Classroom Practice · CLSM Framework
Some Teachers Have Better Students. That Doesn't Make Them Better Teachers.
A good class roster can make a teacher look awfully good.
I'm sure that statement won't sit well with everyone, particularly those who take pride in their students' academic success. But I think we've gotten a little too comfortable praising teachers for results without questioning how much of that success was already there before the students entered their classrooms.
We all know that students don't arrive at school with the same academic abilities, reading levels, study habits, or behavioral needs. We know that some students require significantly more support than others. Schools spend considerable time discussing these differences, especially when it comes to differentiation, accommodations, and closing achievement gaps. Yet when it's time to evaluate teachers, we seem perfectly comfortable comparing classrooms as though those differences suddenly don't matter.
And I find that rather convenient.
A teacher with students who can read on grade level, follow directions, manage their assignments, and work independently has an advantage over a teacher spending a significant portion of instructional time teaching those skills alongside the required curriculum. That doesn't make the first teacher less deserving of recognition, and it certainly doesn't mean their job is effortless. But the amount of instruction required to get those two groups of students to the same academic standard is not going to be equal.
I don't understand why acknowledging that has become such an uncomfortable conversation in education.
Especially when the research is already there.
In July 2026, William Delgado and Lauren Sartain published a study in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysisexamining how the makeup of a classroom influences teacher performance ratings. Using data from Chicago Public Schools, they looked at how teachers' ratings changed when the academic and behavioral characteristics of their students changed from year to year.
They found that teachers received higher performance ratings when they taught students with stronger prior academic achievement and fewer behavioral difficulties. And those differences remained even when the researchers compared the same teacher working in the same school.
That last part is important.
We're not simply talking about two teachers with different levels of experience, different training, or different instructional abilities. We're talking about ratings changing for the same teacher as the students assigned to that teacher changed.
The researchers couldn't establish that every difference came from evaluator bias. Some of the effect may reflect how classroom conditions influence the instruction a teacher is actually able to deliver. But that distinction doesn't make the findings any less concerning. If classroom composition can influence the rating, then the rating isn't telling us about the teacher alone.
And before someone dismisses this as one study, Matthew Steinberg and Rachel Garrett found a similar problem in 2016. Their research, using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, showed that students' incoming academic achievement played an important role in teachers' classroom observation scores.
So we've had evidence of this issue for at least a decade.
We've just continued evaluating teachers as though we have a much cleaner measurement of teaching ability than we actually do.
I'm not suggesting that administrators shouldn't observe classrooms or that teacher evaluations should disappear. Quite the opposite. I want evaluations to mean something. I want accomplished teachers recognized, and I want teachers who are struggling instructionally to receive support and be held accountable for improving.
What I don't want is for us to confuse a teacher's skill with the academic advantages of the students assigned to them.
And yes, those advantages exist.
I spent years teaching special education before moving into high school social studies. I know how much additional instruction some students need before they can independently complete work that another student might finish with very little difficulty. Sometimes the challenge isn't even the content itself. It's the language used to explain it, the number of directions students have to remember, their ability to organize information, or the background knowledge they're missing.
I see versions of those problems in my Civics and World History classes.
Take something like judicial review. I can teach the definition, explain Marbury v. Madison, provide guided notes, and have students practice recalling the concept. They might answer correctly when the question is presented in a familiar way. But put the same principle inside an unfamiliar Supreme Court scenario, and suddenly some students struggle to recognize what they're being asked.
Now I'm having to figure out whether they forgot the information, misunderstood the question, or never learned how to apply the concept outside the examples we practiced.
That's a very different problem from simply needing to review the definition again.
And it takes time to figure out.
I've been dealing with this quite a bit as I examine my recent progress checks. Some of the results haven't been good, despite the instruction, practice, and review I've provided. I could blame the students for not studying or paying attention, but that doesn't help me understand why they're choosing certain answers. It also doesn't tell me what I need to change.
Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is that I thought my instruction had accomplished more than it actually did.
I'm willing to admit that. I think more teachers should be willing to examine that possibility.
It's one of the reasons I've been developing my CLSM Framework, which brings together cognitive load, language, structure, and memory. I've been examining how those components interact during instruction and how they might explain the difficulties students experience when they have to retrieve and apply information independently.
The framework is still developing, and I'm not claiming I've solved the problem. But it has made me more critical of what I consider evidence that my students have learned something.
And it has also made me question how much of the work involved in helping struggling students is recognized when teachers are evaluated.
