The Real Purpose Of Teacher Evaluations

Teacher evaluations are about firing bad teachers. Lip service is paid to helping struggling teachers but the real passion behind StudentsFirst and other education revolutionaries is generating pink slips. The taxpayers believe, rightly or wrongly, that schools cannot or will not remove incompetent teachers because of the legal obstacles that unions and statutes place in the way. New evaluation methods often go hand in hand with laws stripping teachers of tenure. In some states teacher evaluations are now 100% test scores. Just about everyone assumes that some percentage of teachers is substandard and a predetermined fraction should be let go each year. The theory is that if you eliminate the worst teachers you’ll eventually upgrade your staff. Value Added Measurements (VAM) is the latest incarnation. It tries to measure how much the teacher contributed to current year test scores by comparing them to scores from previous years. Johnny scored 604 on his English language test in 2011. I had him in my English class in 2012 where he scored 567. Therefore I caused him to regress. Therefore I should be fired or sent to some sort of teacherly re-education. I know how frustrated the public is. I read the stories about Teacher Jones who was on the phone selling real estate when he should have been covering the War of 1812. I get it that taxpayers want the best possible teachers and resent any obstacles to achieving that goal. But I think all the assumptions that have led to VAM systems are wrong-headed. Quantifying a person’s job performance is extraordinarily subjective and fallible. If you’ve ever been evaluated on a job you know how maddening that process can be. It’s even more problematic when you are dealing with someone who does their job behind closed doors and where the ‘product’ is so ambiguous. Add to that the fact that a teacher’s contribution to a school goes well beyond what happens in the classroom. Even if test scores revealed a teacher’s pedagogical abilities (which I feel strongly they do not) they don’t begin to reveal the other things that an individual does to sustain the institution. That fabulous high school teacher who taught you to diagram sentences may have been a powerful imparter of information. She might have taught you things that remain with you decades after you left her classroom. But your perspective on her performance is necessarily narrow. Judging her would involve more than what you saw in the classroom. You don’t want the principal choosing teachers by test scores. I don’t think you even what the principal choosing teachers based solely on classroom observations. Principals don’t have the time to observe teachers often enough to accurately assess their abilities. You want principals retaining good employees. So what do I say to all those folks who want to clean house? My first choice would be to eliminate tenure and empower the school principal to choose a staff that he or she feels comfortable with. Don’t like my haircut? Fire me. It’s your school and we want to hold you accountable for its good governance so why not allow completely subjective choices? Forget about objective/scientific evaluations. Assemble a staff that supports your goals. That isn’t going to happen. And probably shouldn’t happen. I find myself in the scary position of defending the status quo! My experience is that our schools rid themselves of teachers they don’t want. There are ways even when tenure seems an obstacle. The states that have invested capital in these new ‘objective’ evaluation systems will, I think, produce a host of unintended consequences. They will end up firing the wrong people. And they will produce turmoil. Beware of the revolutionaries (especially if they are funded by Bill Gates).