Jay Mathews wrote that he no longer believes that teachers should be evaluated by test scores.
However, he went on to say that teachers should be judged by their principal, and that principal should have the absolute power to hire, pay, judge, and fire teachers at will. If we don’t like the principals, we should fire them and get others.
Here is the answer to Jay by Carol Burris, who was just named principal of the year by her colleagues in New York State:
The better answer is to put in place systems of supervision and evaluation like [Montgomery County’s] PAR [Peer Assistance and Review]. This obsession that we can ‘fear and fire’ our way to excellence, is nonsense. ‘Give them (principals) the power to hire, compensate and fire staff members as they see fit”. This principal says….bad idea. As is doing the same for principals. That is still putting evaluation by tests scores in a primary place. It will also make schools more political than they already are and create more “Atlantas”.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t understand. Every organization should allow supervisors to evaluate those whom they supervise. Why should schools be any different? This should be true throughout school districts, meaning that principals are evaluated by their superiors, superintendents by school boards, and school boards by the voters. Otherwise, nobody is accountable and nobody is responsible. Surely you don’t claim that every teacher in every school is a great teacher without room for improvement, do you?
Maybe every organization should allow their employees due process like tenured teachers get (those who still have tenure, anyway) before they get disciplined or fired. No supervisor is perfectly objective or fair and no employee should have their livelihood dependent on the whims of one person.
I agree that anyone who receives an inappropriate evaluation should have the ability to challenge it. But to suggest that supervisors cannot evaluate those whom they supervise is to suggest that there is no supervision whatsoever, and further results in a complete inability to foster teacher improvement and to remove, if necessary, those who should not be teaching.
The issue is that principals should not have *absolute* power to fire and discipline. That’s where due process comes in. You’re raising a mighty strawman trying to claim that people are saying that principals cannot evaluate teachers.
As always, excellent responses, Dienne.
Some thoughts to aid understanding:
Good principals are hard to find.
They would rather coach than fire.
Central office timelines and mandates are likely arbitrary and counterproductive.
Replication of success (e.g. Montgomery County MD) requires accountability in the central office–not fear-inducing tactics on the front lines.
Montgomery County held its central office to high standards via the Education Criteria for Performance Excellence (Baldrige). Other districts prefer cheating.
You are right. There is a severe shortage of good principals, but that shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to do common sense supervision. I completely agree that central office accountability is critical, so that if the principal is not doing an appropriate job of evaluation and supervision, it is the principal who is held accountable.
Not a careful reader? Who is saying teachers should not be evaluated? That you would even think such a thing makes you suspect for having the teacherphobia that is abroad in the land.
The objection is to high-stakes tests, which are given once a year, being the major source of an evaluation and which take no consideration into the conditions in which the student being tested is living.
As a Civil Rights Attorney who has spent the past 18 years advocating for the rights of children with disabilities to receive an appropriate education, I completely agree that teachers shouldn’t be evaluated on test scores alone. My concern here is that I don’t see a counterweight to that. All employees, including teachers, need a broad based evaluation.
Teacher phobia? The only teachers I’m phobic about are the handful who have no business teaching. Sadly, too many of my cases have involved teachers who have abused children with disabilities for years without being held accountable and unions who defend their right to teach regardless of the abuse they have perpetrated on these vulnerable children.
You are basing your opinion on the commonly held belief that teachers are not professionals. Professional people with advanced degrees are usually evauated in part by their peers, and that’s how it needs to be with teachers.
I completely believe that teachers are professionals. I’ve been a professional attorney for 28 years and in every job I’ve held, my supervisor evaluated me and I think that is completely appropriate. I do agree that a good evaluation includes seeking and obtaining input from a variety of sources, including peers.
The overwhelming majority of attorneys are evaluated by their bosses, i.e. the partner or partners in the law firm they work for. I can guarantee that you don’t want to be evaluated like they are.
