Education Week - May 8, 2013 - 26

EDUCATION WEEK

MAY 8, 2013

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COMMENTARY
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Want to Build a Better
Teacher Evaluation?
iStockphoto/Aurelio Scetta

Ask a Teacher
By Ross Wiener & Kasia Lundy

“

Current evaluation efforts
will be for naught unless teachers
feel an ownership stake in the
effort to define expectations,
provide feedback, and
continuously improve
instruction.”

eformers have invested massive financial resources and political capital in new
teacher-evaluation systems, but early results show that these policies won’t lead to
improvements on their own. To generate
more effective teaching through evaluations, teachers, principals, and school system leaders
need to embrace a culture of ongoing two-way feedback
and a commitment to continuous improvement. Surveys
are a critical component of well-designed continuousimprovement systems, which high-performing organizations inside and outside the education sector have
adopted as a reliable, cost-effective means of gathering
and valuing front-line perspective. Surveying teachers,
and acting on the results, respects teachers’ voice, provides diagnostic information regarding principals and
schools, and offers an invaluable, authentic lens into
classroom implementation. Used well, teacher surveys
just might save evaluation reform from itself.
The problems evaluation reform is trying to address
are deep-seated issues of culture and management.
There is still an aversion to distinguishing based on performance; principals haven’t been expected to provide

Charting Pre-K’s Value for All
By William T. Gormley Jr.

iStockphoto

hen President Barack Obama announced his support for universal
preschool in his State of the Union
address this year, he rekindled a
fierce debate. Supporters praised
universal preschool as an excellent “investment” in the nation’s future workforce.
Critics lambasted it as yet another example of wasteful federal spending.
We have grown accustomed to cacophonous debates, so
this is not unexpected. Yet, if you look at the research on
pre-K learning in the United States, there is a surprising
degree of consensus among researchers in early-childhood
education. From this, bipartisan support for some type of
federally supported universal preschool program could
grow over time—an important development given that the
National Institute for Early Education Research reported
just last week that state pre-K funding has declined.
Let’s begin with the common ground. Most earlychildhood-education researchers would agree with the following three propositions:
First, a high-quality pre-K program can boost school readiness substantially, for disadvantaged children. This has
been amply demonstrated by the Perry Preschool Project,
the Abecedarian Project, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers
Project, and many others. High-quality universal preschool
programs in Georgia and Oklahoma have also demonstrated
big gains in school readiness for poor children.
Second, the cognitive benefits from pre-K often decline
from kindergarten to 3rd grade. Sometimes, the “fade

out” is modest, as in the case of the Chicago Child-Parent Centers. Sometimes, it is dramatic, as with a 2010
Head Start evaluation. Note, though, that the Head
Start evaluation included high-quality, low-quality, and
medium-quality programs.
Third, even if some initial fade-out occurs, the longterm benefits of a high-quality pre-K program can be
substantial. These include higher high school graduation

“

The benefits of a highquality universal pre-K program
are likely to exceed the costs, and
by a substantial margin.”
rates, lower rates of juvenile delinquency, less substance
abuse, and higher adult earnings.
Thus, many studies show that high-quality pre-K programs can improve outcomes for disadvantaged children
in the short run and generate favorable returns for taxpayers in the long run.
So, what’s the fuss about? Despite some common ground,
experts disagree, to some extent, on three other questions:
First, does a high-quality pre-K program benefit middleclass children? Second, how substantial is fade-out for
large-scale programs? Third, do the benefits of large-scale
universal pre-K programs exceed the costs?

rigorous feedback, and teachers aren’t accustomed to receiving critical appraisals. But perfunctory evaluations
are a symptom, not the cause, of lackluster performance
management, and inserting test scores into the equation
won’t produce meaningful evaluations of teachers on its
own. The changes that require the most attention relate
to building the will and capacity of leaders and inspiring teachers to embrace evaluation as an improvement
strategy, and these aren’t easily advanced through quick
fixes in policy.
To leverage teacher evaluation for improvement,
public education needs to teach principals to accurately
assess quality in teaching practice, create the expectation that school leaders will regularly give teachers
direct feedback that guides improvement, and coordinate the massive investments in professional development with content and activities that address teachers’
identified needs. Surveys can provide important, timely
information on whether this work is happening and
how it is being perceived. This is the premise of our recently published study, “Evaluating Evaluations: Using
Teacher Surveys to Strengthen Implementation.”
So far, the formative aspects of teacher evaluation
have been insufficiently emphasized in terms of energy
and investment compared to the measurement and accountability aspects. While accountability is certainly an

Until recently, it has been difficult to study the effects of
government-funded pre-K on middle-class children because
most pre-K programs have been aimed at poor children.
However, we are beginning to accumulate evidence from
the largest and most mature of the universal preschool programs—namely, Georgia’s and Oklahoma’s. In our study at
Georgetown University of the school-based pre-K program
in Tulsa, Okla., we found that middle-class children who
participated in pre-K were seven months ahead of their
peers in reading, four months ahead in writing, and four
months ahead in math. Disadvantaged children benefited
even more, but middle-class children benefited substantially. A recent evaluation of Boston’s universal preschool
program also detected substantial effects on middle-class students. Studies
of Georgia pre-K program participants
have thus far not directly addressed
the question of middle-class effects,
though they have concluded that the
presence of middle-class children in
pre-K classrooms benefits disadvantaged children.
Fade-out has sparked considerable controversy, especially over
Head Start. Unfortunately, these
debates do not tell us what we need to know about a
high-quality universal preschool program because a
different mix of students is involved and because Head
Start programs vary sharply in quality. We have folPAGE 29 >

WILLIAM T. GORMLEY JR. is a university professor at the Georgetown
Public Policy Institute and the co-director of the Center for Research
on Children in the United States, which is a joint venture between
the institute and Georgetown University’s psychology department, in
Washington. He is the author of Voices for Children: Rhetoric and Public
Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2012).

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Education Week - May 8, 2013

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