How Can We Effectively Evaluate Teacher Performance?

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By Luke Justice ’12

Image via The Huffington Post

One of the most significant legacies of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed under George W. Bush in 2001, is its impact on the way we use data to measure the performance of our educational system. While NCLB’s accountability measures where focused on school-level performance, 10 years later we are starting to develop teacher performance evaluations that, for the first time, incorporate student testing.

In 2009, The New Teacher Project published a now widely read survey of teacher evaluation systems across the country, titled The Widget Effect, and found that most systems were an extremely limiting and binary ranking of “satisfactory/unsatisfactory,” and that almost all (98 percent) teachers were annually ranked “satisfactory.” Even if there were a more accurate scoring in that old system, it would still tell us virtually nothing substantive about an individual teacher’s performance. Ten years after the passage of NCLB, some large urban districts are now developing systems that include the use of hard data in an attempt to paint a rich portrait of a teacher’s performance.

New York City is piloting a teacher evaluation system that uses a mix of student test scores and more qualitative measures, such as peer observations. Most of the focus on using student test scores to evaluate teacher performance has been on so-called “value-add” measurements that attempt to demonstrate the level of improvement students make under a particular teacher.

So far, the data seem to have been rather unreliable for the majority of teachers and more consistent at the extremes. That is, year-to-year, the value-add scores of exceptional — and exceptionally bad — teachers tend to persist, while those in the middle 80 percent jump around. Opponents of using student scores to rate teachers have latched onto this unreliability, while supporters note that the value-add measurements make up only one piece of the larger evaluation and are important data to have, especially if you are trying to identify the best teachers for recognition and the worst for improvement, if not removal.

Another significant drawback to value-add measurements is their limited application to a few grades and subjects. More complex material, such as essay-writing, can’t currently be captured by standardized tests. But the use of hard data to pin down an objective measure of student progress and thereby teacher performance may be just the first step in a larger cultural shift toward a more rigorous and integrated evaluation of both student and teacher. As The Widget Effect highlights, even districts with evaluation systems that have wider spectrums for ranking teachers suffer from a compliance mindset. That is, the most well crafted performance evaluations are useless if they are not applied with rigor and a genuine desire to understand one’s effectiveness.

As the culture around evaluations shifts, however, we are more apt to find methods for evaluating teacher performance that act as reliable predictors of student achievement in lieu of hard, standardized data on student outcomes. As but one example, Cincinnati has begun using rigorous teacher observations as part of its overall Teacher Evaluation System (TES). Researchers have found that the scores of these observations predict student achievement gains for subjects than can be accurately tested (e.g. reading and math), thus concluding that such observations can capture a significant portion of measurable differences in teacher effectiveness in harder to test subjects and grades.

It seems then that while data are directly relevant for understanding student achievement and teacher performance, the larger value of a focus on the numbers lay in the impetus it provided for a deeper cultural shift that seeks to develop an understanding of teacher effectiveness at all levels.

Continue the conversation at Friday’s Social Enterprise Conference session, Replicating Models of Success: Scaling Innovation in the Education Sector. Read a research report on Measuring and Creating Excellence in Schools.

Investing in Social Innovation

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By Elly S. Brown

This post was originally published on Next Billion.

Image via Next Billion

“You, as the asset holder, have to challenge the status quo and provide the leadership necessary to co-create the world you want to see. It is that simple,” Lisa Kleissner, co-founder of KL Felicitas Foundation.

After successful careers in Silicon Valley, Charly and Lisa Kleissner founded KL Felicitas Foundation in 2000 with a vision to scale social innovation through impact investing. The foundation supports social enterprises everywhere along the spectrum from the seed stage to startups that are rapidly expanding. Led by visionary social entrepreneurs, these companies are addressing some of the most challenging issues in society including climate change and environmental destruction.

