Yesterday I described the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) project as “an expensive flop.” To grasp just what a flop the project was, it’s important to consider what success would have looked like. If the project had produced what Gates was hoping, it would have found that classroom observations were strong, independent predictors of other measures of effective teaching, like student test score gains. Even better, they were hoping that the combination of classroom observations, student surveys, and previous test score gains would be a much better predictor of future test score gains (or of future classroom observations) than any one of those measures alone. Unfortunately, MET failed to find anything like this.
If MET had found classroom observations to be strong predictors of other indicators of effective teaching and if the combination of measures were a significantly better predictor than any one measure alone, then Gates could have offered evidence for the merits of a particular mixing formula or range of mixing formulas for evaluating teachers. That evidence could have been used to good effect to shape teacher evaluation systems in Chicago, LA, and everywhere else.
They also could have genuinely reassured teachers anxious about the use of test score gains in teacher evaluations. MET could have allayed those concerns by telling teachers that test score gains produce information that is generally similar to what is learned from well-conducted classroom observations, so there is no reason to oppose one and support the other. What’s more, significantly improved predictive power from a mixture of classroom observations with test score gains could have made the case for why we need both.
MET was also supposed to have helped us adjudicate among several commonly used rubrics for classroom observations so that we would have solid evidence for preferring one approach over another. Because MET found that classroom observations in general are barely related to other indicators of teacher effectiveness, the study told us almost nothing about the criteria we should use in classroom observations.
In addition, the classroom observation study was supposed to help us identify the essential components of effective teaching . That knowledge could have informed improved teacher training and professional development. But because MET was a flop (because classroom observations barely correlate with other indicators of teacher effectiveness and fail to improve the predictive power of a combined measure), we haven’t learned much of anything about the practices that are associated with effective teaching. If we can’t connect classroom observations with effective teaching in general, we certainly can’t say much about the particular aspects of teaching that were observed that most contributed to effective teaching.
Just so you know that I’m not falsely attributing to MET these goals that failed to be realized, look at this interview from 2011 of Bill Gates by Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal. You’ll clearly see that Bill Gates was hoping that MET would do what I described above. It failed to do so. Here is what the interview revealed about the goals of MET:
Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students’ education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.
“We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year,” he says. “Well, I’m enough of a scientist to want to say, ‘What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?’
“I watched the movies. I saw ‘To Sir, With Love,’” he chuckles, recounting the 1967 classic in which Sidney Poitier plays an idealistic teacher who wins over students at a roughhouse London school. “But they didn’t really explain what he was doing right. I can’t create a personnel system where I say, ‘Go watch this movie and be like him.’”
Instead, the Gates Foundation’s five-year, $335-million project examines whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting common student errors—can be systematically measured. The effort involves collecting and studying videos of more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts.
“We’re taking these tapes and we’re looking at how quickly a class gets focused on the subject, how engaged the kids are, who’s wiggling their feet, who’s looking away,” says Mr. Gates. The researchers are also asking students what works in the classroom and trying to determine the usefulness of their feedback.
Mr. Gates hopes that the project earns buy-in from teachers, which he describes as key to long-term reform. “Our dream is that in the sample districts, a high percentage of the teachers determine that this made them better at their jobs.” He’s aware, though, that he’ll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.
The final MET reports produced virtually nothing that addressed these stated goals. But in Orwellian fashion, the Gates folks have declared the project to be a great success. I never expected MET to work because I suspect that effective teaching is too heterogeneous to be captured well by a single formula. There is no recipe for effective teaching because kids and their needs are too varied, teachers and their abilities are too varied, and the proper matching of student needs and teacher abilities can be accomplished in many different ways. But this is just my suspicion. I can’t blame the Gates Foundation for trying to discover the secret sauce of effective teaching, but I can blame them for refusing to admit that they failed to find it. Even worse, I blame them for distorting, exaggerating, and spinning what they did find.
(edited for typos)