State rethinking how to evaluate teachers

Bill would take student test performance out of equation

Legislators and education department officials are rethinking the way administrators evaluate whether teachers are getting through to students.

A recent bill introduced into the legislature would prohibit districts from using student tests and other performance measures to judge teacher effectiveness for three years. The moratorium gives students the chance to make up lost classroom time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teachers, who have long questioned if student performance reflects teacher effectiveness, welcomed the proposed legislation, while the state education department called for more measured changes to provide districts and families a way of seeing if kids are learning.

“There has to be some happy medium there between finding assessments that will provide reliable information for parents, students and teachers,” said Morgaen Donaldson, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut who researches educator evaluations, “and then having teachers set goals based on those assessments that are smart, realistic and context-specific, and can be part of their evaluation.”

In a typical school year, teachers are evaluated on their students’ performance on standardized tests, among other measures. Almost half of a teacher’s rating — 45 percent — is based on student learning, while the remainder is gleaned from observation, parent or peer feedback and student feedback or school-wide student performance.

But when schools shuttered last spring, the state waived teacher evaluations for the year.

As the pandemic continued to have an impact on students this year, and affected performance data as a result, the state adjusted its evaluation process once again. Current guidance assesses teachers on student social and emotional learning and engagement, rather than academic growth.

Former commissioner Miguel Cardona, now the U.S. Secretary of Education, wrote that the changes “reflect the critical importance of the social and emotional learning and well-being of students and educators during the upcoming academic year while maintaining meaningful feedback and substantive evaluation.”

Now, a bill before the state legislature’s Education Committee would continue to adjust evaluations following the pandemic as students catch up over three school years.

In written testimony, teachers’ unions expressed support for the proposal.

“Student performance in this situation reflects many more factors than the teacher’s performance,” wrote Jan Hochadel of the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut.

The idea of prohibiting student performance data in teacher evaluations is not new. Many teachers take issue with the practice, saying it doesn’t account for outside factors that influence student performance and encourages educators to teach to standardized tests.

Kate Field of the Connecticut Education Association called for suspending academic growth indicators in evaluations until the state reworks them to promote learning and innovation.

“Of course, we should be judging teachers on how much students are growing, but how do we measure that?” Field told Hearst Connecticut Media. “The measurement is what’s going to drive the instruction once you tie it to a teacher’s livelihood and wellbeing.”

Donaldson, the UConn researcher, said using academic growth as a measure of educator effectiveness suggests teachers have a greater impact on student performance than they actually do.

“Even before the pandemic, that assumption was not supported by research,” said Donaldson, who was the principal investigator of the state’s System for Educator Evaluation and Development pilot program almost a decade ago. “Families, home life, neighborhood contribute a lot to student performance. Teachers do affect it, but their work is not the most major influence.”

The current global crisis has only exacerbated that disconnect, she said.

“There are even more variables that have been introduced, like student mental health” especially for students still learning from home, Donaldson said, where “the availability of food, technology, internet stability, space to work that’s quiet — is not a given.”

Meanwhile, the education department proposed that, rather than eliminate indicators of student academic growth from evaluations, the legislature should extend the current state guidance, a department spokesperson wrote in an email to Hearst Connecticut Media.

The state education department is also in the process of convening a council to overhaul the state’s evaluation process in general. The coalition is using a phased-in implementation schedule beginning in the 2022-23 school year.

Dasha Spell, mom to a sixth grader from Classical Studies Magnet Academy in Bridgeport, said she would be concerned if policymakers rid evaluations of student performance indicators entirely, with some caveats.

“When you have a child not meeting standards, you have to make sure teachers are doing what they’re supposed to,” said Spell, adding that academic growth alone shouldn’t be the sole measure.

“It’s looking at the whole picture when it comes to evaluating a teacher,” she said. “You have to look at what the teacher is dealing with in the classroom… If we’re not supporting our teachers the way we’re supposed to, we can’t say our teachers failed the kids.”