When I spend additional time breaking down academic language, I'm not necessarily teaching a different standard. I'm helping students understand the language they need to access that standard. When I have to revisit a concept because students can recognize it but can't independently apply it, I'm addressing a problem that might never arise to the same extent in another classroom. When I develop predictable routines, guided notes, and retrieval activities, I'm trying to help students develop skills that some of their peers already possess.
That work isn't particularly glamorous. It doesn't always make for the most exciting lesson to observe, either.
And frankly, some days it feels like I'm teaching students how to learn the material as much as I'm teaching the material itself.
Now compare that with a classroom where most students already know how to study, comprehend grade-level text, and work independently. That teacher might be able to move into a higher-level discussion or application activity much sooner because the students already have the skills needed to get there.
Of course, that teacher should be expected to challenge those students and extend their learning. Having academically prepared students doesn't automatically mean good teaching is taking place.
But let's not pretend those classrooms require the same amount of foundational instruction.
They don't.
I'm currently working toward National Board Certification, and the process has made me pay much closer attention to how I document what my students know, what they struggle with, and how my instruction responds to those needs.
That's the part of teacher effectiveness I wish we took more seriously.
Not simply whether students were engaged during an observation or whether a classroom appeared to run smoothly. I want to know what the teacher actually contributed to student learning.
What did those students know before instruction? What did the teacher recognize about their needs? What changed because of the instruction? And can students demonstrate what they learned without having the teacher guide them through every step?
Even those questions aren't easy to answer, and student growth data have limitations of their own. But they're worth investigating rather than assuming the teacher with the most successful students must be the most effective.
Because I don't believe that assumption holds up.
The Delgado and Sartain study makes this issue even harder to ignore when you look at what happened after the researchers simulated adjusting teacher ratings to account for classroom characteristics.
Under one adjustment model, Black teachers' relative rankings improved by approximately eight percentile points.
Eight.
That wasn't an actual change in teachers' ratings, but a modeled result showing how accounting for classroom composition could alter who was considered more effective. The researchers found that academic and behavioral characteristics were more consistently related to ratings than the demographic makeup of the classroom itself. Because Black teachers in the study were more likely to work with higher-need students, accounting for those differences affected their rankings.
I think that's something school leaders should be paying attention to.
Not because the study proves that every evaluation system is biased or that every struggling teacher has been judged unfairly. It doesn't. The study examined a particular district and evaluation system, and researchers were clear about the limitations of making adjustments.
But it certainly challenges the idea that our ratings are as objective as we'd like to believe.
And if the students assigned to a teacher can influence whether that teacher appears more or less effective, shouldn't we be concerned about how those ratings are being used?
We use evaluations to help determine professional performance, identify areas for improvement, and sometimes make decisions that affect careers. We also use student achievement to shape our opinions about which teachers are doing exceptional work, even outside the formal evaluation process.
Think about how often we hear that a particular teacher consistently gets great results. Or that another teacher just can't seem to get students where they need to be.
Maybe those judgments are accurate.
But maybe we're giving one teacher credit for academic preparation that began years before those students entered the classroom, while criticizing another teacher for academic gaps that also developed years before the students arrived.
And somehow we're calling that a fair comparison.
I have a particularly hard time with the expectation that an effective teacher should be able to overcome almost anything if they're simply good enough at their job.
It sounds impressive until you actually consider what we're asking.
We're expecting teachers to address reading deficiencies, language barriers, missing foundational knowledge, behavioral difficulties, executive functioning needs, and grade-level academic standards, often within the same classroom and during the same instructional period.
Then we're surprised when their students don't perform exactly like students who came in without many of those difficulties.
At what point do we admit that this expectation is unreasonable?
I'm not advocating for lower standards, either. Students who are behind academically deserve challenging instruction and opportunities to reach the same high expectations as their peers. But maintaining high expectations shouldn't require us to ignore how far some students have to travel to reach them.
A student who moves from barely understanding a historical passage to explaining its main argument and using evidence to support an answer has made meaningful progress. That progress deserves recognition, even if the student still hasn't reached proficiency on a standardized assessment.
Likewise, a student who earns high grades but hasn't developed the ability to apply information outside familiar classroom examples may not have learned as deeply as those grades suggest.
I don't know why we're so willing to accept the final number without spending more time examining what happened before it.
And there's another part of this that bothers me.
We have teachers who are praised for their instructional abilities, invited to share their practices, and held up as examples for others to follow. Some absolutely deserve that recognition. But I wonder how often we stop to ask whether those same practices would produce similar results with students who have substantially different academic needs.
Would the lesson still work with students reading three years below grade level? With students who are still acquiring the English needed to understand the content? With students who haven't developed the executive functioning skills necessary to complete an independent assignment without additional structure?
Those are legitimate questions.
