One plus of the newspaper analysis is that the data question the conventional wisdom of what is a “good” teacher.

Cuban goes on to challenge the notion that “everyone knows” who the good and bad teachers are:

If only that were the truth! The fact is that notions of “good” teachers vary among parents, other teachers, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and, of course, journalists–see above with Caruso and Polacheck. Traditional and progressive beliefs about how children should learn, what knowledge is of most worth, and how teachers should teach differ among the above groups and vary even more within each of those groups. Desired outcomes–high test scores, problem solving skills, independent thinking, creativity–will vary according to each version of “goodness.” Thus, relying on standardized test scores to evaluate effective–a synonym for “good”–teaching concentrates on only one version of being a “good” teacher since most of the other desired outcomes are missing from standardized test items.

Larry Cuban, Using Test Scores To Out Ineffective Teachers

Added commentary 9/8/10:
I find it painful to admit that Cuban is right – we may not know who’s effective and who’s not, because we may be using different definitions of “effective.” We can’t let tests determine everything, but we also can’t let niceness mask ineffectiveness at ensuring student learning.

I think the best way to deal with both of these problems – tests mistakenly labeling effective teachers as ineffective, and administrators giving rosy evaluations to ineffective teachers – is by doing what Seattle’s new teacher contract does: using value-added data to trigger increased scrutiny and support, without triggering penalties for teachers who may have no idea what they’re doing wrong.

If principals don’t know why teachers are getting poor results, the next step should be for the principal to investigate and find out if the data are a fluke or if there’s really something amiss. That’s instructional supervision at its core – using data but looking beyond the numbers to determine what’s really going on.

One perplexing finding: A large proportion of teachers who rate highly one year fall to the bottom of the charts the next year. For example, in a group of elementary-school math teachers who ranked in the top 20% in five Florida counties early last decade, more than three in five didn’t stay in the top quintile the following year, according to a study published last year in the journal Education Finance and Policy.
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Meanwhile, the District of Columbia began evaluating teachers based on test scores last school year, and fired more than 150 teachers after the school year because of poor performance. Test scores count for 50% of teacher ratings in subjects that are tested.
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A report from the Department of Education released last month shows that even with three years of data, one in four teachers is likely to be misclassified because unrelated variables creep in.

Even with these questions, relying on student test scores to create a quantitative assessment of teachers might be better than the current standard practice. At many schools, principals grade teachers based on a few minutes of classroom observation (and then give most of them high scores).
–Carl Bialik, Needs Improvement: Where Teacher Report Cards Fall Short (WSJ)

One of the most visually arresting elements of the article is this chart that shows the instability of value-added ratings from year to year:

Source: WSJ.com

As you can see, the idea that excellence in teaching (as defined by impact on student learning) is a stable construct is not supported by the data from this study. Value-added is not ready for prime time.

But is it better than what we currently use for teacher evaluation?

But even skeptics of test-score-based evaluations acknowledge that a uniform, data-based approach for ranking teachers could be superior to subjective methods—such as principals’ observations—that still predominate in schools. “Damn near anything is going to be an improvement on the status quo,” says Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Indeed, the sad state of teacher evaluation is not due to a lack of data, but a lack of diligence on the part of school administrators. But I would disagree sharply with Willingham’s prescription for change. Far too much energy has been devoted in recent months to making a show of doing something – anything – to address issues of teacher performance. We seem to be enamored of anything that uses data and promises accountability, even if the results are patent nonsense, as in the illustration above.

We like this approach because it’s neat and quantitative, even if it’s dead wrong. Truly improving instruction is a lot more complicated. In order to do a better job of identifying effective and ineffective teachers, and ensuring that the latter make the necessary improvements, principals will have to make time to observe instruction, provide feedback, and take responsibility for the quality of teaching in their schools.

See this follow-up post for more analysis from Bialik.

So why are folks still talking about individual merit pay when it’s clear that it won’t work? Because the idea of holding teachers accountable for their students’ test scores sounds so obvious—and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a bunch of powerful politicians are enabling that gut feeling.
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First, those who advocate performance-based accountability are absolutely right that student achievement needs to be front and center. It’s not enough to observe teachers’ classroom performance; we need evidence that students have learned.

Second, research has clearly established that teachers and principals make a huge difference to student achievement. They shouldn’t be ducking responsibility.

Third, when people are acknowledged for a job well done, it’s affirming and energizing. That’s true even for idealistic and intrinsically motivated educators.
–Kim Marshall, Merit Pay or Team Accountability?

As always, great thoughts from Kim Marshall.

[Arne] Duncan and [Bill] Gates propose developing measures of effectiveness to get rid of bad teachers and increase the pay of good ones. It sounds like common sense. Or does it?

This approach was called the “inspection” method by W. Edwards Deming, known as the father of the science of quality improvement. Inspection, he wrote, is not an effective way to improve quality because it has no effect on the process that caused suboptimal results in the first place. Real and continuous improvement, Deming argued, occurs only when the workers themselves study outcome variability and the processes that produce it.
–James Stigler, Rethinking Teacher Accountability – Before It’s Too Late (EdWeek, June 9, 2010)

I almost recycled this issue of EdWeek when I came across this essay from James Stigler of UCLA. He goes on to describe the Japanese practice of lesson study, and explains how it is both a form of accountability and a form of professional development.

“If you have a principal who knows there’s a poor-performing teacher and chooses not to evaluate him or her effectively, who’s really the incompetent person?” Mr. Weil said.

–EdWeek on the “Dance of the Lemons” process for transferring teachers

Named for sociologist Donald T. Campbell, the precept holds, essentially, that the more that numbers are used for political purposes, the more they will be manipulated—and distort the decisions they were supposed to inform.

The very measures that get bandied about most often—like those stellar test gains—turn out to be the most suspect, because their main purpose all along was to promote policy decisions that were already made. And where there’s one set of bad numbers, there will be others.
–New York Magazine: What Downgrading the Too-Easy Grading of City Schools Means for Bloomberg’s Reform

From Wikipedia:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

H/T: Diane Ravitch

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.

The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

—Carl Jung

“Attention is the holy grail [of neuroscience],” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”
–NY Times

We’ve taken the smartest and richest people on earth, hundreds of millions of them, and put them to work sorting and organizing and polishing data.
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Right now, the big sort focuses on finding clever viral videos, but it won’t for long. The power of this coordination is so huge it won’t stop with building Wikipedia and turning the founder of ChatRoulette into a millionaire. Instead, the big sort will relentlessly find and connect and spread ideas that generate productivity and impact.

-Seth Godin

Across all generations, inadequate school leadership is the second most cited factor (after low salaries) contributing to the departure of teachers who leave their schools or the profession because of dissatisfaction. Specifically, 51 percent of those who transfer and 32 percent of those who leave the profession cite poor administrative support as a primary reason for their decision (Ingersoll, 2003).

–Behrstock-Sherratt & Coggshall, Ed Leadership May 2010 (Vol 67, no 8), p. 31

What kind of support should we provide to retain teaching talent in our schools? This article, which focuses on Generation Y teachers, explains that feedback is a critical component of young teachers’ job satisfaction.

I can state categorically that this is true from personal experience – feedback and the knowledge that someone else knows what you are doing (and how well) are essential components of job satisfaction. Being left alone may have been a selling point for teachers in the past, but no more.