Measuring Teacher Effectiveness According to Chris Christie and Bill Gates

Christie Proposes Education Reform Bills that would Eliminate Current Tenure System for Teachers

April 14, 2011

The Star-Ledger - Gov. Chris Christie sent a package of education reform bills to the Legislature Wednesday that would eliminate tenure as teachers know it and offer job protection only to those who consistently show a high level of performance based on new statewide evaluation system.

Under the tenure proposal, teachers would be given one of four ratings — highly effective, effective, partially effective or ineffective — based equally on student performance and classroom observations. Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf first unveiled the evaluation system during an address at Princeton University in February.

Teachers who receive the two highest ratings three years in a row would be eligible for tenure and merit pay, at their district’s discretion. Educators rated partially effective for two consecutive years or ineffective for one year — even if they have previously been highly rated — would lose tenure and could be fired.

"We want tenure to become something good teachers earn," said Christie, who has been advocating education reform for months. "It will not protect bad teachers who stay in front of the classroom.

"What we want is the most effective teachers at the front of every classroom regardless of seniority. Teachers who are effective are not worried about losing their jobs."

Under the current system, most teachers receive tenure after three years and one day on the job. The state has revoked tenure from just 17 teachers over the past 10 years. The process can drag out for years and be very costly to districts.

The tenure proposal is one of seven education reform bills Christie said he hopes will move through the Democrat-controlled Legislature quickly and be implemented by the 2012-13 school year.

Other proposals include:

• Ending the practice known as "last in, first out," which requires districts to lay off less experienced teachers first.

• Promoting what’s known as "mutual consent," which requires principals and teachers to agree on teachers’ assignments to schools.

• Offering bonuses to teachers who work in high needs districts and difficult to staff subject areas like math or science.

• Placing a 30-day deadline on tenure revocation decisions.

• Allowing school districts to opt out of the civil service system.

None of the bills has a sponsor, leaving some legislators questioning the likelihood they will move forward at all.

Tom Hester Jr., a spokesman for the Assembly Democrats, said the caucus would review the bills and may introduce competing legislation.

Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex) said he does not support any of the measures, as proposed, and would likely vote against them if they came before his committee.

"Everyone in education agrees that there are no reliable evaluation tools to accomplish what the governor continues to say should be the standard for hiring and retaining teachers," Diegnan said. "Test scores have been tried across the country and consistently produce unreliable results."

Steve Wollmer, a spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said an evaluation system might drive performance in the corporate world, but won’t in the state’s public schools.

"You should not use standardized test scores to make high stakes personnel decisions," said Wollmer, whose union has consistently battled the governor over education reform. "There are too many factors that affect student test scores that teachers cannot control."

Adam Bauer, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans, said it is "highly likely" the bills will garner support — and sponsors — from the Republican caucus, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. (R-Union), who supports the governor’s education reform agenda.

"(Sen. Kean) looks forward to continuing to work with the administration on their shared commitment to saving kids from failing schools and measuring educational success based on outcomes," Bauer said.

Kean could not be reached for comment.

Lynne Strickland, executive director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, a group of about 100 suburban districts, said Christie’s proposals will prompt "a real dialogue and conversation" about education reform in New Jersey.

She said a number of "stumbling blocks" from teachers’ perspectives, including the proposed changes to teacher compensation and the evaluation process based on assessment.

"The details in the legislation are going to be dramatically important," Strickland said. "That’s why it’s clear this is going to be hashed out. It should be, because this is significant change."

2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates (Excerpt)

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness

The foundation works on health in poor countries because we think it’s the best way to improve lives globally. In the United States, we believe the best way to improve lives is to improve public education. America’s education system has been fundamental to its success as a nation. But the way we prepare students has barely changed in 100 years. If we don’t start innovating in education to make it better and more accessible, we won’t fulfill our commitment to equal opportunity, and our competitiveness will fall behind that of other countries.

In last year’s letter I wrote about the evidence that helping teachers teach more effectively is the best way to improve high schools. It is incredible how much the top quartile of teachers can improve the skills of even students who are quite far behind. This was a new effort for us at the time, so in 2009 I spent a lot of time trying to understand more about teaching: How do you identify the best teachers? How can they help other teachers be as good as they are? What investments are made to raise the average quality of teaching?

It is amazing how little feedback teachers get to help them improve, especially when you think about how much feedback their students get. Students regularly have their skills measured with tests. The results show how they compare to other students. Students know how to improve because they see where they did well and where they didn’t. They can talk to other students and learn from those who mastered the material.

Students get more feedback on their work than people in most jobs. One job where the worker is provided almost no feedback is the teacher at the front of the class. In a teacher’s personnel file there is rarely anything specific about where the teacher is strong or weak. Often there is just a checklist of basic things like showing up on time and keeping the classroom clean. In places where there is a rating system at all, 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory. Although this personnel system has the benefit of low overhead and predictability, it doesn’t help identify best practices and drive improvement.

The alternative is a system where time and money are invested in evaluation with the goal of helping teachers improve. Making this work requires both resources and trust. A new system needs to be predictable and help teachers identify weaknesses and give them ways to improve, and it should not make capable teachers afraid of capricious results.

A key point of contention about an evaluation system is how much it will identify teachers who are not good and don’t improve. A better system should certainly identify the small minority who don’t belong in teaching, but its key benefit is that it will help most teachers improve.

A new system requires more than just taking the test scores of the students and seeing how they improve after a year with a teacher. It also involves things like feedback from students, parents, and peer teachers and an investment of time in reviewing actual teaching. Tools like video can be used so that a teacher can send peers a video showing him trying to do something hard, like keeping a class focused, and ask for advice. Instead of people coming into the classroom, which is quite invasive, a webcam can be used to gather samples for evaluation.

To help develop an evaluation system to improve teacher effectiveness, in November we committed $335 million to partnerships in Memphis, Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Pittsburgh; and Los Angeles. The involvement and support of the union representatives in each of these locations was a key part of their selection.

This is an instance where there isn’t a clean separation between the creation of the innovation—ways to evaluate teachers and help them improve—and the delivery of the innovation, which requires teachers to embrace a change to the personnel system. We are working on both at the same time. Teachers will be evaluated and given incentive pay based on excellence. If most of the teachers in these locations like the new approach and they share their positive experience, then these evaluation practices will spread. The goal is for them to become standard practice nationwide. The benefits of this would be unbelievably large, which is why we are pursuing it even though we know there is a high risk that it could fail. Previous efforts along these lines seemed to thrive for a few years, but if the system is not well run or if teachers reject differentiation, it gets shut down.

The filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who directed An Inconvenient Truth, has a new documentary about American education coming out this year. Waiting for Superman tells the story of several kids trying to get into schools with high-quality teaching—it’s literally a lottery that will decide the fate of these young people. Although I may be biased because I appear in the movie, I think it is fantastic and hope it will galvanize a lot more political will to improve teaching effectiveness...