Teachers should not be evaluated by principals

Making sure we identify poor teachers and have them exit the teaching profession should be of the utmost importance. This is because teachers, by far, have the single biggest impact on student success.

Josh Dwyer
Director of Education Reform

This country’s teacher evaluation systems are broken. While student achievement and graduation rates are stagnating, a disproportionate amount of teachers are being rated as effective or better.

A recent New York Times article highlighted this trend:

• In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations.
• In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”
• In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.

Chicago is not much different.

Between 2003 and 2008, 88 percent of Chicago Public Schools did not issue any unsatisfactory ratings. For the 12 percent of schools that did, only 0.3 percent of teachers received the rating.

Are these data just a reflection of the fact that teachers are disproportionately good at what they do, as some have claimed, or is there something else at play that is driving principals to rate almost 100 percent of teachers effective or better?

Some claim that principals want to foster a friendly work environment and are afraid of identifying teachers as unsatisfactory due to some of the backlash it might cause. But most research does not back this up.

Another reason is that some principals simply don’t know what a good teacher looks like. In Los Angeles, for example, of the small portion of teachers who were rated unsatisfactory in 2008, more than half turned out to add more value on end-of-the-year assessments than those teachers determined to be satisfactory.

But the most convincing argument is that giving a teacher an unsatisfactory rating begins a bureaucratic nightmare that no principal wants to deal with.

The Illinois Policy Institute’s own journalist in residence, Scott Reeder, did an in-depth report about how protracted and costly firing a teacher can be in Illinois. He found that Illinois school districts have spent an average of $219,000 in legal fees to fire poorly reviewed tenured teachers.

But there is a solution – move teacher evaluations out of the hands of principals and into the hands of third-party evaluators. This is exactly what Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University, suggested in an op-ed in Bloomberg:

“The best way forward is to move the evaluation of teachers outside the schools entirely, with standardized tests administered by an independent agency. This would be supplemented by classroom assessments based on unobtrusive videotaping, also judged by outsiders, including teachers’ representatives.”

While there may be some reasonable arguments against using video technology to evaluate teachers, Glaeser’s recommendations are on point. It makes much more sense to hire outside observers to evaluate teachers than it does to rely on principals who face a variety of obstacles that make providing accurate evaluations difficult.

Making sure we identify poor teachers and have them exit the teaching profession should be of the utmost importance. This is because teachers, by far, have the single biggest impact on student success.

In fact, a 2011 study showed that replacing a teacher “in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher would increase the present value of students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000.”

This is a big deal, and would be more likely if reforms that change how teachers are evaluated are put into place.