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There is such a wide gap between and especially within the categories of “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” that it becomes fairly meaningless to be satisfactory. I especially am pleased that the report mentions the fact that better teacher evaluations are not just a means to “get rid of” teachers but also to provide the right professional development to the right teachers. What I need at this point in my career is not at all what I needed five years ago, and hopefully not what I will need to learn in ten more years. We’ll see if/how this report is used and received, but I strongly agree with the message that U or S are not really the end-all be-all of performance evaluations.

I’m concerned about criticisms of short observations.

I ask anyone who has worked in a professional or white color position outside of schools, how were you evaluated? Did they measure your output/production by some objective measure? Did they just sit and watch you work for an hour or so?

Of course not!

They looked at what you accomplished — qualitiatively and quantiatively, where appropraite. They worked *with* you on something to see how think. They did like micro-evaluations in all kinds of informal ways. Hopefully, they even had some conversations about your goals and intentions in your work, so that you and whomever were sure to have a common understanding of what you were supposed to be doing.

Ken Marshall and others have written compellingly for years about mini-observations (or is it micro-?). There’s nothing wrong with short observations.

Obviously, there is something wrong with small sample sizes. An couple hours out of apporximately 1000 hours instruction is clearly not enough to make valid inferences. But that some of that data might come in smaller — and consequently more frequent — chunks is not a problem in and of itself.

There are many problems with how we evaluate teachers, but the fact that some observations might be short is not one of them.

I also am unclear as to why observations of less than a hour would be a problem. The school day is usually split into segments of less than a hour in our schools. Why would it even need to be noted that they are this short, except to imply something (i.e. they are too short) that cannot be logically supported if explicitly stated.

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I also have to argue with the phrase “less than a handful of observations.”

First, it does not appear anywhere in the report, so I have to ask Elizabeth what it means. What is less than a handful, when it comes to obsevations? Whose hands are we talking about, how how bulky is an observation? A handful of M&Ms would number in the dozens, but a handful of dinner rolls would number less than half a dozen. Untenured traditional public school teachers are supposed to be formally evaluated six times a year. Is that “less than a handful”?

Second, there’s an editorial nature to the phrase. If you (Elizabeth) think that they are not enough observations, say so. Perhaps you could guide to the reader to what an appropraite number might be.

I think that I also have to criticize Elizabeth for not listing the four states examined in this report (i.e. Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio). I don’t think that these states are necessarily representaive of the entire country, and therefore Elizabeth would have done well to mention which states they are. There are no Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, Sothern or West Coast districts included among the 12 TNTP looked into. That seems odd to me. If general statements are going to be made about practices nationally, I would think they’d have a more nationally representative sample, or at least they’d provide some sort of explanation of for why we might make national inferences from the sample they selected.

In fact, it is not clear why they chose these four states, unless I am missing something.

I guess that I am asking Elizabeth to present reports a bit more critically. I don’t have a problem with her reporting on their findings, but I think that she should frame with at least a little but of guidance as to why and why not we should take them seriously. And, of course, that she should do this explicitly.

MeanTeacher,

I am not sure what your point is? The advisory panels did not have any authority to approve or edit the report. Rather, “advisory panel members were given the opportunity to provide a written response to the process and recommendations.” (p. 38)

These responses are posted on the report’s website.

http://www.widgeteffect.org/panel-responses/

Francine,

I had just noted the people who wrote the report. The Adisory Panel shows that the authors knew about the Toledo Plan, and just chose to not acknowledge it or explain its role. Shouldn’t a study of evaluations include an account of those evaluations?.

The pattern is what bothers me. When the wrote the ATR report last year, would it have killed them to combine scary sounding percentages like “six times greater” to have received Unsatisfactory rating with the unscary raw number? Couldn’t they have included any caveats in their evidence, such as the number of teachers seeking work? Other reports described the ATR by showing the complexity of the situtation.

The more the TNTP demonizes the union, the tougher they make it for reformers in the union. And again, they just want teachers to have a single day in front of an arbitrator.

I couldn’t follow all of the moving words on their fancy web site but I liked the conclusion of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers that “…Comprehensive
evaluation systems like ours are very expensive to run and we can only
evaluate 1/5 of the teachers each year. If this is where our country is going
we will need to find many, many more dollars to do this, particularly
if every teacher is comprehensively evaluated every year. Again, I caution
us all to consider changing the larger context of school structure first.”