Teacher evaluations should not be watered down

Jocelyn Huber:

Excellent teachers and excellent education are inseparable. In fact, teacher quality is one of the most important determinants of whether a child succeeds in school and continues to college.

A handful of states have been working hard to recruit and nurture great teachers -- starting with strong, effective evaluation systems. Tennessee has led the charge.

When it comes to improving public schools, ideas can only take us so far. It's effective implementation of those ideas that yields results. Last year, the state passed bold, bipartisan legislation, the First to the Top Act, to create a rigorous teacher and principal evaluation system that has the potential to set an example for the rest of the country. The legislation was supported by the teachers' union, the business community and a wide range of education stakeholders.

Related: Teacher evaluation system a good start, but seems not to go far enough by Chris Rickert:

It was encouraging to see the state Department of Public Instruction release a framework for evaluating public school teachers that is the product of much time and thought by a broad array of smart people.

I can even ignore that it took until now to devise such a framework when the quality of public school teachers and, indeed, public education itself have been among the hottest of public policy topics since, well, forever.

Harder to ignore is that while the state took a decidedly top-down approach to grading teachers, it's taking a decidedly hands-off approach to how districts use the grades.

DPI's 17-page "preliminary report and recommendations" employs plenty of euphemisms and academia-speak to go into great detail about technical aspects of the proposed evaluation system without saying how the evaluations should be used when it comes to paying teachers -- or dismissing bad ones.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 11, 2011 3:51 AM
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