No Evaluation Left Behind

The Education Sector’s January 8 panel discussion regarding public education’s inadequate measurement of teacher performance featured an array of leading national experts on the subject, including Chris Cerf of the New York City Department of Education, Robert Rothman of Brown University, and Education Sector’s Thomas Toch. The panel was moderated by Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector.

The panelists uniformly stressed the beneficial effects that proper teacher evaluation can exert on the conditions of United States public schools. Its focus on the educational enterprise’s core—that is, the quality of teaching—is elemental to public school improvement.

However, the potential the teacher evaluations hold are currently viewed by the panelists as a wasted opportunity. As Toch states, “a host of factors—a tradition in public education of using credentials as a proxy for quality and a lack of accountability for school performance among them—have led to evaluations in many public schools that are superficial, capricious, and often meaningless.”

These evaluations, which are meant to be extensive analyses of an individual instructor’s particular teaching methods, educational focus, and interpersonal skills with his/her pupils, are more often than not reduced to mere classroom visits by a building administrator who is untrained in relevant evaluation. The brief visit is comprised of a general observation, supplemented by an equally vague checklist of teacher behaviors and classroom environment, and pays no particular heed to the quality of teacher instruction. Therefore, the prescribed goal of the evaluations is largely overlooked.

The dire state of these evaluations poses a serious problem to public school education. It is a problem that, the panelists stressed, is mostly being overlooked. Among the implications of this problem is the diminished efficiency with which the $400 billion a year on teacher’s salaries is being spent. Furthermore, Toch notes that “it is a tremendous drag on the campaign in recent years to improve teacher quality. It is hard to promote quality in the absence of a defensible system for measuring quality.”

Members of the panel referred to the introduction of the No Child Left Behind’s nationwide standardized testing as a reason for why teachers are primarily evaluated in accordance to their students’ test scores. Although on the surface the strategy appears to be sound and efficient, in practice it generates a number of problems. One such problem is that less than half of U.S. public school teachers incorporate tested subjects into their curriculum, therefore rendering it impossible to assess the said educators on this basis.

In response to these circumstances, another solution is being touted by an expanding number of local, state, and national initiatives. The new proposals use teaching standards based on classroom techniques that, through research, are directly linked to student achievement. These models are far more comprehensive than those that predominate today, as they involve multiple evaluations by trained individuals, in lieu of the largely inexperienced school administrators who usually oversee evaluations.

Louisa Tavlas is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.