how to take the measure of a teacher.

Spurred by Race to the Top, the competitive Obama administration grant program, numerous states are now rushing to implement intensive teacher evaluation systems that, in most cases, are heavily influenced by test-score gains, which can affect a teacher's employment status and pay.

Done right, say advocates, strong evaluation systems could be a game changer for both teachers and their students, reshaping the profession and pushing teachers to improve.

"How do you change results for kids if you don't change the way we're teaching?" asks Dan Weisberg, executive vice president at The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a teacher-training and policy nonprofit that advocates the overhaul of teacher evaluations. "If you don't know who your best teachers are, how do you work to promote and retain them? You need to identify teachers struggling and do your best to get them to a satisfactory level or, if you can't, get them exited. There's no way to change results for kids without doing those things, and you can't do those things if you don't have a good system to accurately measure performance."

Research indicates that the quality of teaching has more impact on student learning than any other factor that a school can control. A year with a good teacher, studies show, can mean a child learns as much as three times more than a student with a poor teacher.

But the mechanics of quantifying good teaching are tricky. How can districts discern who the best – and worst – teachers are? Are test scores reliable? Is observation too subjective? How does something as subtle and nuanced as teaching a roomful of individuals – a job that is arguably more art than science – get reduced to a score?

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