Study From Chicago Shows Teacher Appraisals Aid Principals

Proposed reforms help improve student achievement by providing principals with the tools to manage the quality of personnel in their classrooms

From a Press Release at EducationNext.org:

Cambridge, MA – When current U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan, headed the Chicago Public Schools in 2004-05, the city implemented a new collective bargaining agreement that covered teacher dismissal policy:  principals were given more flexibility to dismiss non-tenured teachers.  Now a new study by University of Michigan economist Brian Jacob finds that when given the authority, principals make dismissal decisions that put a premium on teacher effectiveness and student achievement.  The study will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available at www.educationnext.org.

According to the press release, Mr. Jacob found that principals are more likely to dismiss teachers who received poor evaluations in prior years.  They are also more likely to fire teachers who are frequently absent, and at the elementary level, those who had demonstrated less effectiveness in raising student achievement in prior years than their peers who were not dismissed.  Comparing the characteristics of dismissed versus non-dismissed untenured teachers within the same school and year, Jacob was able to determine how much weight principals place on a variety of teacher characteristics.  Teachers who were given a rating of “satisfactory” in the prior academic year were 22.1 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than teachers in the same school who were given the highest rating, “superior.”  Teachers rated “excellent” were 4.3 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than those rated “superior.”

Among elementary school teachers for whom direct measures of effectiveness in raising student achievement were available, less effective teachers were also more likely to be dismissed.  Specifically, teachers who were one standard deviation less effective (equivalent to the difference between a teacher at the 35th percentile and an average teacher) were associated with a 7.1 percentage point increase in the probability of dismissal.

When one compares the year immediately prior to establishment of the new policy with the first two years of the policy’s implementation, they would find that the total separation rate of non-tenured teachers increased by roughly 9 percentage points.  Among other findings are that dismissed teachers who were subsequently rehired by a different school are more likely to be dismissed again than other non-tenured teachers in their new school.

Read the full press release here.