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There’s a reason school districts still rely on the same teacher evaluation model that’s been around for half a century.
Many are not ready for anything more ambitious.
Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of local school leaders who do a great job of evaluating teachers.
It’s just that, with everything else there is to do in today’s public schools, the teacher evaluation process can get lost in the shuffle. You just assume it’s working fine.
That’s why there are principals out there who are not adequately trained to evaluate their faculty. And why there is little money out there to provide that training.
And why lots of mediocre teachers get a “satisfactory” rating each yearbecause principals don’t feel qualified to make hard judgments or prefer to avoid the hassles of dealing with a struggling teacher.
Of course, there also are those schools that just avoid the issue altogether. That reality was revealed in a new report that concludes the Boston Public schools “routinely neglect a basic task: evaluating teachers.”
According to the Boston Globe, the report, commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, found that “half the city’s approximately 5,000 teachers have not received an evaluation in the past two years, and a quarter of the city’s 135 schools have not conducted evaluations during that period.”
As disturbing, the Globe reports, researchers “could not find any evidence that the district reviews a teacher’s performance in the classroom before awarding tenure.”
Boston is by no means alone in falling short. Which is a bit of a problem, particularly as the Obama administration is talking about more data-driven teacher evaluationsand some school systems already are experimenting with the use of test scores and other performance indicators to assess teachers.
Here’s what I see happening: Over the next few years, some school systems will develop effective evaluation systems that incorporate quantifiable data in a fair manner. And it’ll be worthy of replication.
But some school systems will drop the ball. They’ll launch such efforts with great fanfare. But after a few years, their focus on evaluations will wane. Money for adequate administrator training will dry up.
And the process will get sloppy. Test scores will become too influential a factor, and then we’ll start hearing those “horror stories” of bad evaluation systems and great teachers receiving flawed evaluations.
That’s not going to happen everywhere. With so many schools across the nation, there’ll be plenty of success stories out there. Indeed, Boston school officials said this week that they would respond to the criticisms identified in their evaluation process. So there’s reason for hope.
Just keep this in mind: It’s easy for your teacher evaluation process to get “flabby.” And unless you occasionally take a look at what’s happening in your schools, you could find yourself with too many mediocre teachers on the payrollwith tenure.
Not that your schools have any problem there.
Del Stover, Senior Editor
