Professional Practice, Student Surveys, and Value-Added: Measures of Teacher Effectiveness

Responding to federal and state prompting, school districts across the country are implementing new teacher evaluation systems that aim to increase the rigor of evaluation ratings, better differentiate effective teaching, and support personnel and staff development initiatives that promote teacher effectiveness and ultimately improve student achievement. Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) has been working for the last several years to develop richer and more-comprehensive measures of teacher effectiveness in support of a larger effort to promote effective teaching. In partnership with PPS, REL Mid-Atlantic collected data from Pittsburgh on three different types of teacher performance measures: professional practice measures derived from the Danielson Framework for Teaching; Tripod student survey measures; and value-added measures designed to assess each teacher’s contribution to student achievement growth. 

 

The study found that each of the three types of measures has the potential to differentiate the performance levels of different teachers. Moreover, the three types of measures are positively but modestly correlated with each other, suggesting that they are valid and complementary measures of teacher effectiveness and that they can be combined to produce a measure that is more comprehensive than any single measure. School-level variation in the ratings on the professional practice measure, however, suggests that different principals may have different standards in assigning ratings, which in turn suggests that the measure might be improved by using more than one rater of professional practice for each teacher.