New IES report on Teacher Performance Evaluations in U.S. Public Schools

The National Center for Education Statistics released a new Data Point report today, entitled Teacher Performance Evaluations in U.S. Public Schools. This report describes information sources used for teacher performance evaluations in public schools during school year 2016–17 and how results would be used to inform decisions about teachers during the 2017–18 school year, by school type. Findings include:

In 2017–18, both traditional public and public charter schools reported using more than one source of information on teacher performance in completing teacher evaluations during school year 2016–17.

While both traditional public schools (98 percent) and public charter schools (94 percent) used classroom observations in teacher evaluations, more public charter schools videotaped classroom observations than traditional public schools (20 percent versus 10 percent).

Student and parent surveys were used as a source of information in teacher performance evaluations more often in public charter schools than traditional public schools (45 percent versus 32 percent and 40 percent versus 26 percent, respectively).

More principals in public charter schools used teacher performance evaluation results to inform decisions about annual salary increases than principals in traditional public schools (32 percent versus 6 percent).

I think the big takeaway from the summary is how much more the charter schools use assessments for personnel decisions, with conventional schools presumably using seniority. Personally, I think that's probably the biggest thing normal schools stand to learn from charters, but also least likely to actually do so because the seniormost teachers disproportionately lead the unions and have a lot of power to pressure teacher bodies to follow their opinions.

https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2020133

Submitted December 03, 2020 at 10:47AM by scolfin https://ift.tt/3g2W66c