BILL DRIES - The Daily News -

In the large bowl of alphabet soup that is education reform, it is known as MET.

The letters stand for Measures of Effective Teaching.

MET is a two-year research study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in seven school districts, including Memphis City Schools.

One year into the effort to come up with a meaningful and accurate way of evaluating teacher performance and linking it to student achievement, the foundation of the Microsoft founder and his wife has some data and some ideas – if no conclusions at this point.

They have no data from MCS at the end of the first year because of a delay in statewide Average Yearly Progress numbers from spring state tests. The data are expected by the end of this month.

Student testing results are the most prominent and controversial “value” in the “value-added” concept of evaluating teachers and making judgments about their performance.

But Tom Kane, deputy director of the Gates Foundation U.S. program, said it’s not the only measure and shouldn’t become the only measure.

The Tennessee education reform effort reached a critical point early this year when the Tennessee Legislature met in special session and approved, among other measures, using state testing data to evaluate teachers and make tenure decisions.

“Principals have to make the most important decision we ask them to make without any sort of objective information to guide them,” Kane said of the tenure decision after three years.

“There is a growing consensus now … that student achievement gains should be a part of a teacher’s evaluation – but a part. Right now, there’s an eagerness to find other things that are demonstrably related to student achievement gains that could be included in the evaluation as well.”

He compares value-added to batting averages in baseball, which do measure players’ performances to some degree.

“The correlation in Major League Baseball players’ batting averages from one season to the next is actually a little bit lower than the correlation in the teachers’ value-added from one year to the next, especially in math,” he said.

“Batting averages are typically not the only thing that you focus on when you are assessing a player’s performance. There are other things, too. But it is one of the things.”

And early evidence from the first half of the two-year MET effort is being offered by Kane and the Gates Foundation as proof that when teachers’ jobs depend on student test results, they don’t just teach the test. They do teach an understanding of the concepts.

“It was not the case that the high value-added teachers on the state test were simply teaching to the test and not teaching concepts,” he said. “We found just the opposite that teachers who tended to be successful in promoting gains on the state tests also tended to be successful in seeing students’ achievement gains on these other tests.”

The preliminary findings also found students asked to evaluate their teachers with a five-part answer choice to statements ranging from agree to disagree bore out what the other methods of evaluation concluded.

The one caveat in the study so far has been a difference in English language arts results.

The scores and results showed more “volatility” and less of a correlation among the results.

It’s a finding that has shown up in other states and districts.

And Kane does not deny that there is some volatility in all value-added assessments.

“It’s just that these are not so volatile that they are not predictive. … It does give information,” he said of the volatility in general.

“Our goal shouldn’t be to continue debating whether value-added scores are volatile or not. They are volatile. But the right answer is trying to add in other measures to give you a more complete picture of a teacher’s effectiveness. That’s what our study is all about.”

When it comes to language arts results, Kane said more investigation is called for on the subject.

“One interpretation is schools have less effect on literacy – reading and writing – than families do,” he said. “But one surprise was teacher impact on student writing scores looked a lot more like impacts in math.”

One theory is that language arts skills tests should include more writing prompts – or what non-educators will remember as essay questions from their school days – to balance out multiple-choice questions that might not apply as well to language arts skills.