Review of MET Reports

Hi all,

Our friends at the Great Lakes Center and the National Ed Policy Center released their review of the most recent MET reports today – if the attachments don’t
come through here I’ll post them in the File Cabinet.

-Stacey

From: Quinn, Dan [mailto:dquinn@greatlakescenter.org]

Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2013 8:02 AM
To: greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org
Subject: [GLC Toolkit] Think Twice Review: Culminating Findings from the MET Project's Three-Year Study

ATTENTION NEA AFFILIATES: GATES’ FOUNDATION’S MET STUDY FAILS TO SOLVE TEACHER EVALUATION CHALLENGE

BACKGROUND:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation completed its
Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project in January 2013, with two of the final research papers dealing with the impact of student assignment on teacher evaluations and how teacher evaluation measures are best combined. A central focus of the MET study
was the use of value-added scores to measure teacher effectiveness.

Jesse Rothstein of the University of California Berkeley and
William J. Mathis of the University of Colorado Boulder conducted a detailed review of the study’s final research papers and concluded the students and teachers used were not representative
of their schools. There was also a great deal of noncompliance with the experiment, as only a quarter to two-thirds of the students were taught by the teacher they were assigned to.



Rothstein is a former Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and former Senior Economist at the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: The MET project released its third and
final set of findings amidst much fanfare, generating a tremendous amount of attention and valuable data on how to best evaluate teachers. Undoubtedly, researchers will be reanalyzing and debating the results for many years. However, the end product failed
to construct a teacher evaluation system that could be used in a real-world setting.


REPORT SUMMARY: Here are the main talking points summarizing Rothstein and Mathis’ review:

• 
  The study does nothing to quell concerns about bias in value-added measures that score teacher effectiveness.
  
  


• 
  The threshold of noncompliance in the experiment threatens the validity of the study’s conclusions.
  
  


• 
  There is still no consensus about how to predict a teacher’s performance in the years to come.
  
  


• 
  The MET study took place in a low-stakes setting, which can’t inform the debate about how teacher evaluations would become distorted in a high-stakes environment. 
  
  

MATERIALS ATTACHED: To help communicate this message to policymakers and others, this communication packet includes the following materials,
which are designed to make the research relevant, user-friendly and understandable as you deliver it to a broad audience: