The Indiana Teacher Appraisal and Support System — a project of IU’s Center on Education and Lifelong Learning — released a four-year analysis of the implementation and effect of educator evaluation reform. The report suggests a need for clearer guidelines and requirements for evaluations.
INTASS submitted the report to the Indiana Department of Education, according to a press release.
Senate Enrolled Act 1, the 2011 state law that mandated teacher evaluations, requires that all teachers be evaluated annually; that evaluations be “significantly” informed by objective measures, such as test scores; and that teachers be placed in one of four categories: highly effective, effective, improvement necessary and ineffective.
The INTASS report authors, Sandi Cole and Hardy Murphy, studied educator ratings, student assessment outcomes and teacher evaluation plans to research implementation practices, plan quality, ratings of instructional effectiveness, learning outcomes, and student, educator, classroom, school and district demographics. Free and reduced lunch rates were used to determine student poverty rates, according to the report.
The researchers analyzed more than 2 million student records and almost a half million educator records from a data set provided by the Department of Education, according to the release.
The report suggested there is a “continued need for clear guidelines and requirements for training of teacher evaluators,” according to the release. It also calls for consideration of student growth strategies in teacher evaluations, such as a classroom-based teacher evaluation growth model to compare like classrooms and more equitable accounting for student demographics.
“The findings have obvious implications for several important issues in the school accountability discussion, including performance grant equity, teacher recruitment and retention, and the validity of the current A to F model,” Murphy, co-project director, said in the release.
Previous INTASS studies found that Indiana school administrators were generally positive about teacher evaluation requirements but had reservations about how they were implemented.
INTASS is funded by the Indiana State Board of Education and the Joyce Foundation. It is housed at IU’s Center on Education and Lifelong Learning, one of six centers at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community.