A strategy working beautifully with one group of students doesn't automatically make it effective for everyone.
And teachers shouldn't have to pretend otherwise just because a practice is being presented as something everyone should be doing.
I also don't believe working with struggling students automatically makes someone an accomplished teacher. A difficult roster is not proof of effective instruction, and it shouldn't become an excuse for poor teaching.
But a strong roster isn't proof of effective instruction, either.
That's the distinction I wish we'd stop avoiding.
If a teacher with academically prepared students receives an excellent evaluation, I want to know what made that instruction excellent. If a teacher working with students who have substantial academic needs receives a lower evaluation, I want to know what specifically was missing from the teaching, rather than assuming the challenges visible in the classroom are evidence of the teacher's shortcomings.
And I want those judgments to be based on more than how polished the lesson looked or how easily students completed an assignment.
We spend so much time telling teachers that every student is different. We expect instruction to reflect those differences. We remind teachers that students come to us with different academic backgrounds, different strengths, and different needs.
But apparently, we're still uncomfortable admitting that those same differences can influence how successful the teacher looks.
Some teachers really are exceptional. Others have a lot of room to improve. That's true in every school, regardless of the students they teach.
But we should be able to distinguish exceptional teaching from the advantages a teacher inherited with a class roster.
And right now, the research suggests we aren't always doing that very well.
I don't want teachers receiving recognition they haven't earned. I also don't want teachers doing excellent work with academically struggling students to be overlooked because their students don't produce the same results as a classroom that started several steps ahead.
That's not accountability. At least not the kind of accountability I think education should be defending.
It's measuring the finish line without giving enough consideration to where everyone started.
Some teachers have students who are better prepared for school.
That doesn't make those students better people. It doesn't mean they're more intelligent, or that their teachers aren't working hard.
But it also doesn't automatically make their teachers better at teaching.
And until we get more serious about separating what students bring into a classroom from what teachers actually contribute, I think we need to be a lot more careful about who we're calling our best teachers.
Because a good class roster can make a teacher look exceptional.
I'd rather know whether the teaching actually was.
Research Referenced
Delgado, W., & Sartain, L. (2026). Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737261449250
Steinberg, M. P., & Garrett, R. (2016). Classroom Composition and Measured Teacher Performance: What Do Teacher Observation Scores Really Measure? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(2), 293–317. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373715616249
Originally published on LinkedIn on October 28, 2026.
A good class roster can make a teacher look awfully good.
I'm sure that statement won't sit well with everyone, particularly those who take pride in their students' academic success. But I think we've gotten a little too comfortable praising teachers for results without questioning how much of that success was already there before the students entered their classrooms.
We all know that students don't arrive at school with the same academic abilities, reading levels, study habits, or behavioral needs. We know that some students require significantly more support than others. Schools spend considerable time discussing these differences, especially when it comes to differentiation, accommodations, and closing achievement gaps. Yet when it's time to evaluate teachers, we seem perfectly comfortable comparing classrooms as though those differences suddenly don't matter.
And I find that rather convenient.
A teacher with students who can read on grade level, follow directions, manage their assignments, and work independently has an advantage over a teacher spending a significant portion of instructional time teaching those skills alongside the required curriculum. That doesn't make the first teacher less deserving of recognition, and it certainly doesn't mean their job is effortless. But the amount of instruction required to get those two groups of students to the same academic standard is not going to be equal.
I don't understand why acknowledging that has become such an uncomfortable conversation in education.
Especially when the research is already there.
In July 2026, William Delgado and Lauren Sartain published a study in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysisexamining how the makeup of a classroom influences teacher performance ratings. Using data from Chicago Public Schools, they looked at how teachers' ratings changed when the academic and behavioral characteristics of their students changed from year to year.
They found that teachers received higher performance ratings when they taught students with stronger prior academic achievement and fewer behavioral difficulties. And those differences remained even when the researchers compared the same teacher working in the same school.
That last part is important.
We're not simply talking about two teachers with different levels of experience, different training, or different instructional abilities. We're talking about ratings changing for the same teacher as the students assigned to that teacher changed.
The researchers couldn't establish that every difference came from evaluator bias. Some of the effect may reflect how classroom conditions influence the instruction a teacher is actually able to deliver. But that distinction doesn't make the findings any less concerning. If classroom composition can influence the rating, then the rating isn't telling us about the teacher alone.
And before someone dismisses this as one study, Matthew Steinberg and Rachel Garrett found a similar problem in 2016. Their research, using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, showed that students' incoming academic achievement played an important role in teachers' classroom observation scores.
So we've had evidence of this issue for at least a decade.
We've just continued evaluating teachers as though we have a much cleaner measurement of teaching ability than we actually do.
