The Widget Effect

The New Teacher Project poses the following question, "If teachers are so important, why do we treat them like widgets?" This issue is addressed is a large scale study of twelve public school districts across four states which gathered data involving teacher performance appraisal.

It is important to note that this study included teachers' union representation on the advisory panel which analyzed written feedback from survey responses from over 15,000 teachers, 1,300 principals and data from more than 40,000 teacher evaluation records. This research study produced some very interesting findings about the existing

teacher evaluation system:

1. All teachers are rated good or great: Less than 1% of teachers evaluated received unsatisfactory ratings.

2. Excellence goes unrecognized: When 99% of teachers evaluated are satisfactory or greater it creates methodological evaluative challenges to identify the truly exceptional teachers

3. Professional development is inadequate: Almost 75% of teachers did not receive specific feedback targeted towards instructional improvement from the evaluation process.

4. Novice teachers are neglected: Many districts had low expectations for beginning teachers

5. Poor performance is not addressed: 50% of the districts examined in this research study did not dismiss a tenured teacher for poor performance over a five year period.

You can download the executive summary of the Widget Effect in a 1.5 MB PDF here.

Source: The Widget Effect (edited)