I came across a moving story about a music educator in Wisconsin whose death stirred his town and wrote about him last night. His influence was widely acknowledged.
I asked, in light of the community’s reaction, how such an inspiring teacher should be evaluated. It was obvious that test scores was not the right answer, in part because what he taught–music and band–do not lend themselves to measurement by test scores. But the qualities that the community honored in him–his ability to inspire, his love for music, his concern for students–are inherently not quantifiable. The same might be said for teachers in other subjects as well, not just teachers of music and the other arts.
A music educator commented:
As a former high school band teacher, and current music teacher educator, this story shines a light on one of the glaring inadequacies of the current, one-size-fits-all approach to teacher evaluation. music teaching is different than teaching math, or science, or reading–and one rubric or test can’t measure every kind of teacher. or school. or community. music teachers across the country are struggling with how to use these tools to describe the totality of what we do, and with the reality that our jobs–as it is with our colleagues in every other other discipline–are just too complex, complicated and messy to fit in this tiny little box.
It has always seemed to me that the things we care the most about, that are most important to us, are the most resistant to this sort of simplistic measurement. do we measure our marriages with a 4 point scale? do we “grade” the love we have for our children on a rubric? teaching is a daily act of love; love for our students, for their learning, for our colleagues, and for our communities. to think that we can measure our effectiveness as teachers with a 4 point scale is not only absurd, its insulting.
Mr. Garvey made a difference in his community that could never be measured by a test. it was measured by the length of the line at his wake, and by the depth of the grief felt by his former students and his family at his funeral. Mr. Garvey, like many, many teachers across the country who are getting ready to return to their classrooms, taught because he wanted to bring his love of his subject matter to his students, to make them think about the world differently, and to help them become the persons they wanted to become. there aren’t enough “points” on any teacher evaluation rubric to measure the difference these teachers will make this year.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve been turned off from education in a traditional school setting. I wonder if applying any sort of grading schema is a concession to the individuality of our students.
In the quote above, the analogy to marriage really hit home for me. If it’s absurd for us to grade our relationships on a 4 point scale, it seems equally absurd to bump it up to a 5 or 6 or 12 or 100 point scale and call it ideal. Similarly, if we are committed to education in the purest form, what role does grading actually have. We evaluate our relationships on a series of complex variables, givings and takings, and indefinable moments. What happens when we apply similar rigor to our teaching?
It seems inconceivable that we can do so with a class of more than one student. As I said above, doing so is a concession to societal pressures (“there must be a category I can pigeonhole this student into: B+”) and lack of resources (“I have 9 other students in the class I need to develop an educational relationship with. There’s no way I can do that in the hour I see them each week.”).
Is classroom education just doing the best you can with the resources you have? And is that within the students’ best interests?
Please don’t leave out the peer-to-peer variable. Anyone who has taught a class of children knows that the presence of one student can change the entire class social structure for that day. Learning how to care for all the students as if they belonged to the same extended family is part of the teaching craft. The social lessons we learn from interacting not only in teacher-student relationships but in student-student relationships are a very important type of learning for living in society.
In many evaluation systems that have been in place for decades, there is a small range of indicators that describes a general level of management efficacy for classroom environment–there are no “numbers” or “grades” in this system.
With all the current proposals to rate a teacher’s work using “value scores,” there is plenty of room for error. If you look at the people touting values as a valid way to measure the “success or failure” of teachers, you won’t see too many with teaching experience of this nature. How could they possibly use numbers and test scores to evaluate a person helping to manage a classroom environment if they know just how socially complex it is from their own personal experience? The truth is, they don’t HAVE this experience, yet they advertise themselves as experts.
How do you describe the efficacy of a teacher whose work was rated a 69/100 compared to one whose rating is a 70/100? Is there a “cut-off” of efficacy and “woe to the person whose evaluator gives them the score at the cusp of success” where one point would have been the difference between keeping a teacher or firing one? How can anyone put a number on the facilitation of the complex and varying social structures of the classroom evironment? What do these “values” even mean?
The focus on grading teachers had two sources. One was the comparison of US student scores on internationally benchmarked tests to those of students in other countries. Many have acknowledged that this is not an apples to apples comparison as other countries do not include everyone in their testing as we do here, so our test scores looked lower in comparison. But this did not necessarily point to poor teaching, only skewed test takers and different standards and therefore is really not a good reason to grade teachers. The other seems to be this belief that we do not know how to recognize a bad teacher and therefore need some objective system to do it for us. The reality is that everyone recognizes the bad teachers (yes administrators, parents know you are lying when you tell us you’ve never had a complaint about this teacher before.) The problem has been contractual obligations that made getting rid of them very difficult, putting administrators in a tough position. The use of test scores to identify bad teachers is a bad surrogate because it doesn’t address the problem – poorly negotiated contracts that allow bad teachers to stay in the classroom. The proof that this is the wrong solution to the wrong problem is found in the 8th grade math teacher in New York who was ranked the worst in the city, even though her kids performed in the 98th percentile. http://eyeoned.org/content/the-worst-eighth-grade-math-teacher-in-new-york-city_326/ Since, according to the article, her principal KNEW she was a good teacher, and so presumably did her peers and the parents, wouldn’t it make the most sense if their evaluation of her counted the most, even if it was not neatly quantifiable? This solution, however, doesn’t fit neatly into an employment contract. This seems to be what the music teacher is referring to.
“The problem has been contractual obligations that made getting rid of them very difficult, putting administrators in a tough position. ”
Can you give an example of the exact contract wording that makes it difficult to get rid of “bad” teachers?
I’m very curious how contracts negotiated by school boards and teachers unions do this since the contracts are negotiated by both sides AND unions protect the employees’ rights to due process, but the administration and school board (who make the recommendations AND vote for each teacher to get tenure) have the right to remove a “bad” teacher if it can be proven that tenure charges are valid. The only people who are actually keeping “bad” teachers in their positions are the people who cannot prove they are “bad” in the first place, and who might those people be? Well they would be the administrators and the school boards, not the contractual obligations. Contractual obligations cannot take action as they are inanimate objects of agreement that represent both parties.
So again, can you give an example of how contractual agreements “put administrators in tough positions?”