Imagine your third grade student is about to start a new school year. Would you rather your student have a teacher who has demonstrated their ability to teach engaging lessons and grow student learning or a teacher who struggles to create a safe learning environment? Now, imagine you are a teacher who wants to improve your compensation, accelerate your growth, and seek out opportunities for differentiated development. Without a fair and rigorous evaluation system, teachers, campuses, and school systems cannot identify the quality of instruction happening in a classroom or provide tailored professional development to accelerate teacher growth.
Teachers, and the instruction they provide students, are the most important school-based factors for student success. Teacher appraisals play a critical role in ensuring that students receive high-quality instruction and teachers receive the support they need to provide high-quality instruction. Robust teacher evaluation systems promote and reward effectiveness by setting clear expectations and drive professional development by highlighting areas for instructional growth.
Teacher appraisals not only provide teachers feedback for continuous improvement, but they also shine a light on best practices to support student growth. Research shows that in one school year, students assigned to an effective teacher can gain up to an additional year of academic growth in comparison to students taught by less effective teachers. Teacher appraisals can help district and campus leaders identify highly effective educators and incentivize those teachers to serve students on campuses with the most need.
Teacher evaluation systems create standards for teaching practices so that all students receive high-quality instruction, enable differentiated professional development and coaching so that all teachers can grow and refine their craft, and provide mechanisms to inform human-capital decisions for staffing, improving retention, and recognizing and rewarding top talent.
Teachers in districts with robust evaluation systems can be eligible for additional compensation, made possible through the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA). The Texas Legislature established TIA with the goal of providing outstanding teachers an accessible pathway to a six-figure salary as part of House Bill 3.
Good Reason Houston has supported multiple districts in the Houston region to participate in TIA including Aldine ISD, Pasadena ISD, and Alief ISD. Other districts in the region including Spring ISD, Klein ISD, KIPP, and YES Prep have also implemented TIA-approved local designation systems. These districts identify and designate outstanding teachers using multiple measures including student growth on assessments and classroom observations.
Teacher Appraisals and Impact on Student Achievement
Effective teacher appraisals are reliable predictors of student outcomes and include multiple measures, most importantly, student outcomes and multiple teacher observations. Research shows that when an appraisal system included 1) multiple teacher observation scores, 2) student feedback, and 3) student growth measures on assessments, the system was significantly more likely to predict student achievement gains than systems that only included a teacher’s years of experience and whether the teacher held an advanced degree.
Teacher years-of-experience alone is an insufficient indicator of teacher effectiveness. Good Reason Houston has found that there is no relationship between average teacher experience at a campus and that campus’s third grade reading proficiency, fourth grade math proficiency, and CCMR outcomes in Houston-area schools, and there is a slight positive relationship between average years-of-experience at a campus and that campus’s 8th grade science proficiency in the region.
An effective evaluation system aligned with strategic compensation can improve student outcomes. The National Bureau for Economic Research found that when Dallas ISD implemented an evaluation system that included multiple measures for evaluation and aligned stipends and pay, math and reaching achievement significantly improved overtime.
Reliable teacher evaluation systems can identify teachers who produce higher average student achievement. It is important to note that when systems do not use multiple measures for appraisals and do not prioritize evaluator calibration or reliability, those evaluation systems do not improve student achievement.
Student Outcomes in Teacher Appraisals
Student outcome metrics, especially those focused on student growth, add an objective measure to teacher evaluation systems that reduce bias and are often the only evaluation component focused on outcomes rather than instructional inputs.
Parents want to know that their child’s teacher can effectively support their learning. Families in schools with higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students have been shown to strongly value a teacher’s ability to improve student achievement.
Evaluating the impact of a teacher on student achievement is a complex and difficult task. In order to ensure reliability within a teacher evaluation system, districts should use reliable student outcome measures. Reliable student outcome measures include: results on research-backed assessments like STAAR, NWEA MAP, and in some cases, district-created student growth measures.
A combination of teacher-observation scores, student feedback, and growth measures on state tests from another year or group of students has shown to have the highest relationship with student outcomes.
Teacher Observations in Teacher Appraisals
Classroom observations can play a central role in a teacher evaluation system by providing information for meaningful feedback but the effective use of observations hinges on quality implementation and observations. In effective evaluation systems, districts regularly verify that observation scores are correlated with student assessment scores. To achieve these results, districts must prioritize both ongoing calibration of appraisers and the implementation of valid and reliable student growth measures.
Multiple observations are an essential component to any effective teacher appraisal. By conducting multiple observations using an observation tool (rubric, checklist, etc.) with a calibrated observer, districts can gauge the quality of instruction happening across campuses. Further, principals, instructional coaches, and other administrators can leverage observation data to develop and implement professional development and coaching plans to support teachers to grow and develop.
Observation rubrics can also establish a common understanding of effective teaching. Researchers found that observation rubrics developed a shared understanding of the elements of effective teaching that fostered communication about instructional improvement. They also found that teachers reported using the information from the observation rubric measures to change their instruction.
Teacher Evaluation Systems and Human Capital
Appraisals and evaluations across industries exist to inform human capital systems. Equitable and reliable evaluation systems can be used to make decisions regarding teacher development, retention, and other human capital systems.
After Denver Public Schools implemented a robust evaluation system campuses saw 91% of teachers earning the highest teacher rating were retained on campuses. Similarly, at a state-wide level in Tennessee, teachers who earned highly effective ratings were generally retained at a higher rate than less effective teachers. Emerging evidence in DC Public Schools shows that, on average, when low-performing teachers leave, they are replaced by teachers with higher scores resulting in student learning improving by about two months.
Teacher Evaluation Systems and TIA
The Texas Vacancy Task Force (TVTF) examined research and conducted stakeholder input across the state to determine how districts can attract and retain teachers. In addition to raising teacher base salaries, TVTF recommends that districts implement and sustain innovative compensation and staffing models that reward great teachers so that teachers can earn higher salaries faster based on performance. TVTF recommends that districts leverage TIA dollars as a means to provide higher salaries.
So that all teachers in Houston have access to TIA allotment funds, Good Reason Houston recommends that Houston-area districts develop and implement Local Designation Systems that meet the criteria to earn system approval from the Texas Education Agency. Large districts, like Houston ISD could draw down approximately $18.5 million dollars of incentive dollars per year and almost $92.5 million over 5 years through TIA. Low pay is a top concern of teachers in Texas, and TIA dollars can be used to recognize and reward the hard work of skillful teachers in the region.
