Creating Summative Educator Effectiveness Scores: Approaches to Combining Measures

Recognizing that human capital is the most important asset to teaching and learning, states and districts are rethinking their approaches to evaluating teachers’ performance. The goal is to better differentiate effective and ineffective performance in order to inform a host of human capital decisions. In particular, the focus on teacher evaluation has spurred action by states and districts to improve the processes and tools for assessing teachers’ performance, including the use of student achievement and growth as a significant criterion among multiple measures of teacher effectiveness.

Among the many decisions that states and districts make in the redesign of teacher evaluation systems, how to combine multiple measures of teacher performance into an accurate, consistent, and defensible summative teacher rating is one of the more challenging. This white paper is intended to assist states and districts in strategically combining measures into a summative score in a way that reflects their goals and priorities while accurately and consistently representing teacher effectiveness.