Teachers matter. They have an extraordinary, positive, and lasting impact on their students. Students with high-performing teachers can progress three times as fast as students with low-performing teachers and each student deserves access to highly effective teachers in every subject.
So, how do we know which teachers are effective? All teachers deserve a fair and accurate assessment of their skills, how they perform in the classroom, and how they can improve. Teacher effectiveness is dependent on these accurate and fair evaluations, based on multiple measures, including—but not solely based around—their students' performance in the subjects they teach.
What can we do about the abysmal state of teacher evaluation? Firstly, we need to recognize what's wrong and, secondly, we need to fix it. So far in this series of blog posts, I've discussed how observation does not equal evaluation and purposeful, data-driven evaluation. Today I lay out the problems of and solutions to a one-size-fits-all evaluation framework.
The Problem: One Size Fits All
What's Wrong
In teacher evaluation, as with almost everything else, one size doesn't fit; it never did and it never will.
Attempting to apply the same dose of evaluation to all teachers leads to a host of problems. For instance,