By Tom White

Chad Aldeman, an analyst and blogger for the Education
Sector, recently wrote about Washington’s teacher evaluation system. It’s an
interesting read. You can cut to the chase by looking at his blog post here,
or if you’re feeling ambitious, you can tackle the whole article here.

His basic point is that Washington State judges an
overwhelming majority of its teacher as satisfactory, regardless of their
students’ achievement. He calls this the “Evergreen Effect” which is a
reference to “The Widget Effect,” a phenomenon in which education policy-makers
treat teachers as interchangeable “widgets,” ignoring their relative
effectiveness.

I have several reactions to his thoughtful piece.

First of all, his idea of a good teacher is a teacher who
produces good results. He begins his entire piece by citing the disparity
between the low test scores at five Pasco elementary schools and the fact that
most of the teachers in that school received satisfactory evaluations. I can’t
sit here and claim that those teachers are all satisfactory. But nor can
someone sit anywhere else and claim that they aren’t. It is entirely possible
to teach well and still have low-performing students. As we all know, there are
factors beyond any teacher’s control that affect student performance. In fact,
what Alderman doesn’t say in either his post or his article is that the five
schools in question have poverty rates around ninety-five percent, along with
ELL rates around sixty percent. Mitigating circumstances indeed. I’m not sure
why he omits this fact, but it’s either because he didn’t bother to look it up,
which is unlikely; or because he doesn’t think it matters, which would be odd
coming from an education policy analyst; or because he’s being disingenuous:
cherry-picking data to suit his narrative.

Besides that, when he complains that an overwhelming
majority of teachers get a satisfactory rating regardless of their students’
achievement, this belies what actually happens at an evaluation meeting.
Perhaps this is because he’s never sat through one. What actually happens is
that the principal and the teacher talk about goals that were set back in the
fall, the progress (or lack thereof) toward those goals and their respective
impressions of how the year went. There is also talk about what areas of
improvement that teacher might want to focus on for next year. And then, when
it’s all said and done, the principal checks off “satisfactory” and the meeting
ends. But being labeled satisfactory is by no means the culminating climax of
the event. It’s an afterthought. That said, this is what happens with the old
system; it is not what will happen once our new evaluation system is up and
running.

My third reaction concerns Aldeman’s complaint “that
educator evaluations were too focused on a teacher’s practice and disconnected
from student outcomes.” This is legitimate, in that evaluations in Washington
are focused on teacher practice. But why shouldn’t they be? After all, if I’m
teaching, what else do I have control over? The only way I can influence
student outcomes is by my practice. That’s not to say that there aren’t conversations
about student performance; they happen all the time. But those conversations
aren’t evaluative; they’re pragmatic. What can we do to boost Kaylin’s reading
fluency? How do we improve Erika’s number sense? Moreover, those conversations
involve more than just the principal and the classroom teacher; problem solving
in today’s schools – at least in Washington – is a team effort, not an
individual pursuit.

Honestly, If I had to name an “effect” that has permeated
Washington State school reform and teacher evaluation overhaul, I would name it
the “National Board Effect.” Our state adopted the National Board’s vision of
classroom-based school reform decades ago and it shows. Ours is not an “outcome-based”
culture. It is decidedly “practice based.”

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the way it should be.