Development of an Analytical Process to Measure Teacher Effectiveness Based on Student Growth to Augment an Educator Evaluation System

Abstract

Teacher quality is one of the most important school related variables associated with student achievement. Therefore, raising the quality of the U.S. public education teaching force is essential to ensure that every child has the opportunity to achieve academic success. In order to accomplish this, significant analytical inspection of teachers is needed to assist with the determination of whether teachers contribute appropriately to students attaining adequate yearly growth. The primary objective of this research was to fill the need of augmenting Alabama’s formative educator evaluation system, EDUCATEAlabama, with a precise and stable teacher effectiveness index based on student growth. The methodology of computing such an index consisted of three phases. Phase I entailed calculating four teacher effectiveness metrics. Subject-specific and overall teacher index values were calculated in Phase II utilizing the Phase I metrics and principal component analysis. The principal components served as the inputs to Phase III, Cluster Analysis, with Ward’s clustering method employed as a general prescription to illuminate teachers with similar characteristics (principal components) in the data. A medium-sized, suburban district in Alabama and a dataset from the National Center for Education Statistics consisting of 17 urban districts from across the United States provided the requisite student and teacher data to fully implement the process, which concluded with successfully placing teachers into effectiveness categories by grade, subject(s), and year.