I'm not suggesting that administrators shouldn't observe classrooms or that teacher evaluations should disappear. Quite the opposite. I want evaluations to mean something. I want accomplished teachers recognized, and I want teachers who are struggling instructionally to receive support and be held accountable for improving.
What I don't want is for us to confuse a teacher's skill with the academic advantages of the students assigned to them.
And yes, those advantages exist.
I spent years teaching special education before moving into high school social studies. I know how much additional instruction some students need before they can independently complete work that another student might finish with very little difficulty. Sometimes the challenge isn't even the content itself. It's the language used to explain it, the number of directions students have to remember, their ability to organize information, or the background knowledge they're missing.
I see versions of those problems in my Civics and World History classes.
Take something like judicial review. I can teach the definition, explain Marbury v. Madison, provide guided notes, and have students practice recalling the concept. They might answer correctly when the question is presented in a familiar way. But put the same principle inside an unfamiliar Supreme Court scenario, and suddenly some students struggle to recognize what they're being asked.
Now I'm having to figure out whether they forgot the information, misunderstood the question, or never learned how to apply the concept outside the examples we practiced.
That's a very different problem from simply needing to review the definition again.
And it takes time to figure out.
I've been dealing with this quite a bit as I examine my recent progress checks. Some of the results haven't been good, despite the instruction, practice, and review I've provided. I could blame the students for not studying or paying attention, but that doesn't help me understand why they're choosing certain answers. It also doesn't tell me what I need to change.
Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is that I thought my instruction had accomplished more than it actually did.
I'm willing to admit that. I think more teachers should be willing to examine that possibility.
It's one of the reasons I've been developing my CLSM Framework, which brings together cognitive load, language, structure, and memory. I've been examining how those components interact during instruction and how they might explain the difficulties students experience when they have to retrieve and apply information independently.
The framework is still developing, and I'm not claiming I've solved the problem. But it has made me more critical of what I consider evidence that my students have learned something.
And it has also made me question how much of the work involved in helping struggling students is recognized when teachers are evaluated.
When I spend additional time breaking down academic language, I'm not necessarily teaching a different standard. I'm helping students understand the language they need to access that standard. When I have to revisit a concept because students can recognize it but can't independently apply it, I'm addressing a problem that might never arise to the same extent in another classroom. When I develop predictable routines, guided notes, and retrieval activities, I'm trying to help students develop skills that some of their peers already possess.
That work isn't particularly glamorous. It doesn't always make for the most exciting lesson to observe, either.
And frankly, some days it feels like I'm teaching students how to learn the material as much as I'm teaching the material itself.
Now compare that with a classroom where most students already know how to study, comprehend grade-level text, and work independently. That teacher might be able to move into a higher-level discussion or application activity much sooner because the students already have the skills needed to get there.
Of course, that teacher should be expected to challenge those students and extend their learning. Having academically prepared students doesn't automatically mean good teaching is taking place.
But let's not pretend those classrooms require the same amount of foundational instruction.
They don't.
I'm currently working toward National Board Certification, and the process has made me pay much closer attention to how I document what my students know, what they struggle with, and how my instruction responds to those needs.
That's the part of teacher effectiveness I wish we took more seriously.
Not simply whether students were engaged during an observation or whether a classroom appeared to run smoothly. I want to know what the teacher actually contributed to student learning.
What did those students know before instruction? What did the teacher recognize about their needs? What changed because of the instruction? And can students demonstrate what they learned without having the teacher guide them through every step?
Even those questions aren't easy to answer, and student growth data have limitations of their own. But they're worth investigating rather than assuming the teacher with the most successful students must be the most effective.
Because I don't believe that assumption holds up.
The Delgado and Sartain study makes this issue even harder to ignore when you look at what happened after the researchers simulated adjusting teacher ratings to account for classroom characteristics.
Under one adjustment model, Black teachers' relative rankings improved by approximately eight percentile points.
Eight.
That wasn't an actual change in teachers' ratings, but a modeled result showing how accounting for classroom composition could alter who was considered more effective. The researchers found that academic and behavioral characteristics were more consistently related to ratings than the demographic makeup of the classroom itself. Because Black teachers in the study were more likely to work with higher-need students, accounting for those differences affected their rankings.
I think that's something school leaders should be paying attention to.
Not because the study proves that every evaluation system is biased or that every struggling teacher has been judged unfairly. It doesn't. The study examined a particular district and evaluation system, and researchers were clear about the limitations of making adjustments.
But it certainly challenges the idea that our ratings are as objective as we'd like to believe.
