In Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon, all of the children were famously above average. As states begin reporting their progress with new teacher evaluation methods, the same problem is emerging, reports Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week. Uncertain of methods and fearful of being too negative, principals nationwide are rewarding their faculty with unrealistically high ratings.

Dozens of states have taken steps in recent years to overhaul their teacher-evaluation systems, often in response to federal incentives. Such changes have also been promoted by an influential lineup of organizations that calls for greater accountability in the teaching profession. The states hope to use the systems to strengthen teaching practices and dismiss poorly performing teachers.

Most states are in the process of setting up evaluation systems in which student test scores and other measures combine to produce an annual performance rating. Some states have a year of data behind them, while others are still negotiating with unions and considering options. Teachers’ unions are often insisting that a large part of each rating must be based on the principal’s observation of classroom teaching. While many principals have been teachers in the past, they are still unsure how to distinguish poor teaching, better teaching, and the best teaching.

The result is an obviously unrealistic, unhelpful set of scores in which above 95% of teachers get ratings of “effective or better.” Florida is one of the states with a little more data on record, and its scores illustrate the problem:

In Florida, where every district was required to implement a new teacher-evaluation system in 2011-12, data released in December show that 97 percent of teachers received one of the top ratings. That figure, while high, is still lower than the 99.9 percent from before the revisions, state officials noted.

Principals aren’t sure what the best teaching actually looks like, and they are generally biased by having a role in shaping school policy. Teachers and principal are both part of a school’s culture, so principals tend to view what they see in the classroom with favor. A Harvard/Gates Foundation study called Measures of Effective Teaching suggested that classroom observations should always be carried out by more than one observer and at more than one time.

At this point, no states are equipped to create teams, and principals are not sure what they can do for now. Some administrators tried hard not to automatically rate all teachers as excellent. In Florida, Lee County tried to be harder on its teachers, rating only 10% with its top score. Although Florida’s statewide rate of awarding the lowest rating was only .2%, Lee County managed to score 1.5% of its teachers as ineffective.

Teachers’ unions ask why the scores can’t be accepted as they are.

“Despite all the rhetoric blaming teachers for all the problems in education, most teachers are doing a good job, given their limited resources,” said Doug Pratt, a spokesman for the Michigan Education Association.

But most researchers believe that the answer lies in special training for principals. Tennessee is sending out training teams to coach principals on how to evaluate teachers better. The teams are focusing on schools that gave high teacher ratings when their student achievement scores were low. Georgia, too, is looking into how to train administrators. They are training evaluators in online sessions and focusing on reaching a consistent standard that can be applied objectively.

Some [Georgia] districts are also creating libraries of teaching videos to help refresh evaluators’ memories of exemplary performance at each level. The challenges for ensuring inter-rater reliability are somewhat greater for states that have given more discretion to their districts regarding training.

Perhaps when states believe they have found the keys to matching student scores with teacher scores, they will also understand what it is that makes some teachers more effective than others. It may seem like taking the long way around, but the end result may be the desired outcome: real educational improvement.

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Professor Eric M. Camburn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has published his review of the recent Gates Foundation-sponsored report which declared that data gathered via student surveys provided useful information in assessing teacher effectiveness. In his conclusions, Camburn writes that although collecting student opinion of teaching performance could prove useful, any assertions made by the Gates report regarding links between students’ thoughts on teacher performance and actual teacher performance weren’t supported by the data.

Camburn explains that student surveys provide useful insight into the quality of instruction, and could be a mine of practical ideals and suggestions that are worth putting into practice. He notes, however, that many of the conclusions presented in the Gates report are not critically examined in light of the available evidence.

“Developers of the MET project embrace the idea that multiple measures of teaching effectiveness are needed to represent such a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. However, in discussing the potential uses of student surveys, this report’s stance is lopsided, placing too much weight on the strengths of student surveys and not enough weight on their weaknesses.”

The Gates report, titled Asking Students about Teaching, asserts that evidence collected from student surveys provide evidence in assessing quality of instruction. It goes on to offer a series of guidelines on how such data could be mined and most effectively used.

Camburn, whose findings were published by the National Education Policy Center and whose review was funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, said there’s sparse evidence to support the guidelines and policy recommendations made by the Gates report.

… a major limitation of the report is that the claimed relationship between student survey reports and teacher effectiveness is not supported by the evidence provided. A broader limitation of the report is that many of the findings and conclusions are presented too uncritically and without sufficient justification. Developers of the MET project embrace the idea that multiple measures of teaching effectiveness are needed to represent such a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. In discussing the potential uses of student surveys, however, this report’s stance is lopsided, placing too much weight on the strengths of student surveys and not enough weight on their weaknesses. A potential concern is that glib implementation of some of the report’s recommendations might result in an unwarranted overconfidence in student survey results.

Camburn points out that the Gates report provides a number of useful suggestions that – apart from failing to be provably useful in assessing teacher effectiveness – could serve to improve instructional quality and allow students to be more honest about their views of their instructors. For example, Camburn praises the suggestion made in the report that students would be more honest in their assessment if they believed that their surveys wouldn’t be viewed either by their teachers or their peers.

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The Center for American Progress has released a report this week that documents the progress states have made in the past several years towards implementing updated, comprehensive teacher evaluation systems. Recent moves by the Obama administration, such as the creation of the Race to the Top program and allowing the states to obtain No Child Left Behind waivers, triggered a move by many states to rethink the way they assess teacher effectiveness, and the CAP is now looking at how much progress there has been made in that direction.

There has been a focus recently on the design aspect of the new evaluation systems, but not enough on how well that design has been implemented and how effective the new systems have been in identifying effective teachers. The report, titled The State of Teacher Evaluation Reform, aims to fill that gap. The authors look at the teacher evaluation reform efforts undertaken by six states – Colorado, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Tennessee – and reviews how the lessons learned by these “early adopters” can be utilized by other states contemplating similar reforms.

As states adjust to their new, more ambitious role in supporting teacher effectiveness statewide, they are shifting from a traditional focus on compliance and accountability to a support and service-delivery mode. The report finds that many state departments are struggling to determine how to fulfill both functions simultaneously and often lack the capacity to do so. The states’ solutions to these challenges could prove instructive for other state education departments.

Since the way the K-12 education systems function differs from state to state, the problems that state education agencies dealt with in the course of designing and implementing their new systems differed as well. Some were stymied in their efforts by Constitutional restrictions on the role they could play in determining how districts assessed their own faculty; others lacked the fiscal means to bring in the manpower necessary to make the new system function properly.

From his analysis, Patrick McGuinn, the report’s author, predicts that even while benefiting from the experience of those that came before, each state will make mistakes and missteps while going through the process of developing a teacher evaluation system that meets their own special needs.

After looking at the challenges confronting the six states as they look to put their new assessment systems into practice, McGuinn provides a number of recommendations for other states that are also looking at adopting new evaluation systems for their teachers.

State education agencies must assess existing capacity and define an appropriate role for their work with districts and schools. This will require that they reallocate existing staff and budgets to focus on new responsibilities and build capacity.

States must also think about where they can provide something that districts cannot. This will enable their support to render the most praise from districts. State education agencies should also tailor their implementation timelines to the unique needs and recourses of their particular state.

States need to think long term about how to produce a supply of administrators with the training, technical expertise, and field experience to address their current human-capital challenges around teacher evaluation reform.

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Although the ability to fire teachers for poor performance has been one of the most contentious issues defining the relationship between teachers unions and their local districts, in Washington, D.C. the mechanism to remove instructors who are preforming poorly has been in place since 2009.

Usage of student achievement metrics in comprehensive teacher evaluation systems and therefore allow them to have an impact on hiring and firing decisions was one of the points of disagreement that led to the Chicago teacher strike which concluded last Tuesday.

According to the Washington Post, since the system went into effect more than three years ago, it has led to the termination of nearly 400 teachers. Just last month, 98 Washington teachers were notified that they were being relieved of their jobs because their evaluation results were below the threshold required to maintain employment in the district. And far from the layoffs arousing a bad reaction from the union representing Washington teachers, the union leadership has actually expressed support for its use and also thanked district officials for softening the criteria used for employment decisions.

“It was a goal of mine to get to a point where this is business as usual,” schools chancellor Kaya Henderson said. “Any well-functioning organization fires people for performance, and that’s going to be a regular occurrence. Every high-performing organization also recognizes and rewards the highest achievers, and that’s now a regular occurrence.”

Although supporters of the new system have said that holding teachers accountable for student performance generally serves to improve the quality of instruction, there are those who feel that the only thing new evaluation systems have done is increase staff turnover and consequently make good teachers more wary about taking jobs in district schools. To support their argument, critics point to the fact that over the years the system has been in place, students have shown only a very modest improvement in academic achievement, based on standardized test results.

“We have gone from a system where almost no one was terminated, no matter how bad, to the other extreme, where good teachers as well as bad are terminated,” said Mary Levy, an attorney and a longtime analyst of city education policy. “The latter is probably more damaging due to the stress and demoralization it causes.”

