The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, funded by the foundation, seeks to help educators and policymakers identify and support good teaching by improving the quality of information available about teacher practice. Independent education researchers, in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions, are working to develop fair and reliable measures of effective teaching that can then be used for evaluation and enhanced professional development.
Current measures of teaching rarely take into account the full range of what teachers do, or the context in which they teach. The MET project is different. It's informed by the real work of real teachers in real classrooms. It goes beyond the exclusive use of student assessments as a proxy for effectiveness and is instead geared to developing a set of measures that together serve as an accurate indicator of a teacher's impact on student achievement.
The project will be implemented during the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years in a number of school districts around the nation. It involves teachers and their students in the following courses: math and English language arts (ELA) in grades 4 through 8, algebra I at the high school level, biology (or its equivalent) at the high school level, and English in grade 9.