Why I'm at peace with the latest crop of teacher evaluation schemes

Despite their appearance to the contrary, I don't think the deformers are quite so stupid to base everything on standardized test scores. Most people without Joel Klein's bloated ego would have hung their heads in shame long ago if they were met with the same hoots of derision (not to mention the devastating dissection from academics) that annually accompany the release of NYC’s school report cards. As is well-known to every neophyte psychometrician, year-to-year changes in test scores – and even on a decent test – are almost completely noise. The unsteady bobbing on NYCs school progress rankings are a crystal clear empirical demonstration of that to anyone without ideological pinhole vision. With teachers, the randomness in year-to-year changes would be even starker. And I think at some level in their reptilean brains, the deformers are aware of this, and they know that coming up with a teacher rating scheme demonstrably even stupider than Joel Klein’s school rating scheme would not bode well for them.

This puts the deformers in a bit of a pickle, because their goal is really to do the whole evaluation thingy as cheaply as possible. They really don’t care if it’s done well or accurately; they just want a new deform accomplishment they can brag about in their bios and in conversations with other deformy types. Unfortunately, however, because any scheme they come up with would be such a big deal, it might come under lots of scrutiny (at least, they hope it's a big deal and comes under scrutiny, as long as it's the friendly type of scrutiny they get from other deformy types), so it must have at least the ambience of reasonability and thoughtfulness.

Besides 100% on changes in test scores, the other option is administrative fiat, the principal-as-CEO shtick. But this, of course, has the potential to go very badly wrong as well, because – though many might be shocked to hear it – not every school principal is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Empowering them too much could lead to serious blowback.

So deformers are backed into a corner of having to make an appearance of doing what they really don’t want to do, namely, conducting a real evaluation that takes multiple factors into account. And so you now hear about how many states are yammering about instituting annual multifactor evaluations to get their paws on RttT money. Which is where things start to get really humorous.

Evaluating teachers is now part of principals’ job description. But everybody knows that principals are overwhelmed with administrivia and discipline, and many are not really instructional leaders anyway. So they do their drive-bys and assigned their ratings, and the deformers hate it because the principals do not rate enough teachers badly – which would require documentation and paperwork that principals don’t have time for. So who is going to do all the newfangled annual multifactor evaluations, and where is the money to pay for them going to come from? How are states going to pay for these new armies of "experts" roaming around doing annual reviews? And for what? To ding a few hundred more teachers per year? My guess is that they'll end up paying a full year's admin salary for every incompetent they flush out of the woodwork. We'll see how long that lasts.

Three years, max, before the next governor or state ed head comes in a pulls the plug on such "an outrageous and ill-conceived waste of taxpayers' dollars."