ABSTRACT
Teachers and principals know the teacher evaluation cycle well. Districts and states have been developing and adjusting teacher evaluation systems for decades. Following the recent Race to the Top (RTT) legislation, each state aligned its evaluations to match the federal requirements. States are now released from some of those requirements following the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, but most have not changed their teacher evaluation systems. Their evaluation systems remain as they have been for years—largely based on observing teachers and scoring them based on complex numerical rubrics.
We often take this way of doing things for granted, assuming this is simply the default way to evaluate educators. But it wasn’t inevitable. The history of teacher evaluations in the United States is a complex one. Over the years, educators have struggled to implement teacher evaluations in practice and policy.
We also assume this system plays a role in raising teacher performance standards. That, too, is false. The research on evaluation systems under RTT does not suggest a real or positive impact on the profession. As in other sectors and domains, teacher performance evaluation systems fail to repay the time and effort spent on them.
Why do we continue with rubric-based, data-driven evaluation systems that don’t work, and how can we make the switch to something that does? In order to fully understand where we are, we must first look at where we came from. We can then adjust the foundation of the system to help us better understand teacher effectiveness.
