Most NOLA schools don’t take teacher evals seriously – but the few that do have something to teach us

Eight New Orleans schools are told to start a new teacher evaluation system. Three schools grumble about having another bureaucratic chore and do the minimum needed to comply. Two schools game the system, sending the problem kids out of the room when it’s time for a classroom observation.

The remaining three? They actually take it seriously. And the results show a lot about how what kind of leadership style supports serious reflection and collaboration in a school system.

Those eight schools are real, and they were the subject of a case study from Tulane’s Education Research Alliance (ERA), released this Thursday.

Researchers interviewed teachers and admin at eight NOLA schools (six charters, two traditional) about how they responded to a Louisiana law that required all schools to either implement a standardized teacher evaluation system from the state, or create one of their own.

Three of those schools (all charters) were what ERA termed “reflective.” They didn’t just evaluate the teachers and move on; they used the evaluations as a valuable opportunity for feedback. Two even went beyond the requirements by including extra classroom observation sessions and more coaching for teachers. Here’s how the report described these schools:

“Educators in these schools perceived the evaluation data as a
valid measure of teaching and reported using them to think about and improve instruction. They viewed the evaluation process as a valuable opportunity to receive feedback and discuss strategies for growth. The reflective case schools’ staffs also worked together to create meaningful personal goals for all educators and students,
and the leadership team was hands-on, offering frequent purposeful collaboration with the goal of continuous improvement for both teachers and students. These schools also regularly set aside time for teachers to track their progress toward goals.”

At three other schools, teachers considered the evaluations to be a useless, bureaucratic exercise — another top-down reform effort from the state that didn’t reflect on the true quality of a school. They did the minimum needed to comply with the law and moved on, with “little to no sign that educators changed their teaching in response to their evaluation results and feedback.”

Two of the schools took an approach that researchers delicately referred to as “strategic.” Some teachers there admitted to gaming the system by, for example, purposefully setting low learning targets for their students so that almost everyone would pass.

What was different about the three reflective schools that took teacher evaluations seriously? It didn’t have anything to do with school organization or demographics, the researchers found. However, all three schools had a “shared leadership” model where teachers are involved in managements. The schools also invested in collaboration, with “purposeful and consistent time for teachers to meet.”

The study is small, but it holds a real lesson for education reformers. Mandates from the state, most of the time, won’t be taken seriously. They’ll just be seen as another bureaucratic burden. But with the right leadership style, a school can use those mandates as a real opportunity for growth.