CEPR Faculty Director Thomas Kane's attendance at a summit on teacher evaluation, being held by the New York State Education Department and Board of Regents, is featured in the following Chalkbeat New York article.
Education research heavyweights are headed to Albany next week to offer their advice about the state’s imminent overhaul of teacher evaluations, and they represent many sides of the contentious debates around how to rate teachers.
Seven researchers, economists, and professors accepted an invitation to weigh in on the debate at a May 7 summit being held by the State Education Department and Board of Regents, according to a department memo obtained by Chalkbeat. Officials are required by law to collect public comment on how to design the regulations that will govern how a teacher’s performance in the classroom gets graded, a process that must be complete by the end of June.
On Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s side is Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard University who last week penned an op-ed praising the governor and the evaluation system he pushed into law earlier this year. Kane is best known for directing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching study, an influential project that many states drew from when designing their new evaluation systems over the last half-decade. (Disclosure: Chalkbeat also receives some funding from the Gates Foundation.)
Kane’s three-year, $45 million project ultimately recommended that 33 to 50 percent of a teacher’s rating be determined by student growth as determined by their state test scores, 25 percent by student surveys, and the rest by classroom observations. (New York’s new system puts a heavier emphasis on student growth, but prohibits the use of student surveys.)
...