Washington was one of the first districts in the nation to be given permission to use student test scores to assess teacher effectiveness, although administrators didn’t exercise this option until the severely underperforming school system was taken over by then-Mayor Adrian Fenty and his handpicked schools leader Michelle Rhee.

During the three years of Rhee’s leadership, over 1,000 teachers lost their jobs for poor performance and misconduct, including questionable sexual behavior towards the students. However, Fenty’s defeat in the Democratic primary three years later, in an election that was widely viewed as being mostly about Rhee’s performance as chancellor, led to her resignation.

The new mayor, Vincent Gray, with Kaya Henderson as his lieutenant, sought to temper the fiery rhetoric used by Rhee — but that didn’t mean that they were looking to walk back the reforms she brought about in the district, including the new assessment system.

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said the discussions about teacher quality have been more respectful under Gray and Henderson. That’s one reason he’s working to change the system from within, rather than pushing to scrap it entirely. Starting this school year, test scores only account for 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, down from 50 percent under the previous model.

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Ashley Bateman, writing on Heartland.org, reports that results of a recent study show that when districts took pains to design good teacher assessment systems, the feedback from those systems not only had a positive impact on teacher quality but also translated to higher student exam scores.

Specifically, the study looked at the Teacher Evaluation System, a rigorous assessment program in place in Cincinnati schools, and found that as a result of TES performance of mid-career teachers showed definite improvement.

TES has been in place in Cincinnati since the 2000-2001 academic year, and since the system went into effect, students showed an average of 4.5% improvement in mathematics and reading scores after only one year. The gains were maintained when the children were tested again four years after the system started and every five years subsequently.

As implemented, TES is mostly comprised of peer evaluations. And contrary to most systems in place at the time, the walkthroughs by administrators or school principals only counted for 25% of the final score.

The study found that while the system’s overall scores tend towards grade inflation, rubrics and feedback individual evaluators provided were less lenient, leading the authors to suggest that, “Cincinnati evaluation program provides feedback on teaching skills that are associated with larger gains in student achievement.”

“Teachers have been notoriously been afraid of getting principals who don’t know what they’re talking about in evaluating,” Christie said. “If they can, [districts] should crystallize the use of peers or independent evaluators.”

The difference could be due to the investment the district made in training the evaluators. In Cincinnati, those who perform peer evaluations undergo training which costs the district over $2 million a year. When all expenses are tallied, it costs nearly $7,500 to evaluate one teacher in Cincinnati. According to the paper’s authors Eric Taylor and John Tyler, considering the impressive gains by the students, the expenses seems well justified.

The authors also note that while many policymakers and researchers oftentimes claim that midcareer teachers cannot be improved, Cincinnati proves “experienced teachers provided with unusually detailed information on their performance improved substantially.”

“An important thing to note is that this is just one study,” Taylor said. “In general, in social science or general study we want to see replication. That’s an important step for the future.”

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New Jersey school districts are scrambling to develop new teacher evaluation systems that comply with a state law signed last month that aims to make teacher tenure harder to get and easier to lose. The deadline for the new assessment systems to go into effect is the start of the 2013-2014 school year, and the toughest problem facing district administrators will be how much of a role standardized test results, or similar objective student achievement metrics, will play in the final determination of teacher quality.

Some have said that the tight deadline makes it harder on the districts to make a make a measured determination, and will force some into committing to a formula before they can be sure it is appropriate. But not everyone left this decision until they were put under the gun by the legislation. Some, like the Hunterdon County’s Alexandria Township school district, have been preparing for this moment for the past three years.

According to Matthew Jennings, Alexandria’s superintendent, the district already has three years’ worth of data on which they can base their decision as to how much standardized exams actually communicate teacher effectiveness. Alexandria students are tested three times a year in every subject covered between kindergarten and 8th grade.

He said those tests have taken years to develop. And if the district had not already done them, this year would be much more stressful. “I certainly would be tempted to look at some of the shortcuts that exist in order to be compliant,” Jennings said.

Only about a third of the state’s 600 districts have taken similar steps as Alexandria, and already have passable testing frameworks in place. For the rest, the next year will prove to be quite hectic.

“It’s an aggressive agenda if you don’t have anything in place now,” said Brian Zychowski, the schools superintendent in North Brunswick and the chairman of a state task force on teacher evaluations. His district has been using its own tests for more than a half-dozen years. Schools without such systems, he said, will end up buying commercially available ones to meet deadlines. “They’ll be receiving — not being part of the conversation, not trying to shape it.”