Along with capacity building assistance, KL Felicitas Foundation offers a wide range of investment vehicles including grants, social loans, loan guarantees and private equity. The foundation has committed to allocate 92 percent of its portfolio to impact investing vehicles by 2013. Placing a strong emphasis on knowledge-sharing and partnerships, Charly and Lisa are committed to building the field of impact investing. Along with Morgan Simon and Sean Foote, they co-founded Toniic, a global network of impact investors. Complementing GIIN, the industry-wide standards and frameworks for impact investing, Toniic provides a forum for members to learn how to be effective impact investors and to aggregate capital for investing (Click here for past NextBillion coverage on GIIN and TONIIC).

You can meet Charly and Lisa Kleissner from KL Felicitas Foundation and learn more about impact investing at the Columbia Social Enterprise Conference session titled “Impact Investors Spreading Social Innovation” on Friday October 7th between 9:45 a.m. and 10:45 a.m.

Leymah Gbowee and the Journey for Peace

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By Kimberly Parker

After 14 years of civil war in Liberia, Leymah Gbowee and the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women, barricaded the exit to stalled peace talks in Ghana and demanded a resolution. When Gbowee was threatened, she threatened back and began to take off her clothes to shame and curse the men who tried to intimidate her. Two weeks later, a peace treaty was signed.

We define revolutions in moments, but years of work, pain, and anger bring us to those moments. It was anger that guided Gbowee, and she knew she could use her anger for either good or bad. “You get angry, and you decide to put it into two containers — the good or the bad container… Those who decide to fight for peace…they were angry too, but they decided to put it in a good container,” she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Gbowee, executive director and founder of the Women Peace and Security Network – Africa (WIPSEN-Africa), is one of the keynote speakers at this week’s Social Enterprise Conference and the subject of Pray the Devil Back to Hell, a film being screened on October 6. She is a Liberian and African peace activist, a social worker, the reluctant subject of a documentary, author of the recently published memoir: Mighty be our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War, and a mother of six.

On September 20, Gbowee spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative and is in the middle of an eight-city book tour, which is being financed from the personal funds of Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes and Noble. On October 7, she may also receive of the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the recent buzz over the Arab Spring.

After all of the accolades and numerous awards Gbowee has received, another defining moment in her life and career is approaching. On October 11, 2011 Liberia will hold its second free presidential elections since the end of the Civil War and the 2003 ousting of Dictator Charles Taylor. Gbowee has created a coalition of women from nine West African countries to monitor the elections. It is imperative that the elections are fair and peaceful in order to maintain the peace in Liberia for which Gbowee and so many others have fought so hard.

Leymah Gbowee was only 17 when the first civil war in Liberia started in 1989, 22 years ago. She has been fighting for peace almost as long, and will continue to fight, because it is a lifetime of work and dedication that brings us to those defining moments.

Technology for the Greater Good

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By Kimberly Parker

Image via Nonprofit Jobs

Social enterprises apply business principles to social causes, and new and exciting technologies have helped them to work smarter. Technology being created in Silicon Valley is being used for the greater good and becoming an essential part of any strategic plan that aims to make a difference.

Mobile technology — with its accessibility and endless potential  — is at the core of many new social enterprises, such as mPedigree and txteagle, which are serving populations that are often hard to reach. mPedigree President Bright Simons was a panelist at the 2010 Social Enterprise Conference, where he discussed the dangers of counterfeit drugs in places like Ghana and Nigeria, and how mPedigree is using texting to verify the authenticity of pharmaceutical drugs in the third world. At the 2011 Social Enterprise Conference, Nathan Eagle of txteagle will discuss the potential of mobile technology for economic development in the third world and explain how txteagle taps into the consumer potential of the base of the pyramid.

Nonprofits are also harnessing the power of technology, such as Remás, which uses mobile and web technology to improve the financial options of immigrants in the United States, and Benetech, which develops technology to serve social problems.

Even if technology may not be at the core of their mission, it is especially essential for nonprofits, which often encounter a lack of resources and a lack of staff. TechSoup Global is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits obtain and utilize technology, and Susan Tenby of TechSoup will discuss at this year’s conference how social enterprises are using multi-platform engagement channels for constituency development and to increase revenue. There is a network of organizations that also strive to connect nonprofits to technology — such as NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) and NPower — in order to streamline processes, bring down costs, and improve outreach and effectiveness.

