Teacher Performance Measurement and Rhee's Bold Moves

Last week in my Education Pioneers workshop (a weekly, day-long session where we discuss and investigate ed reform topics such as school choice, district reform, the achievement gap, etc.), we looked at human capital issues in public school districts. The most recent news on this front is Michelle Rhee's "victory" to negotiate a new contract with the teachers union. I put "victory" in quotes because I believe it took leadership on both sides of the aisle - Rhee's camp and that of the teachers union - to come to a compromise that looks to be groundbreaking. Again, this is a great example of how leaders (in this case, Rhee and the various teachers union leaders) took bold moves to hammer out a compromise that, while initially divisive, has clear benefits for all sides. While Rhee gets increased power to remove ineffective teachers, effective teachers will be paid significantly more. In essence, ineffective teachers will slowly be removed from the system.

Here's an article that explains the reforms, and another article that explains possibly the most important piece in the agreement - a new rubric for evaluating teachers. It's worth noting that teacher evaluations - one of the most contentious pieces of education reform - will not be solely based on absolute test score benchmarks. Rather, they're based on "value add" (jargon in the Ed world) scores plus other measures. The practice of measuring teachers' effectiveness through multiple measures is similar to that of the balanced scorecard, which has become the predominant method for tracking performance in for-profit ventures. A balanced scorecard uses multiple measures (both quantitative and qualitative) to track performance.

In my view, human capital issues such as pay-for-performance are critical to public education reform. Teachers unions often rally around the trite, lazy, and reductive refrain that "you simply can't effectively evaluate teachers' performance." There is, indeed, some merit to this argument - an effective teacher will do things that don't always show up in a students' test scores. For example, a great teacher will go to the homes of students to involve parents, and they will teach students ethical lessons that won't "show up" in a student's character until years in the future. However, test scores are not the only way to measure student performance. Thus, the teachers unions' argument that you simply cannot measure teacher performance is hollow. There is a better, more complete way to measure performance - a problem that Michelle Rhee's contract is trying to resolve.

The difficulty is in designing and implementing such a performance management system. If we are to rely on other measures such as principal evaluations of teachers (an appropriate role for principals), then principals must have the abilities and time capacity to conduct these evaluations. The reality is that in many many schools, principals have neither the appetite nor ability to conduct these evaluations (which brings up a completely new issue of peer evaluations or evaluations by "master teachers", which would require building new tiered teacher roles in schools). For example, my sister, a first year teacher in the Mississippi Delta, said her teacher came into her classroom less than three times the entire year - a year when Jenny, as a new teacher, needed the most instructional assistance.

So, an effective evaluation system requires a lot more than just "putting the system in place." It requires higher competencies from principals, a new management structure within the schools, and buy in from local teachers unions (not an easy issue to overcome). The bottom line is that reform must start somewhere.