On back-to-school-night at my children’s schools, I was quick to judge their teachers. The poor ones were nervous, robotic and defensive. I was almost always correct in my assessment as my children flourished with the confident, competent teachers, and floundered with the insecure, less competent ones. So if it’s so easy for parents to figure out who’s a good teacher, why should it be so hard for school systems to pass judgment?
The answer is that the categories that comprise the checklist in pay-for-performance evaluations often have little to do with the teacher, and everything to do with who is filling out those evaluations. In all three Fairfax County schools where I taught, the administrators checking the boxes knew how they wanted to rate the teacher in question, and didn’t worry about providing much evidence to support their judgments.
Both former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty trusted that the IMPACT system of evaluation would be implemented fairly, but in my 23 years in a very good public school system, I almost never saw that happen. Administrators decided early in the year which teachers they wanted to drive out of the school, and the end-of-year evaluations were predetermined based on a decision that was made months before.
Conversely, a teacher the school wanted to keep would be evaluated highly not based on the year’s teaching, but on a favorable opinion that rarely wavered. For most of my career, I didn’t fret about the sham involved in these evaluations because I was on the right side of the line. But for those whose positions were precarious, evaluations became a nightmare straight out of Kafka’s “The Trial.”
There was always the appearance of objectivity: scheduled observations by master teachers, surprise observations by administrators, and judgments based on student performance. Yet although both teacher and administrator went through all the motions pretending this was an evolving process, the reality was that the teacher knew all along what lay ahead. That administrator really didn’t have an open mind at all.
Until school systems can find a way to bypass administrative bias for and against teachers, no pay-for-performance system will ever improve the quality of classroom teaching. It will simply demoralize teachers, even those who are rated highly. The ratings also create unhealthy competition among teachers, and the suspicion that some colleagues are getting favorable treatment.
But it is encouraging to know that despite the unfairness inherent in the hierarchical structure of schools, good teachers still turn up every day to do their jobs. And parents don’t need a checklist or an opportunity other than one back-to-school night a year to figure out who’s great and who’s less than par.
And so school systems lumber on. If D.C. is anything like Fairfax County, there will be calls for accountability and pay-for-performance, but most of those calls will die the natural death of tight budgets and principals who rule by fiat. Until that structure changes, the only accurate judgment on teacher quality will be made by each student’s parents, and those judgments are the ones that really count.
