The Education Gadfly Weekly

According to the authors of The SEA of the Future: Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Improvement, the federal government and state legislatures have asked State Education Agencies (SEAs) to be take a bigger role in improving schools. In the Buckeye State, the SEA is the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). To meet these increasing demands, the authors suggest SEAs transition into a performance management system, a system defined by high standards and goals, the systematic assessment of the organization’s progress, and a willingness to continuously improve and adopt new strategies.

In three interconnected essays, the authors, who are mostly affiliated with the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education, share what they believe to be the necessary steps to build a successful performance management system: (1) changing the system of support that an SEA offers to improve the organizational capacity of local districts and schools, (2) funneling resources to support the policies necessary to enact district-level change, and (3) engaging stakeholders such as governors, legislators, and advocates to help sustain the decisions made by SEA leaders. The key takeaway is that a successful SEA must be willing to change and respond to the needs of its districts and schools, while being unburdened by the status quo.

As cities in Ohio become leaders in education reform, it is becoming increasingly necessary for ODE to help support and sustain these policy reforms. Fortunately, state superintendent Dick Ross has a track record of innovating at the district level in Reynoldsburg. And now that some of Ohio’s most important policymakers share a similar strategy for improving education, these groups must establish a foundation for sustainable change in education. If Ohio’s major cities and ODE can work in tandem to develop a flexible and efficient system that does whatever is necessary to provide a good education for its children the possibilities become all the more limitless.

SOURCE: Betheny Gross, Ashley Jochim, Paul Hill, Patrick J. Murphy, and Sam Redding, The SEA of The Future: Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Improvement, (Seattle, WA: Building State Capacity and Productivity Center, May 2013).

Do you believe that well-written and timely stories can change minds? Do you have the ability and the drive to research and write those stories? Would you like to work at the forefront of Ohio education policy? If so, you might be perfect as Education Writer and Policy Associate for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Ohio office.

To see more details or to apply, please click here.

By July 1st, Ohio law will require public school districts (charter and district) to establish a teacher evaluation policy. The evaluation policy must conform to a framework that depends half on student growth on test scores and half on classroom observations.[1] Based on these measures, teachers will earn an overall rating: accomplished, proficient, developing, or ineffective.

In our recent survey of superintendents, Ohio’s teacher evaluation policy received mixed reviews. Nearly three out of four (73 percent) said that teacher evaluations would become accepted practice five years hence. And, 42 percent said that teacher evaluations would lead to “fundamental improvement” in the state’s K-12 school system. So, there’s modest optimism toward teacher evaluation.

But there’s undeniable angst about the policy details. Nearly all superintendents (93 percent) think that they’ll be lawsuits when personnel decisions are based on Ohio’s evaluation framework. And nearly all (86 percent) think that the classroom observation mandate will “put too much pressure on principals.” One superintendent said

“It will over-tax the principals and render them useless. They will need to spend so much time on evaluations, they will not have time for anything else.”

When one looks at the Ohio Department of Education’s website, one can see from whence this sentiment emerges. For example, the “teacher evaluation resource packet,” which operationalizes the classroom observation portion of the policy, clocks in at 22 pages. By simple extrapolation, this suggests a small mountain of paperwork for a principal who supervises 20 teachers.

Is there a better way?

Enter the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, a three-year project sponsored by the Gates Foundation involving 3,000 teachers in 7 school districts. The MET researchers probed whether student perception surveys could be an effective and reliable tool for measuring teacher effectiveness. The study used the Tripod Project survey, developed by Ronald Ferguson of Harvard, which asks students to rate their agreement on 35 or so items related to seven characteristics of an effective teacher. (For the survey items, see pages 12 and 13 of this MET report.)

The researchers found that surveys, if done well, can deliver reliable information that differentiates high- and low-performing teachers. The study finds that:

“Although an individual student may have a less sophisticated understanding of effective instruction than a trained observer, student feedback has two other advantages that contribute to reliability: students see the teacher all year (and, therefore, are less susceptible to lesson to lesson variation), and the measures are averaged over 20 to 75 students, rather than 1 or 2 observers (p. 14).”

The MET study concludes succinctly, “students know an effective classroom when they experience one.”

Despite this robust research, some may still think that surveying students in high-stakes evaluations is akin to the inmates running the asylum. One Georgia high school teacher claimed that “kids, number one, don’t have the maturity to do it and, number two, can be quite biased.” The MET study proves that this fear is unfounded. Plus, this isn’t to suggest that teacher evaluations ought to rely wholly on student surveys. In fact, according to the MET researchers, policy makers mustn’t exclude either value-added growth or classroom observation from teacher evaluation. Multiple measures are required.

Many would agree that having an effective teacher in every classroom is a fair and legitimate goal. And, identifying which teachers are effective and which are not—and tying personnel decisions to effectiveness—must happen, in order to achieve this goal.

