The Proportionality Principle In Teacher Evaluations
Our guest author today is Cory Koedel, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri.
In a 2012 post on this blog, Dr. Di Carlo reviewed an article that I coauthored with colleagues Mark Ehlert, Eric Parsons and Michael Podgursky. The initial article (full version here, or for a shorter, less-technical version, see here) argues for the policy value of growth models that are designed to force comparisons to be between schools and teachers in observationally-similar circumstances.
The discussion is couched within the context of achieving three key policy objectives that we associate with the adoption of more-rigorous educational evaluation systems: (1) improving system-wide instruction by providing useful performance signals to schools and teachers; (2) eliciting optimal effort from school personnel; and (3) ensuring that current labor-market inequities between advantaged and disadvantaged schools are not exacerbated by the introduction of the new systems.
We argue that a model that forces comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced schools and teachers – which we describe as a “proportional” model – is best-suited to achieve these policy objectives. The conceptual appeal of the proportional approach is that it fully levels the playing field between high- and low-poverty schools. In contrast, some other growth models have been shown to produce estimates that are consistently associated with the characteristics of students being served (e.g., Student Growth Percentiles).