Robert Goldschmidt, who heads up the school district in the Gloucester County’s Washington Township, isn’t concerned. He said that he doesn’t feel the need to develop their own assessment system and will instead rely on the model that has been approved by the state’s Board of Education. He calls other districts’ attempts to develop an assessment system in-house as “reinventing the wheel.”

The new law, signed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie last month, will have teacher evaluations play a significant role in tenure decisions. Any teacher who doesn’t attain a minimum grade will not qualify for tenure, while a succession of bad grades will allow the district to fire even a tenured instructor.

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Carmen McCollum, writing for the NWI Times, reports that Public Law 90 in Indiana will require all public school teachers and principals to be evaluated annually starting this fall. It also restricts eligibility for salary raises to those who receive a rating of ‘highly effective’ or ‘effective’. Teachers who are evaluated at ‘improvement necessary’ or ‘ineffective’ will have their salaries frozen.

Last year, the Indiana General Assembly passed legislation that requires schools to consider factors other than just seniority and degrees in determining salary increases. Those factors include educators’ performance on annual evaluations, leadership responsibilities and the academic needs of students.

The evaluation must include multiple rigorous measures and some form of objective student data — such as test scores, said Emily Garrett, the Indiana Department of Education’s spokeswoman for educator effectiveness.

There are some exceptions. Garrett said that school corporations which had entered into a collective bargaining agreement before April 21 could avoid implementing the new collective bargaining laws until the current agreements expire. Private schools that receive public tax dollars under the state’s voucher program may also continue to follow their own policy for evaluating educators.

Many school districts are using the state-created evaluation tool known as RISE to comply with Public Law 90. It uses 19 categories to grade teachers on measures including classroom instruction and lesson plans. School districts are free to use RISE as created, or customize it for their individual needs.

River Forest Superintendent Jim Rice said what he likes about the state’s model is it gives principals an opportunity to be instructional leaders in guiding teachers become better professionals in the classroom.

“Professional development is one of the components required in RISE,” he said.

Rice said principals, along with several teachers trained as secondary evaluators, attended a training program, making them more comfortable with the process.

Lake Ridge Superintendent Sharon Johnson-Shirley said the RISE method was an important element in successfully moving her school off of probationary status.

However, RISE isn’t the only evaluation tool, and there are other methods available. RISE has also been subject to criticism, as Representative Vernon Smith said that the RISE program fails to take into consideration social issues which affect students and environmental factors that distract students.

Hobart Superintendent Peggy Buffington said her school would be among those using Marzano’s Casual Teacher Evaluation Model. This model focuses on how teachers approach different types of lessons and which strategies work best at raising student achievement for specific lesson segments. Those who prefer this method say that it appropriately values the complexity of teaching and identifies specific strategies for improving student achievement.

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Students in the Scottsdale Unified School District in Arizona have begun their school year by taking tests. Lots of tests. They will end their year the same way. And the results will, for the first time, have an impact on more than just them. Starting this year, the results of students achievement testing will play a part in the system used to assess the performance and effectiveness of their teachers.

In the Arizona Republic, Mary Beth Faller writes that although Arizona’s school districts aren’t required to use objective student achievement criteria as part of teacher evaluations until next school year, some districts are not waiting for the deadline. By 2014-15 up to 40% of teachers’ performance pay will be determined by test scores or similar assessment metrics, and the districts’ early experimentation could be an effort to get the balance just right before the stakes get very high.

The state Board of Education set a framework requiring that one-third to one-half of a teacher’s evaluation be based on student data, but beyond that, districts and charters can create their own assessments. So, there is much variety in what they will look like.

While some districts have spent money to purchase a system developed by a third party — including Chandler Unified School District which spent more than $160,000 on the one designed by Marzano Research — others chose to develop one in house or alter the system they’ve been using all along. The Fountain Hills School District officials felt that spending money on an evaluation model was something that they couldn’t afford. Instead, they will continue to use an evaluation based on classroom observations and combining that grade with student achievement data.

Districts are required to work the Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards exam scores into the formula, but are free to add other data including scores from exams designed and administered locally. The issues arise out of the fact that AIMS scores only cover certain subjects, with teachers in areas not covered by AIMS assessed via school-wide AIMS data.

But the Scottsdale district wanted as many teachers as possible to have results from their own students.

So, teachers and administrators spent the past year developing their own tests for subjects including art, music, physical education, world languages and other non-AIMS classes.

The tests include a 45-question, multiple-choice pre-assessment — which was administered districtwide the past two weeks — and an end-of-year test.

The difference in the results from the beginning and the end of the year will be used to assess student progress and account for a third of a teacher’s final effectiveness and performance rating.

