Federal Funds for Improving Teacher Evaluations

Rewarding excellent teachers and swiftly removing bad ones is a relatively new concept in public education. Current labor union contracts and teacher salary schedules typically prevent differentiated compensation based on anything beyond years of experience and academic credentials. And the concept of “tenure” or “permanent status” for teachers makes quick removal nearly impossible. But a recent report by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), The Widget Effect, hopes to change that by encouraging states and school districts to dramatically improve teacher evaluations and link them to teacher pay, increased responsibilities, and dismissal.

The Widget Effect refers to how teachers are currently treated like identical inputs into education, rather than individuals with particular strengths, weaknesses, and skills. The authors claim this is due to the broken teacher evaluation system currently in place in most school districts. Teacher evaluations are infrequent and lack rigor. Principals often do not receive evaluation procedure training and rarely provide guidance and feedback to struggling teachers.

According to the report, evaluation systems lack nuance — typically allowing teachers to be rated only “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” — and the vast majority of teachers always receive the highest possible rating. Beyond that, most teachers already have permanent status, preventing them from easy removal, and probationary teachers are almost never fired as a result of a poor evaluation.

As a result, TNTP claims, neither teachers nor administrators take the evaluation process seriously. Most teachers keep their jobs regardless of evaluation outcomes, and exceptional teachers rarely benefit from a good evaluation. Without a direct connection between evaluation and compensation, the evaluation process will continue to be mostly irrelevant in public education.

TNTP provides four recommendations for improving evaluations. The first calls for a comprehensive evaluation system that effectively judges a teacher’s skill and effect on student achievement and provides guidance for improvement. The second requires that principals be trained and accountable for the use of an evaluation system. The third suggests that evaluations be taken into consideration in assignment, compensation, retention, and dismissal decisions. The fourth, and potentially most challenging recommendation, calls for streamlining the teacher dismissal process for ineffective teachers.

Given the established nature of teacher evaluation systems and the political effort typically involved in changing labor union contracts, some of these recommendations seem like pie in the sky. But new funds available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the president’s fiscal year 2010 budget request could make these changes possible.

For example, the ARRA included $200 million for the Teacher Incentive Fund, which provides competitive grants to local education agencies, or school districts, to implement performance-based teacher compensation systems including those that base pay on evaluations. The president’s 2010 budget proposes to significantly increase the Teacher Incentive Fund to $517 million from $97 million, making more of such funds available than ever before.

In addition to Teacher Incentive Fund increases, the ARRA also provides $48.6 billion in State Fiscal Stabilization Funds that can be used to improve teacher evaluation systems and rethink teacher compensation structures. That same legislation also includes $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds for state education agencies participating in innovative practices. These funds can be used to improve the distribution of teachers across schools through dynamic evaluation systems linked to teacher placement.

Now that the federal government has significantly increased its investment in improving teacher compensation and evaluation systems, states and school districts have a unique opportunity to rethink how teachers are evaluated. TNTP’s report provides a good guide for implementing real change to existing systems, leading the way to treating teachers less like widgets and more like professionals.