Here’s a really wonky description of data studies on teacher evaluations, What Do We Know About the Tradeoffs Associated with Teacher Misclassification in High Stakes Personnel Decisions?, published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on April 15, 2013. In a nutshell, we make too many mistakes. Current evaluation systems tend to overlook many bad teachers and yet classify many good teachers as bad ones. But the more measures you use beyond just student test scores, such as student evaluations , and the more years of data you use for rating each teacher, the more accurate the evaluations become.
The authors, education scholars Dan Goldhaber and Susanna Loeb, are holding a webinar on the topic on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, at 1pm (PST). (That’s 4pm in NY)
