The Widget Effect in Teacher Evaluation

1. Our national failure to acknowledge & act on difference in teacher effectiveness

1.1. The failure of evaluation systems to provide accurate and credible information about individual teachers’ instructional performance

1.2. describes the tendency of school districts to assume classroom effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher

1.3. fosters an environment in which teachers cease to be understood as individual professionals, but rather as interchangeable parts

2. Characteristics of the Widget Effect

2.1. all teachers rated good or great

2.2. no special attention to novices

2.3. excellence goes unrecognized

2.4. poor performance goes unaddressed

2.5. inadequate professional development

3. Reversing the Widget Effect in Teacher Evaluation

3.1. Adopt a comprehensive performance evaluation system that fairly, accurately and credibly differentiates teachers based on their effectiveness in promoting student achievement.

3.2. Train administrators and other evaluators in the teacher performance evaluation system and hold them accountable for using it effectively.

3.3. Integrate the performance evaluation system with critical human capital policies and functions such as teacher assignment, professional development, compensation, retention and dismissal.

3.4. Adopt dismissal policies that provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit the district and a system of due process that is fair but efficient.

4. "In the presence of the Widget Effect, school systems wrongly conflate educational access with educational quality; the only teacher quality goal that schools need to achieve is to fill all of their positions. It becomes a foregone conclusion that, so long as there is an accredited teacher—any teacher—in front of the classroom, students are being served adequately" (p. 9).