A new statewide report finds the overwhelming number of Ohio teachers are doing a good job. The Ohio Education Research Center, based at Ohio University, was commissioned by the Ohio Department of Education to go through evaluations of 86 thousand teachers.
State Impact Ohio’s Mark Urycki reports.
The research center looked at tests scores and other factors from the first full school-year of state teacher evaluations – 2013-14. It rated 90% of the teachers as either “skilled” or, the highest rating, “accomplished.”
Teachers at the big 8 urban districts, in poor rural districts, and at charter schools did not fare as well as suburban teachers raising the question: is it the teacher, or the school curriculum, or the student?
Ohio University professor Marsha Lewis, one of the authors of the report, acknowledges there are many outside factors but says teachers have a great amount of influence.
“These systems, Ohio’s and other states that have changed the way they do teacher evaluation, are meant to give better information and more specific information that schools can use and teachers can use to reflect on their own practice in the classroom and improve that.”
The ratings are reached using many different rubrics: teachers of certain subjects like reading were graded partially by how their students performed on state tests at the beginning and then the end of the year. Others were rated using local tests that followed local curriculum. Some districts judged instructors as a share of several teachers working together.
The president of the teachers union, the Ohio Education Association, Becky Higgins, made this statement: "The fundamental problem with the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System is its over-reliance on student test scores. There is broad agreement that too much testing is taking place and welcome steps are being taken to limit the level of testing. While some progress is being made in reducing the degree to which test scores are used to measure student growth and teacher performance, more improvements in Ohio’s teacher evaluations are needed. "
Half of every assessment was done by administrators who observed the teacher in the classroom, the so-called Performance on Standards.
The Department of Ed is expected to continue to make changes to how it evaluates the state’s teachers.
The OERC is a collaborative of six Ohio universities (Case Western Reserve University, Miami University, Ohio University, The Ohio State University, University of Cincinnati, and Wright State University) and four research institutions (Battelle, Battelle for Kids, Community Research Partners and Strategic Research Group).