Accurate Teacher Evaluations-Impossible?

This is part three in a three part series covering teacher evaluations. This final post covers possible new evaluation procedures.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is well-recognized organization. Achieving their certification is a highly held goal for teaching professionals. National Board Certification is achieved upon successful completion of a voluntary assessment program designed to recognize effective and accomplished teachers who meet high standards based on what teachers should know and be able to do.  In its recommendations to the U.S. Department of Education on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards offered four recommendations surrounding teacher evaluations. Are these ideas feasible? Can they be transferred to an evaluation system? The recommendations (in bold) are worth analyzing.

1. Teacher evaluations should be grounded in measures of student learning and student achievement. This recommendation speaks against one-shot standardized testing. Measuring students' gains requires pretesting, (possibly) mid-testing and post-testing. Another option is for students to create portfolios, with samples of their work that demonstrates their growth, or lack of growth. These forms of evaluating student learning would need great regulation. Dishonest teachers could coax students into performing poorly on the pretest or initial portfolio sample. Parents or administrators could create portfolio work.

2. Teacher evaluations should explicitly link measures of student learning to teacher practice. Looking at a combination of individual, group and class level's learning in connection to teaching methods is an excellent measurement of a teacher's ability. Student statistics would need to be current and readily available for educators.

3. Teacher evaluations should rely on multiple measures, including measures that assess both teaching practice and student learning. Multiple measures would include teaching training, evaluation and reflection on a more continual basis than current evaluations offer. One or two teacher evaluations per year cannot provide an accurate assessment of teaching practices. Planned and staged evaluations will earn passing marks, as will staged measurements of student learning.

4. Teacher evaluations should use measures and instruments that, to the greatest extent possible, reflect the full curriculum, the full scope of a teacher's responsibilities, and the full domain of skills and competencies students are expected to develop. Measuring the full scope of a teacher's responsibility in developing student skills and competencies is not possible. 'The greatest extent possible' is a large qualifier. If teachers are role models under constant observation by at least one set of eyes, her responsibility is constant, and steady evaluation is unattainable. Communication about a student with parents, administrators, other teachers and the student; referral forms, grading feedback, verbal communication in and out of the classroom; classroom décor, teaching methods-the influences are endless. This may be a broad, exaggerated analysis of this recommendation. It does however show that such an evaluation tool cannot recognize the scope of teacher's influence, especially since teachable moments often happen away from the camera.

In covering teacher evaluations and restrictions on evaluation disclosure, I mentioned that teacher evaluations that truly cover the scope of a teaching professional's school year will be time consuming and expensive. Perhaps this is why an appropriate teacher evaluative tool does not exist.

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