Most law firms have more than one partner, so at least there’s a possibility of balancing out someone with a personality conflict or an axe to grind. At large law firms, associates are evaluated by all the partners they work with, as well as usually the head(s) of the evaluation committee. Partners can be equity or non-equity. Equity partners own a stake in the firm and can’t be fired – there are very complex (and expensive) procedures for forcing an equity partner out. Non-equity partners aren’t really evaluated per se. They generally don’t bring in a lot of money (which is why they’re not equity), although usually enough to pay their own salary and overhead, but they usually help a senior equity partner whose billing rate has gotten too expensive to do much work on his/her own matters. Said senior equity partner usually protects them.
Totally bad idea to give that much power to any one person. Principals are politicians in these school districts and they do what they must to stay in their job or advance. Pressure from their supervisors or superintendents is strong and too often they end up doing the superintendents preferences over the students, staff or community. If anything, the principal should come under preview of the community, teachers and students. This system he is proposing keeps the top down model of education in place and that does not work in the long run.
Jay Matthews is not in touch with reality. I spent the first ten years in the classroom joking that I wanted to work for a principal who knew more than I did. After that, it was no longer a joke.
I have worked for 9 principals in just over 20 years. Of the nine there are only two who earned my professional and personal respect.
Who wants to be a principal?
As by my moniker, I retired in 2010. I was very fortunate to have worked with 11 wonderful, fair and experienced principals in 7 different buildings in the district. It was a good think the principals did the evaluations, because the majority of special ed. coordinators and directors were not so wonderful–in fact, systemschangeconsulting probably would have been involved in due process hearings for their lack of respect for the children and parents (and the teachers, of course, who got themselves into trouble by acting as child advocates!). I empathize greatly with active teachers, for–as 4equity2 implies–districts are not hiring experienced principles these days. Of course, individual state requirements in tandem with colleges’ & universities’ administrative programs/certification are partially to blame–in many (if not all!) states, one has only to teach for 2 years before being admitted to an administrative program that might take only one year to complete. Upon completion, states test the candidates. Therefore, one could be hired as a principal with a mere 3 years of teaching experience. Now–to add fuel to the fire–some districts, perhaps, might be hiring TFAs who have become certified as principals (please correct me if I’m wrong, here), so there is even less experience going forth. Last–but not least–principals are so pressured with the “standardized” testing & AYP making that they, in turn, put the heat on their teachers, or MUST do so simply based on VAM, given the guidelines of their school district.
Having said the aforementioned, principals who have families and fear for their jobs comprise the present-day scenario, unlike the situation for the majority of my years teaching. And–even at the end (tail of NCLB, beginning of RTTT), my principal let us teach and encouraged the children to learn. (This school did not make AYP for 5 years–just a very large number of E.L.L.students and the special ed. subgroups caused the situation; even with 93% low income, the general population passed. Long story short–the school went into turnaround: the principal was re-assigned & the majority of {older} teachers sent to other schools, put in unfamiliar positions.)
To date, the school has not made AYP in the 2 years following.
Where can I learn more details about PAR? My own board will be taking up the question of evaluation soon, and I’d like to share this with my colleagues.
Here is one description of PAR
And here is a post with links to PAR: https://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/07/what-is-peer-assistance-and-review/
Thanks, Diane!
The original meaning of principal was “principal teacher.” This would be an experienced teacher who could share wisdom and offer support to a teaching staff. Natural leadership is recognized by those who work under that leadership. Today’s norm is to place people with, perhaps, 2 or 3 years in a classroom to evaluate that which they know nothing about. And it really does seem that, the less they know, the higher they rise in the system. Good leaders empower others. Good principals can help make better teachers by their own example.
That’s because principal teachers became chief administrators or managers about a century ago.
And unfortunately the principal as a “leader” (meaning they have to force change because they know best-ha ha) has really come into vogue since the early 00s. I noticed a change in the language around that time from collaboration (although they still spout that word but in reality do not practice it-Delphi technique and others to supposedly get “consensus”) to leadership.
