Teacher Evaluation
Enable district- and school-level choice regarding which measures of student growth are most appropriate to meet local needs and objectives. Need to ensure that all methods of measuring student growth satisfy some minimum level of technical rigor regarding the calculation of student growth and combining multiple measures. Highly varied and often limited local resources available to develop, administer and analyze measures of student growth. Impact of small class sizes in calculating student growth. Ensuring that determinations of an individual educator’s performance are based upon credible evidence that clearly supports the performance rating.
The Council is also making recommendations concerning the development of new measures of student growth, to be guided by the experiences of pilot districts during the implementation period. Those recommendations are contained in the next section.
• Elena Elementary teaches reading, writing, math, and science to 5th graders. All of these subjects are tested by CSAP in the 5th grade. For reading, writing, and math, the growth of Elena’s students can be calculated using the Colorado Growth Model to compare their scores in 5th grade to the scores they received in 4th grade. However, some students in her class were not in her school or even in the state in 4th grade, so there is no comparison score. In addition, science is tested only in 5th grade, and not in 4th grade at all. In these cases, Elena’s district, in consultation with teachers like Elena and the technical resources available from CDE, will need to decide what the “next best” measure will be. For science, the “next best” measure may be a conditional status assessment, using the previous year’s math CSAP score. In Elena’s district, schools also use NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), which may provide a good source of data as well.
• Harry High School’s district uses a common end-of-course assessment to measure student learning in 10th-grade social studies. This is likely to be Harry’s best measure for student learning.
• Rita Rural teaches several math classes to several grade levels of students. The biggest problem her district will face in selecting growth measures is the small size of the student sample, which can interfere with accurate growth analysis. The district is looking into collaborating with other districts in its BOCES to increase the number of students being assessed. The Use of Student Growth Objectives The Council considers the ongoing improvement of educators' instructional practice to be a significant purpose of the educator evaluation system. The practice of having teachers set Student Growth Objectives for their students in their classes, either individually or as a class, is consistent with this intention. SGOs are traditionally set by a teacher in consultation with his or her principal, and may use a variety of measures, from state assessments to more subjective reviews of student work. Using SGOs as a way to frame student outcomes and growth for all
State Council for Educator Effectiveness Report and Recommendations
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