A quality education is a tool that can break the cycle of poverty and provide a critical foundation upon which students can build to reach a brighter future. It is easy to understand why there is passionate debate about how education is delivered, but it is important we never forget whom education truly serves - the students.
The teacher is the single most important factor in a student’s success. That’s why we believe having an accurate and reliable teacher evaluation system is essential.
A Stanford University study illustrates the impacts of effective teaching, finding “teachers near the top of the quality distribution got an entire year’s worth of additional learning out of their students compared to those near the bottom.” Using analysis that included students of all incomes, race and family backgrounds, researchers suggested “having a good teacher as opposed to an average teacher for three to four years in a row would, by available estimates, close the gap by income.” Furthermore, the report notes the teacher’s impact continues well after school into the rest of a child’s life.
The importance of teacher effectiveness and how to measure it was the subject of the three-year Measures of Effective Teaching Project, which involved more than 3,000 teachers. The study not only validated the importance of effectiveness, but also identified the best ways to measure effective teaching. A number of the project’s recommendations were incorporated into Georgia’s current evaluation system, in particular a balanced approach between student growth measures and classroom observation.
Senate Bill 364 makes significant changes to that evaluation system. It lowers the weight of student academic growth as a part of a teacher’s evaluation from 50 to 30 percent, below what research has identified as a reliable indicator of performance. We were also disappointed to see language that would allow the evaluation of a teacher whose class doesn’t have any End of Course test to be partially based on their school or school district’s overall test scores, regardless of that individual teacher’s performance.
While we understand the desire to address concerns over how much a student’s academic growth will weigh in evaluations, this could have been accomplished while still falling within a range that research shows gives a proper balance between objective and subjective measures. This bill instead allows subjective observations to count for up to 70 percent of an evaluation. When observations have consistently rated more than 97 percent of teachers in the top two categories and fewer than 3 percent in need of improvement, we fear this lopsided balance is less likely to help teachers understand where they are excelling and where they can improve.
Ultimately, our interest is with the needs of students. Knowing the unquestionable impact this could have on student achievement — not only in school but later in life — we fear this change in policy will impede our ability to deliver the quality education that Georgia’s students deserve.
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