In an increasingly networked world, technology connects us to each other — and to what matters to us. TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good) uses crowdsourcing to choose and support social projects. Facebook is playing an important part in the way we live our lives and in movements such as the Arab Spring, even if Mark Zuckerberg downplays the relationship. Other social networks, like Chris Hughes’ Jumo and Ami Dar’s Idealist.org, are specifically designed to connect people around their ideals. Online tools such as Causes, harness the power of the internet to fundraise for social causes. We live so much of our lives online it not only makes sense, but is imperative, that we use these tools in our efforts to make the world a better place.

Taking Stock of IRIS

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By Marin Kaleya ’12

This post was originally published on Next Billion.

Photo via Next Billion

The last decade has given rise to tremendous growth in the impact investing sector. With such growth comes increasing recognition of the sector, but it also brings to light questions of impact investing’s ability to effect substantive change. Stories about upwardly mobile farmers in remote villages are no longer enough to attract savvy socially minded investors. Instead, firms are being held to ever more robust standards to demonstrate the positive implications of their investments. More importantly, with the proliferation of organizations seeking to finance these projects, firms must demonstrate that their social returns are better than the next guy’s. But how can we report standard measurements? There is no EBITDA (earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization) equivalent for social impact.

As many NextBillion readers are no doubt familiar, the Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) is a proposed response to these new developments in the space. First introduced in 2008 as a joint venture between Acumen Fund, B Lab and the Rockefeller Foundation, IRIS is a proposed methodology for standardizing measurement across the impact investing sector. IRIS offers a standard framework for reporting social, environmental and financial performance of impact investments.

What that means is that instead of different projects reporting different measures for the same thing, each organization will report their metrics using the same descriptive metrics within a standard taxonomy. For example, let’s take two investments that finance mango-growing operations. IRIS provides a guideline for reporting — both investments will report number, not pounds, of mangos produced in accordance with specific IRIS performance indicators, which makes the two investments more easily comparable.

Of course, mangos are easy to measure. What becomes more difficult is measuring the actual social impact of an investment. How do you determine the number of lives impacted by a given investment? Do you count the people who have been employed by the investment? How about their families? What about the consumers and their families? IRIS provides a methodology for dealing with some of these questions. For our mango growing operation, we can measure full and part-time employees, broken down into various descriptive demographics. We can also measure new customers during a given reporting period. Thus, reporting is aligned for all companies and firms can no longer overstate their impact. At the same time, new impact investors have guidelines for where to start when measuring and evaluating their investments and IRIS intends to compile submitted data to provide industry benchmarks.

Despite all the hubbub about IRIS, there are still many questions regarding its efficacy and whether social impact measurement can truly be standardized. In an effort to provide some transparency into the model, the KL Felicitas Foundation (KLF), and the GIIN jointly published a case study in April 2011 that discusses KLF’s motivation for adopting the IRIS framework and details its application of IRIS across its active investment portfolio.

KLF is a family foundation founded by Charly and Lisa Kleissner in 2000 to “address poverty through its support of global early-stage social entrepreneurs and social enterprises, with a focus on rural communities.” The Kleissners decided to implement the IRIS framework because they wanted to “illustrate the social, environmental, and financial success of the foundation; nurture their investments; evaluate future investments; and provide needed performance data to share with a growing community of impact investors.” With increased transparency and standardization into impact investments, the Kleissners hope to drive more resources toward and awareness for the sector.

The case is extremely useful as it explains in great detail how KLF fit its investments into the IRIS framework, chooses key performance indicators and transitions its portfolio into this reporting structure. While a more longitudinal study will be necessary to examine the efficacy of using the standards, the implications of this report could be huge. The case is more or less a “user manual” for IRIS: it handholds the reader through the implementation process, illustrating its benefits and challenges. Hopefully it will encourage more firms to use the methodology, because more users can help refine the system further – and create a standard that increasingly hits the mark for the impact investing sector.

