Strengthening the Teacher-Student Data Link to Inform Teacher Quality Efforts
- Organizations: Data Quality Campaign
- Date: 04/2010
- Description:
Current state and federal reform initiatives rely heavily on the ability of multiple stakeholders to access and use information from statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS) to improve student achievement. Policymakers believe that states are best positioned to achieve this by developing and implementing various policies impacting the educator workforce. They will also, for the first time on a larger and more visible scale, use student achievement as one of the primary indicators of both educator and program effectiveness.
In this environment, it is critical for state policymakers, educators, and data managers alike to understand the importance of implementing a teacher-student data link in a valid and reliable way. While 24 states report having this link on the DQC survey, it is clear that these linkages were not implemented for high stakes use (e.g., evaluation, compensation, value-add). As a result, state and local data systems lack critical functions including the abilities to:
- Account for the contributions of multiple educators in a single course;
- Enable a teacher to review their roster for accuracy;
- Incorporate common practices found in schools including virtual classes, labs, and team teaching; and,
- Link a student’s attendance records with their teachers to track the actual number of days of instruction by a particular teacher.
State policymakers seeking to implement reforms based on new state policies/legislation will be further disappointed by the lack of consistency in results across their state as “teacher of record” is currently defined differently across districts and the identification, evaluation, compensation, and distribution of effective teachers will continue to be unequal across schools/districts.
To address this emerging state need, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tapped into the expertise at the Center for Educational Leadership and Technology (CELT) and funded them to lead the Teacher-Student Data Link Project (TSDL). This project is a cross-state, collaborative effort focused on developing a common, best practice definition of “Teacher of Record” and business processes for collecting and validating linked teacher and student data. This important initiative brings five states together to leverage their collective experiences, knowledge, and resources to determine a common definition and approach to one of the most critical components of their data systems and a key step in using data to increase student learning and improve teacher quality.
Throughout the project, the DQC will disseminate key learnings and pilot results to non-participating states as well as to representatives of national organizations and federal agencies as part of a larger conversation around using data for continuous improvement at all levels.