Fair to Everyone: Building the Balanced Teacher Evaluations that Educators and Students Deserve. Teacher Quality

In schools across America, teachers know who among their peers is doing the best work and who is not. Yet the nation's evaluation systems tend to foster the notion that all teachers perform the same way, with the same results for students. Indeed, in an attempt at equality--uniform treatment for everyone--current evaluation systems often end up being fair to no one. Ideally, performance evaluations should serve to help teachers identify strengths and areas for development, as they work to improve their practice. Systems that work have the goal of lifting quality across the profession, aiding all teachers to become good and prompting good teachers to become great. This paper highlights key elements of evaluations that live up to these aspirations. Quality evaluation systems include regular classroom observations by trained evaluators with clear standards. They also include measurements that consider the contribution each teacher makes to student learning over a year's time, taking into account the achievement level and remediation needs students bring to the classroom. Ultimately, everyone stands to gain when teacher evaluation systems are designed to gauge teacher performance fairly, clearly, and comprehensively, with an eye to the kind of professional growth that fuels student learning. It is hoped that this paper demystifies some of the newer approaches to evaluation for districts and states that might be considering them. The author's aim is to illustrate why these new systems are better for teachers and students. (Contains 10 notes.)