After studying the classrooms of 3,000 teachers, including some in Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has concluded the best way to determine teacher effectiveness is to use a combination of state test results, observations and student surveys.
The foundation Tuesday released the final findings from its three-year Measuring Effective Teaching project.
The MET study — which focused on math and English language arts teachers — builds on its earlier reports by fleshing out the best ways to use the measures.
It concludes that using the measures results in correctly identifying more effective teachers who cause students to do better on state tests as well as on other more cognitively challenging tests.
It also concludes that testing data give teachers better feedback for improving their practice.
Click here to read the full article by Eleanor Chute published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (January 9, 2012)
