Bad teachers and the hurdles to firing them are real problems. But they're just one part of a more pressing dilemma – the failure of schools to honestly and accurately evaluate teachers, says a new report out this morning from The New Teachers Project.
The vast majority of teachers earn excellent evaluations, while only a tiny fraction earn bad ones, says "The Widget Effect," which analyzed the ratings at 12 school districts in four states (none of them were in Florida.) That kind of evaluation inflation prevents schools from recognizing the best teachers, so they can become models. And it keeps other teachers from getting the targeted professional development they need to get better.
"While it is impossible to know whether the system drives the culture or the culture the system, the result is clear – evaluation systems fail to differentiate performance among teachers," the report says. "As a result, teacher effectiveness is largely ignored. Excellent teachers cannot be recognized or reward, chronically low-performing teachers languish, and the wide majority of teachers performing at moderate levels do not get the differentiated support and development they need to improve as professionals."
TNTP offers recommendations to turn this around. But it also suggests the vicious cycle now in place won't make it easy:
"Administrators generally do not accurately evaluate poor performance, leading to an expectation of high performance ratings, which, in turn, cause administrators to face stiff cultural resistance when they do issue even marginally negative evaluations," the report says. "The result is a dysfunctional school community in which performance problems cannot be openly identified or addressed."
- Ron Matus, state education reporter
