Joanne Jacobs covers a new study using North Carolina's extensive historical value-added student achievement data:

C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann analyzed 11 years of data on North Carolina schoolchildren for their study, which will be published in Applied Economics, a peer-reviewed journal.

Merit pay incentives should focus on rewarding school teams, not individuals, said Jackson, who teaches labor economics at Cornell.

 

EdWeek summarizes the crux of the findings:

...for the average educator teaching in a grade with three other teachers, replacing one peer with a more effective one has a spillover effect of .86 percent of a standard deviation on students’ test scores.                

For math, that equates to roughly one-tenth to one-fifth the size of the impact that is estimated to come from replacing the students’ own teacher with a better one, the paper says.

This is probably especially relevant to the Outcomes team, but it gives us some new value-added perspective in Measures as well. The full study is available here.

PBS education correspondent John Merrow just finished a blog post this morning on classroom observations. The core of his conclusion:

To wrap this up, that’s over a dozen teachers sharing their ideas and frustrations and highlighting two simultaneous problems–lack of evaluation and ineffective evaluation. Given that we seem to be moving inexorably toward some form of merit pay, how thoughtfully teachers are evaluated matters more than ever. And that means that we have to decide who does the evaluating and make sure they are prepared for the job.

Sobering, and very important to consider.

Over at Ed Week's Teacher Beat blog, Steven Sawchuk has some important details about Toledo's PAR program.

PAR is a favorite of the American Federation of Teachers, who has disputed The Widget Effect's claim that only a few teachers were dismissed under the system.

Sherman Dorn, a Florida academic and edu-blogger, is starting his own "citizen's commision" on Teacher Evaluation in New York City. Check out his blog to learn more.

Do you think Dr. Dorn would be a good addition to our policy team?