The Kleissners will discuss the case study in detail, including their experiences and the implications of adopting of IRIS throughout their portfolio, at the 2011 Social Enterprise Conference at Columbia University.

Convenings that Catalyze Social Innovation

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Image via Poptech

By Lindsay Norcott ’12

Social enterprises are inspiring and impressive as individual efforts — but when brought together as a group they spur further innovation and challenge individuals and organizations to reach greater collective impact.

Sessions at the October 7th Social Enterprise Conference at Columbia University aim for this type of catalytic effect — through the Social Venture Pitch session, where five social entrepreneurs will pitch for a potential $250,000 – $500,000 investment, the Innovation Workshop, where participants will learn an effective innovation process for designing social enterprises, and many more. Rather than lectures or discussions about the successes and challenges that currently exist in social enterprise, these sessions will push attendees to think about the future and how to make the most impact. Both visitors to and experts in the field of social enterprise benefit from hearing a diverse set of perspectives on what the core issues are and the path to a solution.

In San Francisco recently, the fourth annual SOCAP conference convened funders, entrepreneurs, and others involved in the development of a new kind of market — a social capital market — to check in at “the intersection of money and meaning.” Kevin Doyle Jones, co-founder and convener of SOCAP, encouraged this year’s attendees to take action and commit resources to promising social entrepreneurs, saying in his welcome in SOCAP 11’s program book, “This is about more than just having a dialogue between the established professionals and the startups with big ideas. I’m suggesting that if the system is at risk, it’s time to make a lot of small bets on startups who are building a new system.”

Also coming up in October is the PopTech conference, which focuses less on the funding and implementation of great ideas and more on the ongoing creation of new, innovative solutions to global issues. By fostering collaborations within a diverse network, PopTech accelerates the “positive impact of world-changing people, projects, and ideas.” Through programs such as its Social Innovation Fellows, PopTech Labs, and Accelerator Initiatives, PopTech pushes social innovation beyond conversation to real breakthrough solutions.

These effective gatherings, together with Columbia’s Social Enterprise Conference and others, are designed around a strong belief in the ecosystem that nurtures successful social impact. These events bring together experts in various fields to cross-pollinate ideas, funders, and entrepreneurs to facilitate the capitalization of good ideas, mentors, and students to ensure that best practices are passed down and new ideas are constantly infusing fresh energy into the field. Social Innovation is a growing movement and these annual events not only mark progress, but also catalyze groundbreaking steps forward.

Women Wanted in Social Enterprise — Entrepreneurs, Techies, Mentors, and Leaders

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By Kimberly Parker

Image via Mercury News

Echoing Green’s blog recently asked, “Where are all the women social entrepreneurs?” The same question has been asked about female Tech CEOs and women entrepreneurs in general. In fact, women are underrepresented in leadership roles across the board. The gender imbalance in the field of social enterprise can be understood through the lens of other fields, especially fields that are considered new or risky, such as tech or entrepreneurship.

The common thread throughout these fields is the lack of mentors and support for women. Echoing Green is right when they say that focusing on and targeting women is the only way to get them into the sector — much in the way, however subconsciously, male leaders target other men for leadership roles.

There are certainly cases where women do receive direct support from men. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, was sponsored throughout her career by Larry Summers. Sandberg, in turn, now sponsors and assists women in developing their careers. Carmin Black founded Half United, a social venture that follows the same One for One business model as TOMS. Black was mentored and supported throughout an internship at TOMS and was able to launch her own business due to this support.

Yet, the lack of mentorship for women hasn’t gone unnoticed either: networks like Women: Inspiration & Enterprise, Women 2.0, and Y.E.C. Women are designed to support and encourage women. In the field of social enterprise in particular, networks like Young Women Social Entrepreneurs (YWSE) have existed for 10 years, and encouraging articles from organizations like Ashoka promote the role of women in the field. But what we need is more — more support, more women taking advantage of this support, and more encouragement from family and friends to take on risks.

In relatively new fields especially, it is exciting that women have a chance to define — rather than redefine — a sector of the workforce. And, if you can’t find the support or direction you need, there is nothing saying you can’t make it up as you go along.