The Teaching Evaluation Gap

Why students' cultural identities hold the key

By Willis D. Hawley & Jacqueline Jordan Irvine

Teacher evaluation has, until recently, been a symbolic act largely without meaning or consequence. No longer. Race to the Top requirements call for performance-based pay. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's multi-million-dollar investment to define effective teaching will produce highly specified systems of teacher evaluation. Other reforms tie tenure and leadership roles to measures of teacher effectiveness.

Attention to serious teacher evaluation is long overdue. However, most of the protocols for measuring performance give inadequate attention to teaching practices that are particularly effective with students from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. By ignoring these research-based practices, generally called "culturally responsive pedagogy," or CRP, any high-stakes teaching evaluation is likely—unintentionally and ironically—to fail the very students most in need of highly effective teaching.

Current discussions of teacher evaluation often focus on performance as reflected by student test scores or value-added measurement, or VAM. Taken in isolation, VAM, which typically accounts for less than 50 percent of the evaluation, will have little effect in improving teacher performance because it does...