Using Student Achievement Data to Evaluate Teachers

The purpose of evaluating teaching effectiveness is to increase student learning. A common metric of student learning is achievement data (i.e., test scores). Thus, it is logical to use student achievement data to evaluate teaching effectiveness. The U.S. has had a short history of using achievement data to evaluate a school or district; the new movement is to use it to evaluate individual teachers’ effectiveness. Indeed, the US Department of Education has used the Race to the Top funds and the ESEA waiver process to obligate states to use student achievement data as a “significant” part of teacher evaluation. We are beginning to hear discussion of using student achievement data with new teachers to evaluate their teacher preparation programs [1]. The hope is that student achievement data differentiates teachers better than old, inadequate evaluation systems that simply labeled teachers as “satisfactory” or not. These old systems have been justly criticized because almost all teachers received the same score which meant that great teaching went unacknowledged and poor teaching went unaddressed [2].