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17 Nov 2014
Report

Combining Multiple Performance Measures: Do Common Approaches Undermine Districts’ Personnel Evaluation Systems?

Michael Hansen
Mariann Lemke
Nicholas Sorensen

Teacher and principal evaluation systems now emerging in response to federal, state, and/or local policy initiatives typically require that a component of teacher evaluation be based on multiple performance metrics, which must be combined to produce summative ratings of teacher effectiveness. Districts have utilized three common approaches to combine these multiple performance measures, all of which introduce bias and/or additional prediction error that was not present in the performance measures originally. 

This paper investigates whether the bias and error introduced by these approaches erodes the ability of evaluation systems to reliably identify high- and low-performing teachers. The analysis compares the expected differences in long-term teacher value-added among teachers identified as high- or low-performing under these three approaches, using simulated data based on estimated inter-correlations and reliability of measures in the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project.

Based on the results of our simulation exercise presented here, we conclude these approaches can undermine the evaluation system’s objectives in some contexts. Depending on the way these performance measures are actually combined to categorize teacher performance, the additional error and bias can be large enough to undermine the district’s objectives.

PDF icon Combining Multiple Performance Measures: Do Common Approaches Undermine Districts’ Personnel Evaluation Systems?

Related Work

27 May 2013
Report

Working Paper: How Much Are Districts Spending to Implement Teacher Evaluation Systems?

AIR is working with RAND to evaluate the strategic human capital reform efforts of three school districts and a cluster of charter management organizations identified by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Among preliminary findings, the authors assert that the sustainability of the reforms studied relies on buy-in from stakeholders, and the ability of the districts to become more efficient in the way they create better results for students.

Further Reading

  • Value-Added Measures in Education
  • Client Services: Teacher Evaluation
  • AIR Education Policy Experts to Present at Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management 35th Annual Fall Research Conference
  • Uncommon Measures: Teacher Self-Evaluation to Encourage Professional Growth
  • Uncommon Measures: Using Peer Evaluation to Leverage Teacher Talent
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Topic

Education
Longitudinal Education Studies
Teacher Preparation and Performance

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