Measuring teacher effectiveness, however, need not create procedural nightmares for school leaders, lest the bureaucratic costs eat into the benefits of great teaching. Other states, including North Carolina and New York, are implementing student surveys, and Ohio’s policymakers ought to consider mixing surveys into the evaluation framework. If done well, student surveys may be the low-cost and effective relief to the migraines that too many of our school leaders seem to be experiencing per teacher evaluations.

Teach For America (TFA), the demonstrably effective teacher placement and preparation program, is wrapping up its first year in the Buckeye State. In 2012-13, TFA placed 34 teachers in schools and pre-K centers in the Cincinnati-Dayton-Northern Kentucky area and another 50 in Cleveland-area schools. (Six TFA teachers taught at Dayton Liberty Academies, Fordham-sponsored charter schools, and Fordham has supported TFA’s start-up efforts in Southwest Ohio financially.)

A series of articles (accessible here, here, here, here) by reporter Jessica Brown of the Cincinnati Enquirer kept tabs on three of Ohio’s inaugural class of TFA teachers: Sarah Theobald, Paige Fryer, and Tierra McGee. Theobald taught preschool at Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency, Fryer taught first grade at Impact Academy, a charter school, and McGee taught seventh grade at Holmes Middle School in the Covington (KY) School District.

What do the Enquirer articles tell us about TFA teachers? Three characteristics are apparent:

1.)    They’re resilient – Theobald, the pre-K teacher, reported the challenge of having three Spanish-speaking students in her class. With the help of her peers, she’s managed to integrate them into her classroom—and she’s also made learning Spanish a priority.  

2.)    They learn fast – Fryer, who teaches at Impact Academy, reported how she quickly learned on-the-job teaching tricks. One was as simple as giving students clear instructions. McGee, who teaches at Covington, found that role-playing engaged her students, so she adapted her lessons accordingly.

3.)    They achieve results –Fryer, for example, achieved 1.5 years of learning or more for most her students—the school’s “Big Goal.” McGee’s principal said of her: “She’s a keeper, and we intend to keep her,” while Covington’s superintendent told the Enquirer that “The TFA teachers had an outstanding first year…they have met the very high standards that we see for our teachers.”

True, resilient, quick-learning, and results-driven sound like keywords plastered on a recent college-grad’s resume. But these TFA teachers are living out what’s written on their resumes. (TFA teachers’ resumes, by the way, are very good.) Next year, roughly 45 new TFA teachers will enter into Cincinnati-Dayton-Northern Kentucky classrooms, including up to 8 teachers in Dayton Public Schools and 5 in Cincinnati Public Schools. (See our recent blog from former Fordham staff member, Bianca Speranza, who will be part of next year’s corps.) If the first-year results are anything of a predictor, it looks like better days ahead for a few of Ohio’s neediest classrooms.

According to the authors of The SEA of the Future: Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Improvement, the federal government and state legislatures have asked State Education Agencies (SEAs) to be take a bigger role in improving schools. In the Buckeye State, the SEA is the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). To meet these increasing demands, the authors suggest SEAs transition into a performance management system, a system defined by high standards and goals, the systematic assessment of the organization’s progress, and a willingness to continuously improve and adopt new strategies.

In three interconnected essays, the authors, who are mostly affiliated with the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education, share what they believe to be the necessary steps to build a successful performance management system: (1) changing the system of support that an SEA offers to improve the organizational capacity of local districts and schools, (2) funneling resources to support the policies necessary to enact district-level change, and (3) engaging stakeholders such as governors, legislators, and advocates to help sustain the decisions made by SEA leaders. The key takeaway is that a successful SEA must be willing to change and respond to the needs of its districts and schools, while being unburdened by the status quo.

As cities in Ohio become leaders in education reform, it is becoming increasingly necessary for ODE to help support and sustain these policy reforms. Fortunately, state superintendent Dick Ross has a track record of innovating at the district level in Reynoldsburg. And now that some of Ohio’s most important policymakers share a similar strategy for improving education, these groups must establish a foundation for sustainable change in education. If Ohio’s major cities and ODE can work in tandem to develop a flexible and efficient system that does whatever is necessary to provide a good education for its children the possibilities become all the more limitless.

SOURCE: Betheny Gross, Ashley Jochim, Paul Hill, Patrick J. Murphy, and Sam Redding, The SEA of The Future: Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Improvement, (Seattle, WA: Building State Capacity and Productivity Center, May 2013).

Do you believe that well-written and timely stories can change minds? Do you have the ability and the drive to research and write those stories? Would you like to work at the forefront of Ohio education policy? If so, you might be perfect as Education Writer and Policy Associate for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Ohio office.

To see more details or to apply, please click here.