Putting Teeth in D.C.’s Teacher Evaluation System (Aaron Pallas)
Partly tongue-in-cheek, partly serious criticism of teacher evaluation schemes using value-added algorithms, this guest blog by Aaron Pallas, Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia, gets at the increasingly bizarre testing frenzy that has seized the nation’s school districts.The post appeared September 26, 2011 at a Sociological Eye on Education.
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