Giving Compass' Take:
- Cassie Walker Burke, at Chalkbeat Chicago, examines the impact of inequities in teacher evaluations in driving systemic oppression in U.S. education.
- What impact do teacher evaluations have on the education system? How can we work to eliminate bias in teacher evaluations and create a more equitable approach?
- Read more about the role of teacher evaluations in generating educational inequities.
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Chicago’s Black educators who taught in high-poverty schools were more likely to receive lower scores on teacher evaluations, new research shows, pointing to bias in a widely used measure that determines promotion and tenure.
Left unadjusted, the scores could lead to disproportionate and incorrect identification of Black teachers for remediation and dismissal — an outcome that would be counterproductive to efforts to diversify the teacher workforce. About half of Chicago teachers are white.
The study by Matthew P. Steinberg, an associate professor at George Mason University, and Lauren Sartain, formerly of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and currently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that the average Black teacher in Chicago ranked at the 37th percentile in classroom observation scores, compared to the 55th percentile for the typical white teacher.
But there was another critical consideration: Those Black educators also were more likely to teach in the city’s most economically disadvantaged schools.
Once researchers adjusted for certain factors — such as the percentage of a teacher’s students from low-income families, the students’ prior year test scores and behavior records, and even school-level resources — that gap statistically disappeared.
“It’s not because Black teachers are less effective or have lower performance than white teachers in Chicago. It’s that Black teachers in Chicago teach systematically in very different school settings,” said Steinberg. “Black teachers are systematically in schools that are less resourced. It’s not just the classroom environment, it’s the package of goods and services at the school level that is explaining differences in observation scores.”
Steinberg said the findings have national implications. Emerging evidence from Boston, Michigan, and other places shows significant gaps between Black and white teachers when it comes to classroom observation scores.
Read the full article about teacher evaluations by Cassie Walker Burke at Chalkbeat Chicago.