In the New York Times article, "Atlanta Cheating Scandal Reignites Debate Over Tests' Role," NCTE Principal Investigator Tom Kane comments on the role of education testing amid the Atlanta school cheating scandal. Kane asserts that abandoning testing would "be equivalent to saying ‘O.K., because there are some players that cheated in Major League Baseball, we should stop keeping score, because that only encourages people to take steroidsn.’” Kane supports including student test scores as just one of multiple measures used in teacher evaluation. The article provides an overview of the debate around high stakes testing for evaluation purposes.

Reinventing Teacher Evaluation: Bureaucratic Intrusion or Vital Educational Infrastructure?

NCTE Principal Investigator Tom Kane will speak at the Penn Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) at the University of Pennsylvania as part of the lecture series held for the Pre-Doctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Methods for Fied-Based Research in Education, sponosred by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). He will discuss finidings from the MET project and the importance of providing regular, reliable feedback to teachers. 

NCTE Principal Investigator Tom Kane spoke with Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post about the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project and importance of using multiple measures for teacher evaluation in the blog post, "The key to evaluating teachers: Ask kids what they think." Kane points out that the random-assignment study differs from others because it combines data from three different sources, from classroom observation, student achievement gains, and a student survey, to identify which teachers caused greater learning.

This issue features information about the new state teacher evaluation systems currently being rolled out in Race to the Top and ESEA flexibility states. Additonally, it includes a summary of NCTE leaders Corinne Herlihy and Heather Hill's forthcoming article on state and local efforts to increase accuracy and consistency of teachers' evaluation scores.

NCTE Newsletter Winter 2013

Heather Hill and Mary Beisiegel Present at the Teachers' Development Group

NCTE Co-Principal Investigator Heather Hill and NCTE Associated Faculty Member Mary Beisiegel of Oregon State University presented at the Teachers' Development Group 2013 Leadership Seminar on Mathematics Professional Development. Hill and Beiseigel discussed the connection between the Common Core State Standards of Mathematics and the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI) classroom observational tool.
View presentation slides

On Wednesday, January 30, NCTE Principal Investigator Tom Kane spoke at Clark University for the annual Dr. Lee Gurel '48 Lecture. His lecture, "Measures of Effective Teaching," focused on the questions: How do we tell who the great teachers are and how can we produce more of them and more effective teaching? Watch the video recording via the website below.

Congratulations to NCTE Principal investigator Tom Kane, and Co-Principal Investigators Heather Hill and Douglas O. Staiger for appearing on Education Week’s 2012 list of university-based academics making substantial contributionsto the public debate around K–12 and higher education. The list was crafted by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and takes into account the academics’ scholarly publication sand their “footprint on the public discourse.”

CEPR Faculty Director Tom Kane recently led the Measures of Effective Teaching project, a $52 million study sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  In January 2013, the project published three new reports. The teachers who were identified as more effective during the first year of the project—using student achievement gains, classroom observations, and student surveys—produced greater student achievement following random assignment. This is the first large-scale study to demonstrate that it is possible to use teacher evaluations to identify great teachers. The three-year study also found that teacher evaluations which combine student achievement gains, classroom observations, and student evaluations, provided the best combination of predictive power and reliability. 

MET Project Reports:

For a complete list of MET project reports, see: http://www.metproject.org/reports.php

Media Coverage: