WASHINGTON, Aug. 6, 2014 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ — President Barack Obama has announced the appointment of Dr. Michael Nettles to the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. Nettles is the Senior Vice President and Edmund W. Gordon Chair of the Policy Evaluation and Research Center at Educational Testing Service (ETS).

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He was previously Vice President of Policy Evaluation and Research from 2004 to 2006 and Executive Director of Policy Research from 2003 to 2004. Nettles was a Professor of Education at the University of Michigan from 1992 to 2003, and served as the first Executive Director of the Fredrick D. Patterson Research Institute of the United Negro College Fund from 1996 to 1999.

“I am grateful for the opportunity that the president is giving me to collaborate with other leaders, scholars and the general public on a topic that I have been so involved in addressing throughout my career, and that grows in its importance to the nation with each passing day,” said Nettles. “I am eager to confront the challenge facing this presidential commission, and hopeful that we will be able to generate some new and progressive ideas and solutions for the country to act upon in order to make substantive gains.”

“President Obama created the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans because in the 60 years since the Brown v Board of Education decisions, African American students continue to lack equal access to a high-quality education and still lag far behind their White peers in reading and math proficiency, high school graduation rates, and college completion,” Nettles added.

The initiative is a cross-agency effort aimed at identifying evidence-based practices that improve student achievement and developing a national network that shares these best practices.

According to the commission website, the initiative supports the president’s desire to “restore the country to its role as the global leader in education, to strengthen the nation by improving educational outcomes for African Americans of all ages, and to help ensure that all African Americans receive an education that properly prepares them for college, productive careers, and satisfying lives.”

Besides Nettles, President Obama also appointed the following people to the Commission:

Peggy L. Brookins – Co-founder, Director and Mathematics Instructor for the Engineering and Manufacturing Institute of Technology at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida

Dr. Kent McGuire – President of the Southern Education Foundation (SEF)

Dr. Evelynn M. Hammonds – Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University

Spencer Overton – Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School (GWU)

Becky Pringle – Secretary-Treasurer of the National Education Association (NEA)

John Rice – Founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT)

Nettles serves on the boards of a number of organizations, including the Southern Education Foundation, the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, Bank Street College of Education, and the Corporate and Philanthropic Council of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. He received a B.A. from the University of Tennessee, and an M.A., M.S. and Ph.D. from Iowa State University.

About ETS
At ETS, we advance quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. ETS serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English language learning, and elementary, secondary and postsecondary education, and by conducting education research, analysis and policy studies. Founded as a nonprofit in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL^® and TOEIC ^® tests, the GRE^® tests and The Praxis Series^® assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide. www.ets.org

PRINCETON, N.J., Aug. 5, 2014 /PRNewswire-HISPANIC PR WIRE/ — Research scientists from Educational Testing Service (ETS) co-authored six of the 16 chapters in a new book from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Much of their work centered on developing systems for training raters to evaluate teacher performances in order to avoid subjectivity and favoritism. ETS trained over 900 raters who scored 60,000 hours of video footage of teachers teaching.

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The new book, Designing Teacher Evaluation Systems: New Guidance from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, is a result of one of the largest research efforts in the history of the United States to identify and understand effective teaching. The MET project, which was launched in 2010, and ran through 2011, studied the teaching of middle-school mathematics and English language arts and brought together several dozen academic researchers, about 3,000 teachers, seven school districts, and over 20 education organizations and universities. 

“This study is important and one that will positively impact education and teaching because measuring teaching quality is a critical first step toward improving the quality of education for all children,” says Courtney A. Bell, a senior research scientist in ETS’s Understanding Teaching Quality research center and one of the contributors to the volume.

ETS researchers worked on studies that aimed to identify and assess the unique types of content knowledge required for effective teaching. In-depth interviews with teachers provided evidence that the MET assessment went beyond simply measuring basic content competency. 

ETS developed systems for training raters to evaluate teacher performances. Teacher observations have traditionally been performed by watching teachers in class, a method that has been criticized for allowing subjectivity and favoritism. An alternative approach is to videotape teachers in their classrooms and then rate their performance according to guidelines that seek to produce fair and reliable judgments.

In addition to contributing to the book, ETS researchers wrote several reports, policy briefs and white papers that can be found at the MET project’s website.

The new book was edited by Thomas J. Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Kerri A. Kerr, a consultant working with the Gates Foundation; and Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

The 616-page volume includes 15 original studies, many of which took advantage of the extensive data generated by the teacher observation systems ETS helped build and execute. ETS researchers were co-authors of the following chapters:

• Chapter 2: Grade-Level Variation in Observational Measures of Teacher Effectiveness
• Chapter 3: Improving Observational Score Quality: Challenges in Observer Thinking
• Chapter 12: Evaluating Efforts to Minimize Rater Bias in Scoring Classroom Observations
• Chapter 13: Scoring Design Decisions: Reliability and the Length and Focus of Classroom Observations
• Chapter 15: Evidence on the Validity of Content Knowledge for Teaching Assessments
• Chapter 16: Optimizing Resources to Maximize Student Gains

“The MET project gave us a wonderful opportunity to develop and share our ideas about measuring teaching quality,” says Cindy Tocci, executive director in the R&D division. “ETS is a leader in research in this area and our participation allowed us to expand our capabilities so that we could develop new products, including an observation training and proficiency assessment system that ETS co-developed with Teachscape.”

“ETS continues to work on teaching effectiveness by both expanding development of assessments of content knowledge for teaching to new subjects and grade levels and by conducting research to better understand the benefits of using observation protocols to measure teaching quality,” says Ida Lawrence, Senior Vice President for Research at ETS. “The goal of the observation work is to collect evidence of the validity of procedures used in making observations and to disseminate relevant knowledge to policymakers and practitioners. Insights from these advances in measuring teacher knowledge and practice can then support states and districts in their efforts to develop fair and reliable teacher evaluation and licensure systems.”

About ETS
At ETS, we advance quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. ETS serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English language learning, and elementary, secondary and postsecondary education, and by conducting education research, analysis and policy studies. Founded as a nonprofit in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL^® and TOEIC^® tests, the GRE^® tests and The Praxis Series^® assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide. www.ets.org