Principals Often Shy Away From Giving 'True' Teacher Evaluations

July 10, 2017
Education Week

By Corey Mitchell
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Grisson and Loeb make the case that getting principals to stop inflating evaluations and "give 'truer' ratings" would allow for struggling teachers to get more accurate feedback and pave the path for those who don't improve to leave the profession. They do caution that these changes won't happen without the sort of training that allows principals to "conduct high-quality evaluations that are consistent with district goals and to have constructive feedback conversations."

Grissom, an associate professor of public policy and education, and Loeb, a professor of education, do question whether the results from their work in Miami-Dade, a large urban district, would translate to other types of districts or those using different teacher evaluation systems.

Here's a link to Grissom and Loeb's work.

Click here to read full article originally posted by Education Week

Mentioned Publications

Teacher effectiveness varies substantially, yet principals’ evaluations of teachers often fail to differentiate performance among teachers. We offer new evidence on principals’ subjective evaluations of their teachers’ effectiveness using two sources of data from a large, urban district: principals’ high-stakes personnel evaluations of teachers, and their low-stakes assessments of a subsample of those teachers provided to the researchers. We find that principals’ evaluations of teachers are quite positive whether the stakes are high or low, but the low-stakes evaluations show substantially more use of lower rating categories, and many teachers rated ineffective on the low-stakes assessment receive “effective” or “highly effective” high-stakes ratings. Teacher characteristics, such as experience, partially explain the discrepancy between the two scores. Also, despite the fact that principals overwhelmingly assign teachers to the two highest rating categories on the high-stakes evaluation, their high- and low-stakes ratings show similar correlations with teacher value-added measures.

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