Gates’ “High Impact” Teacher Evaluation Process The Most Detrimental
As school districts contemplate implementing the state recommended teacher evaluation system (aka, Marzano or Hazelwood plan) and the State Board of Education considers a “Report on District Alignment to the Essential Principles of Effective Evaluation” on October 27th, it would behoove them to read Anthony Cody’s piece on this process. He says that embedding teacher growth into an evaluative framework can actually produce the opposite of the desired effect. The Gates Foundation has been the bulldozer behind the scenes pushing this model. Bill Gates spoke on October 7th about the “successes” of his foundation in the area of education, into which the Foundation has poured millions of dollars. I guess success is in the eye of the beholder because, like his small schools experiment, so much of what the Gates Foundation has pushed has failed. Cody wrote, “While Gates acknowledged some missteps in the rollout of the Common Core – blamed on their ‘naivete’, the emphasis was on advances made, with a pledge to continue pushing in the same direction.” Gates falls on the classic “the plan wasn’t bad, it was just the implementation” excuse, insinuating that the rest of us just aren’t smart enough to implement his plan correctly.
Cody has provided a great deconstruction of Gates’ teacher evaluation framework to explain why this model is actually destructive to both teacher growth and student education.
A critical segment of Cody’s post is provided here, but I encourage everyone, especially school board members, to read the entire post.
Responding to Bill Gates’ Destructive Model of Teacher Evaluation
Here is how Gates describes the rationale for this work:
We decided to focus on what goes on inside the classroom, and focus on the teaching profession and how we could facilitate improvement there. The evidence is very strong about the importance of an effective teacher. If you take two classrooms from within the same school, and you have a teacher in one classroom who’s in the top quartile – not at the top, but just in the top 25%, and another teacher who’s at the top of the bottom quartile, the 75%, and you look at their students’ achievement over the course of the year, their scores will be ten percent different by the end of the year. And that’s a very dramatic difference. If you go three years in a row having that top line, you would completely close the Gates’ “High Impact” Teacher Evaluation Process The Most Detrimental » Missouri Education Watchdog:
