News Brief
Good Teachers Linked to Test Success
Wall Street Journal (01/09/13) P. A3 Banchero, Stephanie
A study found that effective teachers can boost the test scores of students who had struggled under low-performing instructors, marking a new salvo in the national debate over teacher performance. The three-year study by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, published Tuesday, is the first large-scale research to show, using random student assignment, that some teachers can produce test-score gains regardless of the past performance of their students, according to foundation officials. Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Tom Kane, a leader on the research project, found that the data from the random student assignment project demonstrate that some teachers can "cause student achievement to happen." The study found that a combination of student surveys of teacher quality, well-crafted observations of classroom teaching, and test scores is the best predictor of teacher effectiveness. The study analyzed 2010 test scores for about 1,600 of the 3,000 teachers and ranked instructors based on a value added formula that adjusted students' scores based on race, family income, and past performance. The ranking also included scores from student surveys and classroom observations. Once a rank was achieved, students were randomly assigned to classrooms the following year, and those teachers ranked the highest on average produced the highest student achievement in the following year.
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