Are too many teachers declared highly effective?

A new national report credits Louisiana for its teacher evaluation system, particularly for connecting those evaluations to professional development, compensation and accountability.

The study by the National Council on Teacher Quality, released this week, examined how all 50 states are evaluating teachers.

In Louisiana, researchers found that educator evaluations are tied to tenure, professional development, improvement plans, compensation and layoffs.

The council recommended that the state make evidence of teacher effectiveness the basis for granting teaching licenses to out-of-state candidates, and place student teachers with more experienced educators to help with their training.

Although some Louisiana teachers have criticized the evaluation system, particularly its connection to student performance, the NCTQ researchers found that the state’s system is strong. Louisiana was particularly lauded for how the results connect to salaries, which goes toward treating teachers as professionals, said Sandi Jacobs, the NCTQ’s senior vice president of state and district policy.

Louisiana was cited as one of seven states — along with Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada and Utah — that directly tie teacher evaluation results to salaries.

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“In any other profession, people are rewarded for how well they do their jobs. Teaching really should be no different, especially as we look at the need to attract talented individuals into the profession,” Jacobs said. “We’ve seen a series of reports that shows that when we’re talking to millennials, one of the things that does not appeal to them about teaching is having a salary schedule and not being treated as individuals.”

This spring, a bill that would have changed the evaluation system for many Louisiana teachers failed in a Senate committee. The bill would have adjusted the weight of the Value-Added Assessment Model (VAM) that is used to help evaluate elementary and middle school English and math teachers, as well as many high school teachers.

The VAM model measures teacher performance by how much progress students make, based on computer models, according to educators. However, some have said teachers can be rated “ineffective” if students don’t meet the computer model’s projections, even if a high number of students perform well.

Earlier this year, the Lafayette Parish Association of Educators called the evaluation system "significantly flawed." The organization was hoping that legislators would change the system, and recommended several possible adjustments. Those included giving districts the flexibility to create their own evaluation standards, use student scores for 10 percent of a teacher's score and remove a requirement tying salaries to evaluations.

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The report noted what its authors called “a troubling pattern” across many states — the “vast majority of teachers” are identified as effective or highly effective, generally the top two categories in evaluation systems.

Last year in Louisiana, 43 percent of teachers were rated “highly effective,” according to the Louisiana Department of Education. In Lafayette Parish, 48 percent of teachers were deemed “highly effective,” while another 46 percent were deemed “effective: proficient,” the second-best category.

Jacobs said the nationwide concern is that evaluation results don’t match up with other data the NCTQ has reviewed on student achievement and the frequent struggles of first-year teachers.

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“It’s concerning that we’re not finding more teachers in that second category, which can be called ‘needs improvement,’ ‘developing’ or ‘minimally effective,’” Jacobs said. “The fact that we’re not seeing, in many places, virtually any teachers who are rated as needing improvement — it just doesn’t track with what we know. It’s not that it should be a gigantic number or that we’re looking for more ineffective teachers. It’s just that in most places, it’s so small and doesn’t match with other things we know.”

Jacobs said the connection between evaluation results and other factors is critical so that evaluations aren’t conducted just for the sake of doing them.

“We want to make sure we’re doing it because it matters to teachers, and it’s for the benefit of students,” she said. “One of the things we think is most important is that we are connecting professional development to teacher evaluations. The purpose of evaluations should be to help teachers grow and develop. If we are not targeting professional development to what we are finding out about that teacher, then we really are squandering an important opportunity.”