Why San Diego Isn't Joining the Teacher Evaluation Revolution - voiceofsandiego.org: Education

Why San Diego Isn't Joining the Teacher Evaluation Revolution - voiceofsandiego.org: Education:

Why San Diego Isn't Joining the Teacher Evaluation Revolution

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  Photo by Sam Hodgson

  Crawford High School calculus teachers Jonathan Winn and Carl Munn and their team created a grassroots data evaluation system that boosted teachers' performance. The school district all but ignored their efforts.

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From the Reporter

The Big Picture

School leaders in cities across the country have been pushing to revolutionize how teachers are evaluated, based at least in part on test-score data that isolates student progress.

What’s Happening Here

The San Diego Unified School District, however, isn’t interested in this revolution.

What It Means

The cursory evaluation system in place at San Diego Unified was the norm across the United States until fairly recently. But as education reformers have begun to realize that a half-century of their efforts has done little or nothing to push up student achievement, attention is now focusing on the sticky topic of teacher evaluation.

Posted: Thursday, April 12, 2012 11:50 am |Updated: 12:26 pm, Thu Apr 12, 2012.

10 comments

• By Will Carless

This story also ran in the May 2012 issue of San Diego Magazine.

School superintendents across America are talking tough. The time has come, they say, to get rid of failing teachers, or at the very least to identify them so that weaker teachers can get help to become more effective. No longer should students suffer the ignominy of an educator who isn’t interested, willing, or able to make them learn.

For decades, schools have relied on a principal passing through a classroom