Depolarizing the Debate on How to Measure and Cultivate Teacher Effectiveness

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On March 10-11, I participated in the Civil Rights Research Roundtable in Washington, D.C. The Roundtable was one of a series — convened by the Warren Institute with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other philanthropies — designed to provide access to the latest research on critical issues in education to civil rights advocacy groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Council of La Raza.

The Roundtable focused on equitable access to effective teaching and was structured around a series of research presentations on the following topics:

• Effective teaching: what is it, and how is it measured?
  
  
• What training and competencies do new teachers bring to high-minority, high-poverty schools and classrooms?
  
  
• What is the impact of teacher hiring, placement, and student assignment policies on high-minority, high-poverty schools and classrooms?
  
  
• Why do teachers disproportionately leave high-minority, high-poverty schools?
  
  
• What happens after the first day of school? What is the experience and behavior of new teachers who are placed in high-minority, high-poverty schools and classrooms?
  
  
• How we can we support teachers and students to improve working conditions in high-minority, high-poverty schools?
  
  
• How can we support teachers and students to improve the working and learning environment in high-minority, high-poverty schools?

At the end of Day 2, the attendees were given about 90 minutes to synthesize the research findings and to generate a list of federal and state policies and regulations that would address the problems posed by the research. The Warren Institute provided a suggested list of policies for the group to consider, around the theme Performance Management and Instructional Capacity Building: Compatible or Competing Theories of Action?

As I listened to the research presentations, I realized that they were informed by two broad and different theories of action (TOAs) that were not explicitly identified by the participants.

A number of the researchers — particularly the economists — used the performance management lens to describe teacher effectiveness. This lens emphasizes the importance of teachers’ educational background (SAT scores, class ranking in college) and performance characteristics (e.g., value-added contributions to student achievement, based on standardized test scores and compensation and evaluation histories) to describe teacher effectiveness. Furthermore, the performance management perspective tends to treat effective teaching as an individual endeavor and thus seeks solutions focused on enhancing the identification and distribution of effective teachers in high-minority, high-poverty schools.

With this lens, the social, racial, cultural, cognitive, and linguistic histories and characteristics of students, practitioners, and communities are secondary, if not tertiary, considerations to understanding variations in teacher effectiveness. The reasoning of the performance management TOA goes something like this: If compensation and evaluation are tied to student achievement data, and schools are given the flexibility and authority to hire, assign, and fire teachers, and districts or systems are freed to reward effective schools and close low-performing schools, then teacher effectiveness will increase, along with student performance.

The other research voice and TOA present at the meeting grew out of an emphasis on the importance of instructional capacity building and the use of practice-centered criteria grounded in research on teaching and learning to define the characteristics of effective teaching. This research underscores the importance of pedagogical content knowledge; classroom management skills; understanding of students’ social, cultural, and economic backgrounds; understanding of cognitive and human development; ability to collaborate with peers; and ability to cultivate partnerships with parents and the broader community as critical components of effective teaching.

The instructional capacity-building TOA would state that if schools and school districts provide supports that build the capacity of teachers to address the elements of effective teaching, then student performance will increase and achievement gaps will narrow.

While these two theories of action are not incompatible, the dominance of the performance management perspective in a meeting of civil rights advocates was striking, as this perspective treats culture, race, ethnicity, gender, and economic circumstances as demographic background features rather than forces that shape individual and institutional actions differentially. By confining its attention to compensation, evaluation, data, accountability, and proxies for the quality of teacher pre-service preparation (e.g., SAT scores and class rankings), performance management theory appears to maintain that race and culture won't matter and that effective teachers (by their definition) will be equally competent across groups with very different needs and backgrounds. One could also argue that the instructional capacity building theory of action, by failing to focus on the ways districts evaluate, compensate, hire, and assign teachers, ignores how system actions and lack of capacity undermine investments in instructional capacity building at the school level.

Rather than view these two TOAs as mutually exclusive options that advocates must choose between, I believe the social justice community would be better served by examining the underlying values, strengths, and weaknesses of each theory and how system reform might be advanced by a third, or, what Andy Hargreaves would argue, a “fourth” way.

AISR is planning to convene a group of emerging and senior thought leaders in education reform, with Teach For America as a co-sponsor and with funding from the Ford Foundation. This meeting will provide an ideal forum for exploring the differences in values and approaches between the performance management TOA and the instructional capacity-building TOA. We hope this dialogue will help balance the polarized discourse about teacher effectiveness that is so prevalent today in the field of education reform.

PREPARED BY 
Warren Simmons
Executive Director, 
Annenberg Institute for School Reform 
Warren_Simmons@brown.edu