And if the students assigned to a teacher can influence whether that teacher appears more or less effective, shouldn't we be concerned about how those ratings are being used?
We use evaluations to help determine professional performance, identify areas for improvement, and sometimes make decisions that affect careers. We also use student achievement to shape our opinions about which teachers are doing exceptional work, even outside the formal evaluation process.
Think about how often we hear that a particular teacher consistently gets great results. Or that another teacher just can't seem to get students where they need to be.
Maybe those judgments are accurate.
But maybe we're giving one teacher credit for academic preparation that began years before those students entered the classroom, while criticizing another teacher for academic gaps that also developed years before the students arrived.
And somehow we're calling that a fair comparison.
I have a particularly hard time with the expectation that an effective teacher should be able to overcome almost anything if they're simply good enough at their job.
It sounds impressive until you actually consider what we're asking.
We're expecting teachers to address reading deficiencies, language barriers, missing foundational knowledge, behavioral difficulties, executive functioning needs, and grade-level academic standards, often within the same classroom and during the same instructional period.
Then we're surprised when their students don't perform exactly like students who came in without many of those difficulties.
At what point do we admit that this expectation is unreasonable?
I'm not advocating for lower standards, either. Students who are behind academically deserve challenging instruction and opportunities to reach the same high expectations as their peers. But maintaining high expectations shouldn't require us to ignore how far some students have to travel to reach them.
A student who moves from barely understanding a historical passage to explaining its main argument and using evidence to support an answer has made meaningful progress. That progress deserves recognition, even if the student still hasn't reached proficiency on a standardized assessment.
Likewise, a student who earns high grades but hasn't developed the ability to apply information outside familiar classroom examples may not have learned as deeply as those grades suggest.
I don't know why we're so willing to accept the final number without spending more time examining what happened before it.
And there's another part of this that bothers me.
We have teachers who are praised for their instructional abilities, invited to share their practices, and held up as examples for others to follow. Some absolutely deserve that recognition. But I wonder how often we stop to ask whether those same practices would produce similar results with students who have substantially different academic needs.
Would the lesson still work with students reading three years below grade level? With students who are still acquiring the English needed to understand the content? With students who haven't developed the executive functioning skills necessary to complete an independent assignment without additional structure?
Those are legitimate questions.
A strategy working beautifully with one group of students doesn't automatically make it effective for everyone.
And teachers shouldn't have to pretend otherwise just because a practice is being presented as something everyone should be doing.
I also don't believe working with struggling students automatically makes someone an accomplished teacher. A difficult roster is not proof of effective instruction, and it shouldn't become an excuse for poor teaching.
But a strong roster isn't proof of effective instruction, either.
That's the distinction I wish we'd stop avoiding.
If a teacher with academically prepared students receives an excellent evaluation, I want to know what made that instruction excellent. If a teacher working with students who have substantial academic needs receives a lower evaluation, I want to know what specifically was missing from the teaching, rather than assuming the challenges visible in the classroom are evidence of the teacher's shortcomings.
And I want those judgments to be based on more than how polished the lesson looked or how easily students completed an assignment.
We spend so much time telling teachers that every student is different. We expect instruction to reflect those differences. We remind teachers that students come to us with different academic backgrounds, different strengths, and different needs.
But apparently, we're still uncomfortable admitting that those same differences can influence how successful the teacher looks.
Some teachers really are exceptional. Others have a lot of room to improve. That's true in every school, regardless of the students they teach.
But we should be able to distinguish exceptional teaching from the advantages a teacher inherited with a class roster.
And right now, the research suggests we aren't always doing that very well.
I don't want teachers receiving recognition they haven't earned. I also don't want teachers doing excellent work with academically struggling students to be overlooked because their students don't produce the same results as a classroom that started several steps ahead.
That's not accountability. At least not the kind of accountability I think education should be defending.
It's measuring the finish line without giving enough consideration to where everyone started.
Some teachers have students who are better prepared for school.
That doesn't make those students better people. It doesn't mean they're more intelligent, or that their teachers aren't working hard.
But it also doesn't automatically make their teachers better at teaching.
And until we get more serious about separating what students bring into a classroom from what teachers actually contribute, I think we need to be a lot more careful about who we're calling our best teachers.
Because a good class roster can make a teacher look exceptional.
I'd rather know whether the teaching actually was.
Research Referenced
Delgado, W., & Sartain, L. (2026). Classroom Composition Affects Teacher Performance Ratings. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737261449250
Steinberg, M. P., & Garrett, R. (2016). Classroom Composition and Measured Teacher Performance: What Do Teacher Observation Scores Really Measure? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(2), 293–317. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373715616249
Originally published on LinkedIn on October 28, 2026.