Putting teeth in D.C.’s teacher evaluation system
I’m beginning to think that the District of Columbia isn’t that serious about evaluating its teachers.
Sure, D.C. has its vaunted IMPACT evaluation system that combines value-added measures of teachers’ contributions to their students’ mastery of reading and mathematics with observations of teachers’ practices inside and outside the classroom. And DCPS has used IMPACT to reward some teachers while firing others presumed to be ineffective and incorrigible, replacing them with newer, shinier and cheaper teachers.
But the system seems to be whiffing on some obvious opportunities to extend the evaluation of teachers to other school subjects. If the subjects are important, don’t they deserve this consideration? Without value-added measures of teachers’ contributions to students’ outcomes in areas other than reading or math, how will we
