| | Let's make wise use of new teacher assessments
Recent advances in teacher assessment hold considerable promise for improving the quality of teaching and learning in US schools and for increasing the status and respect associated with the teaching profession. The Real Issue of Performance Evaluation
When offering professional development services to teachers it may be more important to provide quality developmental assistance than to separate the summative (salary-related) evaluation from developmental (formative) evaluation. Some have argued that splitting these two parts of teacher evaluation would help those evaluated to feel less defensive, more open to discussing performance problems, and more open to taking suggestions. The evaluator, in turn, would be free to help the teacher improve performance without also having to make a salary-sensitive administrative evaluation. But it doesn’t always happen this way. Nourish the Roots: Finding and Supporting Top Talent
UW-Madison education professor Allan Odden and colleague James Kelly have begun a new project to help education leaders strategically improve the way human capital is managed. They refer to it as Strategic Management of Human Capital, or SMHC. Odden says that the strategic management of human capital deserves to be a high-priority reform movement in U.S. education. Only when that goal is addressed can classroom instruction be improved, and student achievement increase. A New Era for the Strategic Management of Human Capital
Over the past 18 months educators have seen the national education reform agenda transformed. Novel ideas and unique strategies have been placed on the national docket for serious consideration. This transformation includes a focus on developing talent and managing human capital, a core emphasis of the education agenda of President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
It’s critical at this point to concentrate on developing great teachers and leaders, says Allan Odden. Odden is a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-directs the project Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC).
SMHC is pressing for a comprehensive and substantive national policy agenda on human capital reform in education. The project assembled leaders of major education organizations along with innovative superintendents and independent education reform groups.
SMHC recently released a report, “Taking Human Capital Seriously: Talented Teachers in Every Classroom, Talented Principals in Every School.” It’s intended as a blueprint for the human capital agenda that needs to be addressed by districts, states (including Race to the Top proposals), and the nation. Using Teacher Performance Assessments For Human Capital Management
Developing a teaching assessment for use in a strategic human capital management system is a complex undertaking. A paper by WCER researcher Tony Milanowski and colleagues can help districts and states think about how to get started and what resources to gather. This study reviewed seven teaching assessment systems and found that the most comprehensive assessment systems were the Framework for Teaching and the Formative Assessment System Continuum of Teacher Development. Value-Added Measurement: What It Is and Is Not
A value-added model for evaluation is simply a statistical formula that estimates the contribution of schools, classrooms, teachers, and other educational factors to student achievement. What makes value-added evaluation unique is that it also measures, and controls for, non-school sources of student achievement growth, including, for example, family education, social capital, and household income. Value-added models take into account that different schools serve very different populations of students. |