REMINDER!!! Tomorrow in Tennessee the Senate meets on the floor. The state mandated starvation bill SB132 is item #23 on the agenda. Here is a link to find your Tennessee state senator in case you have not contacted him or her yet. http://www.capitol.tn.gov/legislators/
In his column, Jay Mathews said that “Grading individual teachers” with student test scores “is too approximate, too erratic.” He says that “rating schools” on student test scores “is better.” Perhaps, though school test scores correlate strongly with community income levels.
Then, Mathews says that until better measures of learning are developed, principals should have “the power to hire, compensate and fire staff members as they see fit.” He argues that if “student achievement lags” then “principals should be in the hot seat.” Does Jay not grasp that this is the model employed by Beverly Hall in Atlanta and Michelle Rhee in DC? That this is the same model embraced by corporate “reformers?”
In a September 3, 20011 column in The Post, Robert McCartney reported that he attended a half-seminar-half vacation retreat in Florida with “award-winning principals.” McCartney wrote that among these Post award-winners, “everybody agrees that improving education is the key to restoring the nation’s long-term economic health and international competitiveness.”
Sadly, though, those “award” winners didn’t know very much about the state of public education in the United States. The fact is that –– in spite of what gets reported in the mainstream media –– there is no general “crisis” in public education. And we’ve known that for a long time.
The “crisis” was perpetrated in A Nation at Risk, the Reagan-era screed that warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” that threatened American national security. It was egregiously in error.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, concluded that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
But “reforms” based on the big lie continued. More states enacted “high standards” and testing. No Child Left Behind mandated even more testing, and punishments. Race to the Top’s core elements – more testing, more charter schools, merit pay –– have no solid research base. The Common Core standards are based on the premise that more rigor for students best “positions” the nation for economic competitiveness. [Plenty of the “reformers” embrace Mathews’ contention that Advanced Placement courses constitute the “rigor” that students (and the country) require.]
However, the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks nations each year on their economic competitiveness. The U.S. continues to rank highly, but when it drops, as it has recently, public schools are not the problem.
For example, when the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Last year (2011-12), major factors cited by the WEF were a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.” The WEF did NOT cite public schools as being problematic to innovation and competitiveness.
And this year (2012-13) the WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and, environmentally, “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
Now what, exactly, was public education’s complicity in all of this? And how exactly does more “rigor” for students fix those weaknesses? And why aren’t “award-winning principals” – or teachers, or journalists – aware of the facts? And while there may be some truth to Mathews’ statement that “The best principals…were great teachers,” how many principals (or superintendents) can say that they spent very much time in a classroom teaching?
Last week I met with a young graduate student who wanted to know my opinions on education. On her questionnaire I wrote that some of the people who influenced me most were some of the excellent principals that I had throughout my 42 years as a teacher. These people inspired me, encouraged me, modeled good instruction for me and helped me learn new things throughout my career. I always felt, and continue to feel, that an excellent principal or head teacher has an enormous effect on the learning environment at her school.
That said, I would not want to put any one person in charge of the evaluation of a teacher. Like other professionals, teachers deserve to be evaluated, at least in part, by their peers. Other evaluators can include the principal, parents and students.
About twenty years ago, I applied for a postion as Mentor Teacher in California. This program required the participation of other teachers. As a result I was evaluated by a team of educators that included mostly teachers, although administrators were involved also. These people visited my classroom, observed lessons, looked at student portofolios, talked to parents and students and so forth. It was the only thorough evaluation I ever received in my career. I got the job but other teachers at my school did not. However, these teachers were told why they didn’t get it and were encouraged to apply again. They polished their skills and some were successful the next time they applied.
