No Evaluation Left Behind

Campus Report ^ | January 23, 2008 | Louisa Tavis

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No Evaluation Left Behind

by: Louisa Tavis, January 24, 2008

The Education Sector’s January 8 panel discussion regarding public education’s inadequate measurement of teacher performance featured an array of leading national experts on the subject, including Chris Cerf of the New York City Department of Education, Robert Rothman of Brown University, and Education Sector's Thomas Toch. The panel was moderated by Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector.

The panelists uniformly stressed the beneficial effects that proper teacher evaluation can exert on the conditions of United States public schools. Its focus on the educational enterprise’s core—that is, the quality of teaching—is elemental to public school improvement.

However, the potential the teacher evaluations hold are currently viewed by the panelists as a wasted opportunity. As Toch states, “a host of factors—a tradition in public education of using credentials as a proxy for quality and a lack of accountability for school performance among them—have led to evaluations in many public schools that are superficial, capricious, and often meaningless.”

These evaluations, which are meant to be extensive analyses of an individual instructor’s particular teaching methods, educational focus, and interpersonal skills with his/her pupils, are more often than not reduced to mere classroom visits by a building administrator who is untrained in relevant evaluation. The brief visit is comprised of a general observation, supplemented by an equally vague checklist of teacher behaviors and classroom environment, and pays no particular heed to the quality of teacher instruction. Therefore, the prescribed goal of the evaluations is largely overlooked.

The dire state of these evaluations poses a serious problem to public school education. It is a problem that, the panelists stressed, is mostly being overlooked. Among the implications of this problem is the diminished efficiency with which the $400 billion a year...

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A little note as I’m eating my lunch between Senior English and Computer Applications, so here’s some reality from the trenches.

Teacher evaluations are a joke. Since most teachers have tenure, it is almost impossible to fire malcontents, incompetents, and bums, no matter what’s on the evaluation form. The process to fire a teacher is so onerous that principals almost always find some other alternative to deal with poor employees, such as moving the teacher to another class or building, or giving them classes where they can’t do much harm, like gym or study hall. I’ve seen teachers receive poor evaluations and laugh about it afterwards. To paraphrase an old Hollywood saying, unless they find me with a dead girl or a live boy, I’ve got a job.

Another reality: I get a salary increase based on the number of years I work and the number of college credits I’ve taken. In other words, the bum down the hall gets the same salary as the guy who struggles to be excellent if they’ve been working for the same number of years. Yes, the system is nuts.

The solution, of course, is privatizing education. Milton Friedman’s model, outlined in his book “Free To Choose,” would work well. My evaluation would occur when parents of students see that their children are learning well. If I wasn’t doing a good job, I’d have no clients. If a doctor or an attorney can get credentials, come to town, open an office, and start to work, there’s no reason a teacher shouldn’t be able to do the same thing. My career would rise and fall based on my ability to do the job.

I’ve asked the Lord a number of times to let me live long enough to see this happen. Uncle Milton sure knew what he was talking about.