Assessing teachers' effectiveness

A principal’s relationship to the school is analogous to the teacher’s relationship to the classroom. Teachers provide a safe and orderly learning environment, share information, present learning opportunities for students, and evaluate student performance. Effective principals provide a safe and orderly environment, share information, present learning opportunities for teachers, and evaluate teacher performance. This segment of the article, “Assessing Teachers’ Effectiveness”, examines the purpose of evaluation.

Purposes
Scriven (1967) drew attention to the distinction between formative and summative evaluation. If a school system institutes a system of assessment in order to encourage the professional growth and development of its teachers, it is engaged in formative evaluation. On the other hand, if the school system establishes an accountability system of evaluation in order to select teachers to license, hire, give tenure, promote, demote or dismiss, it is engaged in summative evaluation.

Most leading educators argue that the same procedures, and information gathered with them, cannot be used for both purposes - that teachers who may well benefit from assessment for formative reasons, will not expose their deficiencies if there is a risk of summative judgments. Accountability systems strive to affect school quality by protecting students from incompetent teachers. However, because nearly all teachers are at least minimally competent, the accountability system directly affects only a very few teachers who are not competent.
Thus, if our goal is to improve general school quality - and we use only those strategies that affect a few teachers - overall school improvement is likely to be a very slow process.

Growth-oriented systems, on the other hand, have the potential of affecting all teachers - not just those few who are having problems. There is no question that all teachers can improve some dimension(s) of their performance.

The survey of teacher evaluation that was conducted by Stiggins and Duke (1990) led them to suggest that there were several necessary conditions for the teacher growth model of teacher evaluation to succeed. The first was that any summative approach remains independent of the formative approach.

Stiggins and Duke (1990) were not dismissive of summative evaluation. Rather they argued that highly developed accountability-based evaluation protects teachers' property and rights to due process and protects the public from incompetent teachers.

Reflective Question: How can schools transform into learning organizations for their teachers?

Source: Michael J. Dunkin , Educational Research, 7(1), 1997, 37-51.