Jay Mathews is a nice man and a good writer. However, he is outside of education looking in and rarely seems to “get it.” The best books on education, medicine, law, the ministry etc. are almost always written by educators, doctors, lawyers, ministers. The journalists who have done an excellent job of writing about education (e.g. “Among Schoolchildren” by Tracy Kidder) spent a year or more in a classroom.
Right now, because of the depressed economy and the surplus of teachers, people are looking for a cheap way to evaluate teachers. But of course, there is no cheap way. In order to evaluate a teacher properly, other experienced professionals will have to be familiar with her work as well as the progress of her students.
Linda Johnson: this posting is why I read all your responses. Speaking just for myself, once in a while—and this is an outstanding achievement for anyone who regularly posts online—you offer something that seems on the surface to be just another response but deserves to be read, then reread slowly to absorb all of it.
You have pretty much blown a hole in every know-it-all education ‘expert’ [sadly, Professor Eric Hanushek on BRIDGING DIFFERENCES is one of the latest] who doesn’t know a classroom from her/his [pick your least favorite or most ridiculous part of the human anatomy] but is an expert on your ability to teach—and inspire and guide and ran the marathon of instruction at 100-yard dash speed.
I once had a job where I was a clerk typist in an academic library. I had three supervisors: from the bottom up they were a librarian-in-training, a professional librarian, and the librarian who ran the entire department I worked in. **Not bragging: I was a good enough typist that I secured several jobs largely because of my typing skills.** Not just in my evaluations [I did very well indeed] but in my day-to-day work, I never resented any one of them evaluating me or offering me suggestions or guidance. It took me a while to figure out why I enjoyed working ‘under’ them, but it finally dawned on me: any one of them, if necessary, could have done my [overall] job as well or better than I could. That’s why they didn’t [and didn’t need to] bully or order me into doing anything: I knew they understand what I was doing, and how to get it done, and what limitations I worked under, and their orders never needed to be more than gentle suggestions because they really and truly knew what needed to be done and the practicalities of how to get from here to there. I wish I could say all my jobs were like that, but why spoil your day and mine?
😦
In other words, moral leadership, modesty and personal example. The accountabullies know about carrots and sticks because you can add those up, divide ‘em into percentages, use ‘em in ever greater quantities to humiliate teaching staff—but moral leadership and modesty and personal example, now where would that fit into a VAManiac’s neat little faux formula?
Thank you most sincerely for all you’ve given us over those 42 years—and on this blog!
An abrazón [big hug] from KrazyTA.
🙂
Thank you, Krazy. You’ve made my day.
Did you see my response to Hanushek (Bridging Differences, Why do we teach? March 28 – mine was the last response.) He was speaking of K-12 teaching in a very condescending way but my husband was a university professor so I know that everything negative Hunushek said about teachers is often true of college teachers as well, and I said so!
When my husband came to volunteer in my first grade classroom after he retired, I never left him alone for a second because I knew he wouldn’t know what to do. The same is likely true of Hanushek and many of these “experts.” Many are clueless. After all, they have virtually no experience!
One very simple way to improve the K-12 teaching profession would be to take direction from some true experts (say Carol Burris rather than Bill Gates). Now there’s an idea and it wouldn’t cost a dime!
Jay Mathews? someone ask him about why he went on such a rampage about rating schools by the number of AP courses given.
Moral leadership. KrazyTA nails it.
It should never be just the principal. Principals have many psychological problems concerning no liking certain teachers or if they get caught doing illegal things as in my 1997 California State Audit of LAUSD. It must be peer review in which the principal is one of the inputs. We have massive amounts of students, parents, staff and teachers being retributed by principals. There must always be correction factors. This is human nature. The evaluation of teachers as now presented is also false. What do you think would happen if a Brentwood, very high income, teacher had to teach in the Central City, very low income, and the Central City teacher moved to the Brentwood school? There is an interesting study and one which would really show if their methodology means anything. I believe their ideology would fall on its face. What do you think?
Wow, he has a big ego.