While a small number of cynics out there still argue that classroom teachers are not really an important ingredient in a child’s overall education recipe, one of the most important developments in K-12 education policy in the last few years has been the recognition that decades-old teacher evaluations (where the best a child can hope for is a ‘satisfactory’ teacher over an ‘unsatisfactory’ teacher) aren’t up for the task of recognizing which teachers are hitting the ball out of the park with their students.
At DFER, we’ve long believed that the widespread irrelevance of excellence itself in the K-12 world has created a culture that has actively done damage to the lives of too many children who deserved much, much better from our nation’s most important public institution.
But there have been a lot of positive developments in this area of late. There’s obviously a long way to go, and surely some of what has been done to-date will need to be changed/enhanced/expanded, but we are clearly closer to a day where the link between teaching and learning is more clear in workplace evaluations for educators. (And we continue to hope and believe that this will usher in a new era where successful teachers are treated more like the community heroes that we believe they are.)