By Mark

I sat at a table with two other teachers, two building administrators, and the top two admin from the district office. We'd spent the better part of an hour sorting through the assessment rubrics and frameworks associated with the new teacher evaluation system mandated through legislative action in Senate Bill 6696. 

Silence settled on us all at once. The weight of what we were examining suddenly became overwhelming. 

Like so many things in education, the ideas and philosophies behind this new evaluation system (in brief: a shift from the binary satisfactory/unsatisfactory on a menu of teacher behaviors to a four-point continuum of evaluation using as many as sixty individual descriptors of teacher practice) we could all agree were sound, necessary, and powerful both in terms of evaluation and potential professional development.

But as we began to picture how it all could transition from philosophy to action, the beast began to be revealed.

How in the world would an administrator have the time to use this powerful and meaningful tool in a powerful and meaningful way if he or she were assigned thirty teachers to evaluate? Like every single fad, fashion, trend and new big idea to ever hit a public school in the history of education, the problem is the same exact four letter word: time.

Now if I were to approach this as I do my teaching practice, the solution would be easy. Let's say I give students five minutes at the beginning of every class for DOL grammar practice. After about four minutes, I see the students rushing to finish, just to finish, and the results are poor. When the quiz comes up and I have to collect data, the scores are abyssmal. So, the next week I adjust. Instead of three sentences of DOL, I offer two. I notice the same rushing, the same poor performance… I adjust again. This time, a different approach instead of DOL… and if it too doesn't work in the alotted time, what should I do? Obviously, give more time.

In my short career thus far, every movement, fad, idea, or new curriculum I have seen come and go has been rooted in sound research-based practice. Never have I or my colleagues ever been given enough time to actually take those movements, fads, or curicullum silver bullets and implement them as they ought to be implemented. Never.

And, in a knee jerk response, administrators, the public, or the policymakers point to our failure and demand a new approach before the old new approach has even settled in.

It seems pretty clear to me, then, the fundamental change that needs to happen if we want any kind of improvement in our public education system. Give adminstrators more time to do their daily work (fewer other responsibilites) and I guarantee that this new four-point scale with its associated frameworks would not only be implemented easily, but it would be a smashing success within a few years. Give teachers more time within their work day to design, assess, collaborate, and respond to student work and I guarantee that we would see student performance leap upward. Somebody, write my district a check so we can double our workforce and simply give everyone the time to do it how we know it ought to be done, and I will prove to you that this is absolutely true. (Finland, anyone?)

We're shuffling every other variable: what curriculum we teach, how we present that curriculum, what tools and toys we use to present it, what vocabulary we use to talk about it all. And the results have not been there. The one variable we've yet to touch is, in my judgment, the one which would make all the difference.