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There has been a bipartisan push for teacher evaluation reform after growing discontent with a traditional system of professional advancement based on tenure and seniority. Criticism was largely centered on the idea that union negotiations to maintain the status quo effectively protected bad teachers and blocked progression for young talented teachers. In many states, new teacher evaluation systems will begin to take effect next year — and one of the methods being tested in Ohio is the construction and evaluation of teacher portfolios that serve as a record of student work and lesson plans that highlights the teacher’s skill. As Julie Carr Smyth reports, approaches being tried by other states include parental reviews, student surveys, student growth metrics, and classroom observation.

Tim Melton is legislative director for the education reform group StudentsFirst:

“The biggest factor in school by far is an effective teacher in the classroom,” he said. “Everyone in the building knows who those people are. The difference now is there is a lot of robust data to show how things are going. The question is once you have it, what are you going to do with it?”

Teachers who gain consecutive poor ratings will first be offered help and if they fail to improve could lose their tenure. On the other hand, teachers who excel regularly will face less frequent evaluations.

The Obama Administration was part of the push for teacher evaluation reform by encouraging states to establish improved systems for teacher and principal evaluation with incentives such as Race to the Top grant money. States granted a waiver from No Child Left Behind also had to commit to certain policies such as teacher evaluation being based, at least in part, on student achievement.

Michelle Exstrom, an education program principal, said that in their current form evaluations were superficial and the reforms are much needed to avoid a situation where teachers almost all receive satisfactory ratings.

“These evaluation systems are meant to be much more authentic in assessing how students are doing,” she said. “And make no mistake: Teachers, parents and students all want this. It doesn’t do a teacher any good to get a positive evaluation that’s not accurate.”

Tammy Schmidt is one of over 100,000 teachers in Ohio who will fall under new teacher evaluation criteria next July. Ohio’s system sees a teacher’s rating based half on student growth as measured by a variety of metrics and half on teacher performance measured by teacher portfolios, classroom observation, and other means. Ohio’s system doesn’t involve parental review or student surveys.

Michelle Wimship, a reform consultant to the Ohio Education Association teachers union, said local school boards will hold the decision-making power on how the Ohio evaluation system will look. She is worried that this will lead to a patchwork of different approaches across the state making the evaluations hard to compare directly:

“It’s going to be very complicated and confusing,” she said. “We are watching with interest given the fact this new law was passed with no input from teachers, no input from administrators and no input from the state Department of Education.”

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Massachusetts set this fall as a deadline for all school districts to adopt a new teacher evaluation system that depends heavily on student achievement data. Now, there’s a concern that only a few districts in the state will be able to meet it. According to the state mandate, the system should be fully in place by September 1st of this year or districts will miss out on their chunk of federal Race to the Top grant money.

The conflict with local teachers union is the issue in at least one-third of the districts, with the negotiations process over the new systems not progressing or progressing very slowly. According to Mitchell Chester, the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education, nearly every district is experiencing some issues with the unions’ response to the new ratings, but two-thirds of them are on track to successfully conclude talks in the near future.

“I’m disappointed that we are not further along than anecdotal evidence suggests,” Chester said. “This system relies on local implementation. Where people are dragging their feet, that is not a healthy scenario and that is a lost opportunity for students and teachers in those districts.”

The problem seems to be afflicting all types of districts from urban to rural, and the issues that remain to be ironed out range from guidelines for unscheduled visits by inspectors to how much time underperforming teachers will be allowed to turn around their performance before they are terminated or asked to resign. The inability to compromise over evaluations led to the breakdown in talks over a new teacher contract in Boston just last week.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino has asked the state Depart­ment of Labor Relations to recommend a resolution to the evaluation issue, as well as other stumbling blocks in hope of wrapping up more than two years of contract negotiations.

Massachusetts isn’t the only state revising upwards the impact of student achievement data in its teacher assessment systems. President Obama has encouraged this change by making such a system not only a prerequisite for receiving Race to the Top grants, but also a requirement for being approved for a waiver from the 2014 achievement benchmarks set out by the No Child Left Behind Act.

Unlike other states which mandated how big a part the achievement data should play in the overall teacher rating, the Massachusetts legislature decided to leave the final number to each district. Lawmakers indicated that student performance must be a “significant factor” without specifying what “significant” is supposed to mean.

The 235 school districts, about two-thirds of those statewide that have signed onto Race to the Top, must negotiate the changes with their unions by Sept. 1 or they could lose out on the money. The other districts have until fall 2013 to adopt the changes. But talks have taken longer than many anticipated.

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