Thompson: Are We Arming Barney Fife With Teacher Evaluation? This Week In Education

This Week In Education

Thompson: Are We Arming Barney Fife With Teacher Evaluation?

Tennessee, and other states have made a mockery of Secretary Duncan’s sound bites on evaluation, as they have committed to a single measure of test score growth for firing teachers. Educators, however, must meet multiple measures to keep their jobs.President Obama balanced the investments of tens of billions of dollars to save jobs and improve early education with hundreds of millions of dollars for data systems to fire teachers. The RttT, and now his ESEA NCLB II, provides the gun that management can lay on the poker table as it sits down with unions, growling "Deal." Most districts’ lawyers will look closely at the dangers of actually using growth models to indict teachers as ineffective, so wise leaders will restrain their administrators like Andy of Mayberry handled his deputy. But Barney Fife, we should remember, kept putting his bullet back into his gun. The Center for American Progress’ new reports should rebalance these equations.

In fact, the CAP's recommendations for districts use the word "should" 17 times. That page describes peer review as "one option" for improving teacher quality through more rigorous evaluations. So if political leaders do what they should, unions should reciprocate, and vica versa. The CAP is silent, however, about what teachers should do if districts do not do what they should.

The CAP takes great pains describing the lengthy and non-punitive "best practices" of five charter schools in using data to evaluate teachers. In schools with a 6 to 1, 7 to 1, or 9 to 1 ratio between educators and their evaluators coaches, what’s not to like about an evaluation tool that is "a living document," where evaluation "is a two-way street," and where "feedback is a gift?" These charters seek a "culture of ongoing, honest feedback," and only dismiss a slightly higher percentage than the national norm. (None of these charters use growth models for evaluation.)

I appreciated the CAP’s observation that the union "was not perceived as a barrier to high-quality evaluation," but a shortage of educators was. "The absence of viable replacement teachers ... is particularly striking given the considerable time and effort that these charter schools spend on recruiting ..."

I have no problem with the CAP's endorsement of Eric Hanushek’s estimate that "removing the bottom 6 to 10 percent of teachers would lead to a gain in student achievement that is equivalent of improving the performance of students in the United States to the level of Canada." That's what peer review evaluations do. And The Grand Bargain shows how peer review can be combined with growth