Understanding Data
Teaching › Advancement
Photo courtesy of Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE),
Park View Middle School.
Teacher advancement will increasingly be tied to student achievement.
Student achievement has rarely been taken into account in educator evaluation systems — not even in the otherwise-rigorous National Board Certification process. In the days when test scores were just about the only form of hard data on student or teacher performance, districts were reluctant to judge professionals who might be working with very challenged children. But modern data systems, with their extensive capacity to collect information, evaluations can begin to calculate "growth," so a baseline of an individual student's achievement — wherever that is — can be calculated with that child's challenge to produce a measure of how much a teacher helped that child grow academically.
Currently, the Regents and Commissioner would like student performance, on this "growth" basis, to count as 51% of a teacher's evaluation.
Evaluation, then, will raise questions about specific areas in which teachers might be weak and need additional professional development. Districts and schools will use evaluation data to design professional development on both a school-wide basis, and for individual professionals.
Also, RIDE is redesigning the system they use to license teachers. In future, a teacher's ability to continue to be licensed for public schools will take into account that teacher's effectiveness to improve student achievement.