Study: Educators in Columbus, other big districts get lower marks than rest of state
Ohio’s new teacher-evaluation system offers a positive picture in its first year: About 90 percent of teachers were rated “accomplished” or “skilled” — the top two ratings of a system that relies on student test scores.
But looking at the data across districts, a two-year study by the Ohio Education Research Center found that evaluation ratings varied, notably in urban districts compared to rural and suburban ones.
Nearly 19 percent of teachers in the state’s Big 8 districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) were rated as either “ineffective” or “ developing,” compared to only 8 percent of their colleagues in other districts in the 2013-14 school year.
Similar gaps were also pronounced among principals: Roughly 28 percent were either “ineffective” or “developing,” compared to only 9 percent of their colleagues in suburban and rural districts.
Teachers and administrators in charter schools were also more likely to receive lower ratings than their peers in school districts; 25 percent of teachers and 18 percent of administrators were given “ineffective” or “developing” ratings.
Districts with higher student poverty tend to have higher proportions of educators rated “ ineffective” or “developing” — an area that warrants further examination, said Marsha Lewis, a lead researcher on the study, “Ohio’s Student Growth Measures: A Study of Policy and Practice.”
She said one year’s worth of data is not enough to explain the link, whether it is poor-performing teachers or disadvantaged students not making enough progress.
“We wanted to look at the first year of the transformational change in the way the state of Ohio evaluates its teachers and principals,” said Lewis, an assistant professor at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs. “It helps illuminate what the key research questions are going to be in the next couple of years.”
Lewis noted another area of interest among researchers: Teachers in non-core academic areas that relied on district-created assessments to measure growth had higher ratings than their peers who taught reading and math and whose results were based on state tests.
The difference was not lost on teachers: 76 percent of teachers surveyed for the study felt the variety of assessments didn’t make for Study: Educators in Columbus, other big districts get lower marks than rest of state | The Columbus Dispatch
