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Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness
A teacher's effectiveness-the most important factor for schools in improving student achievement - is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision making in any meaningful way.
Suppose you are a parent determined to make sure your child gets the best possible education. You understand intuitively what ample research proves: your child's education depends to a large extent on the quality of her teachers. Consequently, as you begin considering local public schools, you focus on a basic question: Who are the best teachers, and where do they teach?
The question is simple. There's just one problem - except for word of mouth from other parents, no one can tell you the answer.
In fact, you would be dismayed to discover that not only can no one tell you which teachers are most effective, they also cannot say which are the least effective or which fall in between. Were you to examine the district's teacher evaluation records, you would find that, on paper, almost every teacher is a great teacher, even at schools where the chance of a student succeeding academically amounts to a coin toss, at best.
In short, the school district would ask you to trust that it can provide your child a quality education, even though it cannot honestly tell you whether it is providing her a quality teacher. This is the reality for public school districts nationwide. Put simply, they fail to distinguish great teaching from good, good from fair, and fair from poor. A teacher's effectiveness - the most important factor for schools in improving student achievement - is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way.
The Widget Effect
Our report examines our pervasive and long-standing failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of teachers. At the heart of the matter are teacher evaluation systems, which in theory should serve as the primary mechanism for assessing variations, but in practice tell us little about how one teacher differs from any other, except teachers whose performance is so egregiously poor as to warrant dismissal.
The failure of evaluation systems to provide accurate and credible information about individual teachers' instructional performance sustains...