Matthew Kraft, an assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University, asks the question in the title of this post. He weighs the pros and cons. The cons are overwhelming. The pros are dubious. Peter Greene assesses Kraft’s balancing act. He finds the pro side of the balance curiously vacuous. Yet Kraft steps back and concludes that the nation is better off for the millions or hundreds of millions or billions spent to evaluate teachers by dubious measures.

Greene is not buying it.

The rush to evaluate demoralized teachers, created perverse incentives, and created a teacher shortage, with no evidence of success. Not much of a positive scorecard. (By the way, whatever happened to Raj Chetty and his Nobel-worthy research demonstrating that your fourth grade teacher determines your lifetime income and whether you [if female] get pregnant before marriage?)

He writes:

“Previous sucky evaluation systems may not have provided useful information about teachers (or depended on being used by good principals to generate good data). But at least those previous systems did not incentivize bad behavior. Modern reform evaluation systems add powerful motivation for schools to center themselves not on teachers or students or even standards, but on test results. And test-centered schools run upside down– instead of meeting the students’ needs, the test-centered school sees the students as adversaries who must be cajoled, coached, trained and even forced to cough up the scores that the school needs. The Madeline Hunter checklist may have been bunk, but at least it didn’t encourage me to conduct regular malpractice in my classroom.

“So yes– everyone would be better off if the last round of evaluation “reforms” had never happened.

“Kraft also asks if “the rushed and contentious rollout of teacher evaluation reforms poison the well for getting evaluation right.”

“Hmmm. First, I’ll challenge his assumption that rushed rollout is the problem. This is the old “Program X would have been great if it had been implemented properly,” but it’s almost never the implementation, stupid. There’s no good way to implement a bad program. Bad is bad, whether it’s rushed or not.

“Second, that particular well has never been a source of sparkling pure water, but yes, the current system made things worse. The problems could be reversed. The solution here is the same as the solution to many reform-created education problems– scrap test-centered schooling. Scrap the BS Test. Scrap the use of a BS Test to evaluate schools or teachers or students. Strip the BS Test of all significant consequences; make it a no-stakes test. That would remove a huge source of poison from the education well.”