Teacher evaluations shouldn’t be perfunctory, study says

The profile of teacher evaluation—in many school districts almost a pro forma exercise—is getting a boost. A new report will warn that schools risk stalling the campaign to raise teacher quality if they do not take evaluation seriously.

“The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring, and largely ignored, problem in public education,” argued Thomas Toch, a co-director of the think tank Education Sector. “It’s a lever of teacher and school improvement that’s being squandered.”

Toch is the author, along with Robert Rothman, of a report on the subject due out later this month. Toch decried the single classroom visit made by school administrators, checklist in hand, that too often constitutes teacher evaluation today. Because teachers are overwhelmingly paid on the basis of their years of experience and education, and rarely encounter any consequences from the evaluations, the evaluations have largely deteriorated into, in Toch’s words, “superficial, capricious, and often meaningless” exercises. Read more in Education Week online.