Teacher Evaluation: A Postscript

My friend decided not to leave teaching but is transferring to another building. She says she is trying to walk through the hallways without feeling as if she has the scarlet letter “F” tattooed on her forehead. This process has eroded her confidence and I hope she finds it again so that she can recover the gift she’s been able to give students these past fifteen years.

Her story and reaction to a negative evaluation may be an extreme example, but judging from the number of responses I received to Teacher Evaluation: Taking Stock, perhaps not. It is interesting to note that the responses came as whispers – through private email, rather than public posting – suggesting that teacher evaluation might have become one of education’s “elephants in the room.” Maybe it’s time to talk about it.

My purpose in writing last week’s blog was not to bash teacher evaluation, but instead to give voice to the reality that this particular reform strategy may be reaping some unintended consequences. If the underlying purpose of teacher evaluation is to make sure every student has a highly effective teacher every day, we need to think about the role evaluation plays in the learning required for everyone to make this happen. Harvard Professor Richard Elmore claims that the reason our education system is not delivering the results we want is that everyone is being asked to do things they don’t know how to do. We’re in an era of higher expectations for students with a commensurate reduction in student tolerance for school-as-usual, made more complicated by technology, advancing poverty, and scarce resources. And as with any adaptive challenge, we are going to have to learn our way through this.

We’ve been supporting education transformation for two decades now and there is something noticeably different in today’s landscape: ownership. A decade ago friend and colleague Tony Wagner advocated for a culture of “no shame, no blame, no excuses” recognizing that all of us go to work every day wanting to do our best work for students. We translated that into building urgency for the changes our education system needs through careful exploration of data in relation to the world our kids were heading into, involving all stakeholders in the complex work some used to refer to as “building the plane while flying it.” Today the urgency remains, but the ownership for how we’re going about it seems to have dwindled. A Gallop Poll released this week shows that teachers are the least likely of all occupational groups surveyed to feel that their opinions matter, with accompanying feelings of disempowerment and isolation. Somehow we seem to be going in the wrong direction.

External mandates have their place, to be sure. But in complex adaptive work, their leverage is limited to their ability to create the kinds of conversations and experiences that foster learning, in this case for the adults responsible for educating students. Perhaps Tony was right in his mantra of “no shame, no blame, no excuses.” Somehow we need to move away from the shrouds that currently cloak teacher evaluation, to check our theories of action about its place in our improvement work, and consider how it can foster the adult learning that will take teaching and leading into the future.

 Harriette Thurber Rasmussen is a coach and partner with Abeo School Change.