A reader comments:

“I was present when Dr. Danielson spoke in depth during the formulation of the current Maryland evaluation system and at a Maryland State Education Association Convention. She stated that there was no research to measure teachers using student test scores. In fact, she stated that if a teacher was fired due to students test scores there could be possibility of litigation.

Charlotte Danielson is the real deal! Her research has been co-opted (did I spell that correctly?) by Gates and company. Please do not disparage her.”

Michael Weston of Hillsborough County, Florida, explains what is wrong with teacher evaluation:

“Of course we use the Danielson rubric in Hillsborough County Fl, where it forms one of the three pillars of the Gates funded “Empowering Effective Teachers”. The second pillar is value-added, the third is duplicity / deception.

Quite frankly, whether Charlotte is spelled Charlatan, whether her rubric is valuable or trash, whether her resume is padded…..none of this matters to me. What matters is what it is being used for. Teacher evaluation. Not a good use of money.

Teachers are not the major problem in education. The major problem in education is quite simple, well researched and accepted by everyone except Michelle Rhee.

The problem is the income gap.
The income gap causes an achievement gap.
The achievement gap causes efforts to close it.
The efforts to close it are misguided, destructive and tainted by greed and politics.

The pain, effort and treasure spent on teacher evaluation will produce miniscule returns, if any. The higher likelihood is that teacher evaluation schemes will have a negative net effect. The morale issues are huge and have yet to be quantified.

Most unfortunately, here is where the third pillar, duplicity / deception comes in to play. These schemes are “doomed to succeed”. Why? Because the big money behind them demands they succeed. How easy is it for the Gates Foundation to publish its own results. Very easy. How many School Districts will admit to having poisoned the well of education?”

I agree with the following comment by RRatto. If checklists for teacher evaluation were so great, how come they are never used in the nation’s elite private schools? They are a remnant of factory thinking, and unworthy of any profession. Checklists are great for auto mechanics and home builders. They are distinctly non-professional.

RRatto writes:

“anyone who claims they know how to measure a teacher’s effectiveness is full of #%^.

Because of our immensely diverse population and the need to differentiate I can tell you most teachers must change the way they teach almost daily. There is no magic rubric that can measure that.

Once we start aiming to check off the must do’s of a rubric we are no longer are teachers. We become circus monkeys performing for our masters.”

Perhaps you recall the hoopla that surrounded the release in late 2011 of a study by economists Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, in which they claimed that a great teacher would produce a huge increase in lifetime earnings, fewer pregnancies, and other wonderful life outcomes. It was reported on the front page of the New York Times, where one of the authors said that the lesson of the study was that it was best to fire teachers who couldn’t produce big gains sooner rather than later. The study was discussed reverentially on the Newshour and President Obama referenced its conclusion in his 2012 State of the Union address.

The central claim was that the great teacher produced a lifetime gain of $266,000 for a typical classroom.

First out of the box to challenge the study was Bruce Baker of Rutgers. He pointed out that if a class had 26 students, each of them would see an increment of $1,000 per year, or about $20 a week, or less than $5 a day. Maybe. Or maybe not.

Recently he realized that the Chetty study was being used to sell test-based evaluation of teachers, and no one among the policymakers seemed aware of the defects and critiques of the study.

He decided that the study seems to have gotten a special kind of treatment, which he refers to as “Mountain-Out-of-a-Molehill-inator.” Once again, here views the skewing of the results to show that policymakers would be foolish to draw conclusions and apply them to real schools and real teachers.

He concludes:

“What really are the implications of this study for practice – for human resource policy in local public (or private schools)? Well, not much! A study like this can be used to guide simulations of what might theoretically happen if we had 10,000 teachers, and were able to identify, with slightly better than even odds, the “really good” teachers – keep them, and fire the rest (knowing that we have high odds that we are wrongly firing many good teachers… but accepting this fact on the basis that we were at least slightly more likely to be right than wrong in identifying future higher vs. lower value added producers). As I noted on my previous post, this type of big data – this type of small margin-of-difference finding in big data – really isn’t helpful for making determinations about individual teachers in the real world. Yeah… works great in big-data simulations based on big-data findings, but that’s about it.

“Indeed it’s an interesting study, but to suggest that this study has important immediate implications for school and district level human resource management is not only naive, but reckless and irresponsible and must stop.”