There are two articles that you might want to read either before or after you read this post. The first article was in the New York Times and is entitled: Teacher Ratings get a New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher.  The other article is actually a blog post and is entitled Bill Gates Listens to the Wrong People.

The multi-billionaire Bill Gates is pouring more than $335 million into teacher evaluation research.  The money is being used to revamp several large school district’s personnel departments; it sets out to use digital video tapes of teachers in an attempt to evaluate the teachers, to try and find out if there are specific teacher behaviors that might be correlated with student achievement.  As the New York Times article points out, Gates believes that his money can be used to find out what makes one teacher more effective than another.  So, Mr. Gates idea is to find out what characterizes “extremely good teachers” by video taping them, examining very closely the classroom behavior of these teachers, and use these teachers as “exemplars” of good teaching.  According to the article

The goal is to help researchers look for possible correlations between certain teaching practices and high student achievement, measured by value-added scores. Thomas J. Kane, a Harvard economist who is leading the research, is scheduled to announce some preliminary results in Washington next Friday. More definitive conclusions are expected in about a year.

The other article, written by Diane Ravitch, questions the motivation of Gates, and wonders why do American educators listen to what Gates has to say about teaching, teacher performance, tenure, class size and teacher pay?  Money.  Gates is everywhere telling us that he really knows what education needs.  As Dian Ravitch points out,

Since Gates is a multibillionaire, he can’t possibly understand what it means to work in an environment where you might be fired for disagreeing with your boss. Nor can he possibly understand that schools are collaborative cultures that need senior teachers who are ready and willing to help newcomers. He can’t imagine that school is different from Microsoft or other big corporations. Let’s be honest. CCSSO and The New York Times pay attention to what Gates says because he is so rich. If he didn’t run the biggest foundation in the world, if he wasn’t one of the richest men in the world, would anyone care about his opinion of education? Really, who would care what he said if he were the chairman of the Whatzit Corporation and sold widgets?

If you have not visited Diane Ravitch’s and Deborah Meier’s blog, I urge you do so.  It is entitled Bridging Differences, and is made up of letters Diane and Deborah write to each other.

Trying to link student academic achievement to teacher behavior is not a new idea.  Researchers have been studying teacher and student behavior using video tapes, classroom observations and portfolios for decades.  The central problem that researchers report about teacher effectiveness research is the lack of agreement about what constitutes good or effective teaching.  Bill Gates, especially when he gives interviews, or is making a presentation talks as if he really knows what is effective teaching.

By and large the policy driving the assessment of teachers is the model of teacher effectiveness based on student test scores.  Gates, and other funding entities are quick to assume that teacher effectiveness is a relatively easy attribute to observe.  Yet, researchers Goe, Bell and Little suggest that not only is teacher effectiveness difficult to define but make this point:

just because it is possible to match teachers to their students’ test scores and use this relationship as a measure of teacher effectiveness does not mean that this is the only way to evaluate teacher effectiveness.

I find it amazing that Gates has ignored a very large body of research on teaching, and teacher effectiveness, and acts glib when he talks about “effective” teachers.  I honestly don’t think he has a clue.  If Gates did pursue a scholarly view of teacher effectiveness, he would find the following teacher evaluation (effectiveness?) methods, each of which has been researched:

• Classroom Observation
• Principal Evaluation
• Instructional Artifact
• Portfolio
• Teacher Self-Report Measure
• Student Survey
• Value-Added Model

Each of these methods has strengths, but each also should be approached cautiously.  The value-added model (VAM), a model that Gates and others have grabbed onto has not been shown to be reliable.  VAM is used to determine teachers’ contributions to students’ test score gains.  According to Goe, Bell, and Little:

Little is known about the validity of value-added scores for identifying effective teaching, though research using value- added models does suggest that teachers differ markedly in their contributions to students’ test score gains. However, correlating value-added scores with teacher qualifications, characteristics, or practices has yielded mixed results and few significant findings.