Jesse Rothstein, one of our premier economists and an experienced analyst of teacher evaluation studies, reviewed the latest MET study.
MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) is the Gates Foundation’s premier effort to show that someone has finally figured out a formula to measure teacher quality.
Rothstein says that the MET study did not succeed at its stated task.
Here is the summary:
The Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project was a multi-year study of thousands of teachers in six school districts that concluded in January 2013. This review addresses two of the final MET research papers. One paper uses random assignment to test for bias in teachers’ value-added scores. The experimental protocol was compromised, however, when many students did not remain with the teachers to whom researchers had assigned them; other students and teachers did not participate at all. This prevents conclusive answers to the questions of interest. The second paper examines how best to combine value-added scores, classroom observations, and student surveys in teacher evaluations. The data do not support the MET project’s premise that all three primarily reflect a single general teaching factor, nor do the data support the project’s conclusion that the three should be given roughly equal weight. Rather, each measure captures a distinct component of teaching. Evaluating teachers requires judgments about which components are the most important, judgments that are not much informed by the MET’s masses of data. While the MET project has brought unprecedented vigor to teacher evaluation research, its results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems.
My hunch–and I may be wrong–is that the Gates Foundation will conclude in about 3-5 years that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on finding the right mechanism–standardized and predictable–was a waste of money and will move on to some other big idea.
The foundation dropped $2 billion into the mass-production of small schools before dropping that one.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe the small schools initiative did not ask the right questions to begin with…
The evidence is clear that smaller impersonal schools are no more effective than larger impersonal schools.—duh
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The more VAT that is mandated, the more sterile and impersonal education will become. States sold they and their teachers’ souls for RTT fools gold.
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I can’t speak about other cities, but all that Gates money went a long way towards destroying the neighborhood high schools in NYC, displacing and professionally destroying many teachers, neutralizing the union and making the schools even more administratively top heavy.
From a Shock Doctrine perspective, a compete success.
MET, high stakes exams based on the Common Core, teacher evaluations based on VAM and a nit-picking Danielson Framework, are also intended to undermine the professional autonomy of teachers.
For the education malanthropists, disruption, displacement, and dispossession are measures of success.
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Mike F makes a compelling point—the goal of this “reform” blizzard from Gates, Bllomberg, and other billionaires is to disrupt, demonize and demoralize pub schl teachers, students, parents, and principals, paving the way for a pvt charter takeover of pub schl assets with the staekholder for pub schls in disarray, easier to defeat.
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Gives a whole new meaning to “hobby educators”! Dabbling in reform to satisfy their egos, then dropping the unsuccessful efforts to move on to some other “hobby” pursuit. Strange thing is their enormous failures, like Gates’s small schools initiative, don’t seem to affect their credibility. “Teflon hobby educators”, eh?
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Being an educational leader means having COURAGE. Leaders have to take good care of themselves, know how to build, lead, and maintain good schools, and how to nurture and develop their own inner courage. There is no way to be successful in this environment, when we are evaluated by “teflon hobby educators”, the media, and an uninformed public without courageous leaders.
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Professional educators and educational researchers have known about and used effective evaluation techniques for decades; techniques chosen and driven by research in the field of education—something that Gates could have accessed, if only he had a college degree. Oops—another ignorant person with money thinking that he/she could influence years of quality research and effective teaching. See the book, WHY AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE THE BEST PLACE FOR KIDS (Brown, D. F., 2012)
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