Measuring Progress in Core High School Courses: Insights Into Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness

ACT Research and Policy Research Reports Educator Reports Policy Reports Issue/Information Briefs Issue Brief October 2012 Measuring Progress in Core High School Courses: Insights into Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness There is great interest in measuring instructional effectiveness for school and teacher accountability, for placing teachers and principals strategically, and for targeting professional development and other supports for educators. Traditionally, teacher quality was largely inferred from the background characteristics of teachers themselves (e.g., teacher experience, advanced degrees, and professional development). In recent years, researchers have developed value-added measures that directly measure effectiveness based on assessments of student achievement. These methods use statistical controls for individual prior achievement and background variables to isolate the contributions of teachers and schools to student learning. Several groups have advocated the use of value-added measures as part of teacher evaluation, including the New Teacher Project, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brookings, and Battelle for Kids.1 In 2009, the federal government offered large education grants to states and required states to use student achievement in teacher evaluations. In 2011, twenty-three states required the use of value-added or growth approaches as part of teacher evaluations.2 Value-added critics have argued validly that multiple measures of effectiveness should be used for high-stakes accountability and tenure decisions, because measures of teacher effectiveness based on student assessment do not capture the full impact that teachers have on students.3 The extent that student performance can be attributed to a teacher is limited by difficulties in isolating teacher effects from school characteristics, students’ prior experiences and achievement levels, and other factors beyond the teacher’s control.4 While statistical models can be formulated to control for these factors, they are unlikely to account for all of the relevant variables needed to completely isolate the teacher effect.5 Measures of principal, school, and district effectiveness have many of the same caveats. www.act.org/research infobrief@act.org for more information or to suggest ideas for future ACT Information Briefs. ©2012 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved. The ACT® is a registered trademark of ACT, Inc., in the U.S.A. and other countries. 18942 Issue Brief The key issue, however, is not whether value-added measures are perfect, since no evaluation system can measure all aspects of quality without error. Rather, the issue is whether the new measures provide additional valid input to ongoing methods of measuring instructional effectiveness. Teachers are traditionally evaluated by principals during annual (or less frequent) classroom visits. Weisburg et al. found that most principals gave the highest rating to all teachers in the school and 75 percent of teachers received no feedback on how to improve their instruction.6 Value-added approaches should provide considerably more rigor to these traditional teacher evaluations. Glazerman et al. argue that value-added measures are sufficiently reliable to be used as an element of teacher evaluation.7 Aside from high-stakes accountability, measures of teacher and school effectiveness can provide valuable information on how much students are progressing toward college and career readiness. Perhaps most importantly, the measures can inform school personnel strategies, such as targeting professional development based on teachers or principals showing less growth and placing teachers or principals with student groups for which they have excelled. This study demonstrates value-added measures using a large set of data that established baseline growth in eight core high school courses.8 Actual performance can be compared to expected performance to determine whether students’ growth was at, below, or above expectations. QualityCore and the National Baseline Study Research has shown that students who take a core high school curriculum (four years of English and three years each of math, science, and social studies) recommended in A Nation at Risk tend to be more prepared for college than students who do not.9 Despite more students taking such courses since that time, only about one-quarter of students who complete a core curriculum are ready for college-level coursework across the four core subject areas.10 Many courses appear to lack the rigor required to sufficiently prepare students for college.11 In response to concerns about the lack of college and career readiness of today’s high school graduates, ACT developed QualityCore®, a program designed to help teachers raise the quality of core high school courses. It includes instructional resources, professional development training, formative assessment tools, and end-of-course exams for 12 core courses: English 9,