My Debate with Mr. Liberal Teacher on How Teachers Should be Evaluated

What is the best way to evaluate a teacher's job performance?

This question is being increasingly asked in public education, inspired by legislation like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and important because teachers rising salaries have not led to rising performance on national tests for students. It is an important question and a basic one, a question that likely has already been established for you if you don't work in government- those of you who work in the real world know what your pay and job security and recognition is based on, whether it be sales, piece-work, clients, hours, reviews, boss evaluations, or something else. But in education, teachers are rarely evaluated, and even more rarely are evaluated in any sort of meaningful way. So the question needs to be asked- what is the best way to evaluate a teacher's job performance?

At our staff meeting last week, our social studies department discussed this issue, and it is my hope that you can see why simply asking the question is very threatening to those who work in public schools. My department has about a dozen social studies teachers, teaching subjects ranging from US History to World History to International Relations to Government to Psychology. Only a couple have been teaching less than 10 years, and the rest have been in education for many years. It is our suspicion that sometime in the future some parts of our job may be based on job performance so we decided as a department to start the conversation up on how we should be measured. And the conversation didn't get very far.

"There is no way that anyone can evaluate a teacher's job performance," Mr. Liberal Teacher said (I call him Mr. Liberal because his ideology could be most closely described as liberal- he likes big government, activist judges, few limits on government, was opposed to the War on Terror, hates Bush and Palin, often talks about the plight of various groups like the poor or minorities or gays, and thinks rich people are evil- ie, generally has liberal views on issues). He is the leader of a group of teachers in our department with a similar mindset.

"I disagree," I said, and then suggested "One way that we can be evaluated as teachers is by test grades, such as our scores on AP tests." (Most of our department teaches some form of Advanced Placement class).

"No," Mr. Liberal Teacher said, "That's not a fair way to assess us. Some of the AP Exams are easier than others- I know I teach for the hardest AP exam."

That was not true- all AP tests are equally hard, and are statistically weighted and designed to be this way, but I didn't want to fight him on that point, so I suggested another way "How about then we all get evaluated based on how our students do on our common assessments?" (The core subjects that are taught in our department span several teachers and now have common unit tests).

"No," Mr. Liberal Teacher said, "That's not a fair way to assess us either. Some of us have different students of different capabilities in our classroom, and it wouldn't be fair to assess us as teachers because we may have lower performing students in our classroom."

That was a good point, I suppose, so I applied my few math skills and tried to think of a solution. "Okay, then we'll take the average of our classes and measure over a period of several years- that should correct for the statistical problem of a low sample size of a group of poorly performing kids which may lower a score- over time, we'll all have the same opportunity to get the same groups of kids, and therefore our common assessments will be valid ways to assess our teaching."

"No," Mr. Liberal Teacher said, "That's not a fair way to fix this problem. Some of the other teacher's will just 'teach to the test' to improve their scores, and I don't think that is right."

That was a fair point too, I suppose. "Okay, so if the test is the problem, we can go about creating a better more valid instrument to measure the students on, one that will be based on the curriculum that we're supposed to be teaching and broad enough so that teacher's can't just feed students specific answers."

"No," Mr. Liberal Teacher said, "That's not a fair way to fix that problem. There is no test that will ever be able to correctly evaluate what I am teaching my students."

This is the sort of thing that liberal teachers say when they get provoked and frustrated, because you see, they are hiding their real motive. Let's continue the story and you'll see what the real motive is...

"Okay," I said, moving on, "How about then if we have the students evaluate us? We'll come up with some sort of perfect student evaluation that will ask students to judge us based on a variety of measures."

"No," Mr. Liberal Teacher said, "That's not a fair way to assess us either. Your students like you because you are easy and give everyone an A and never yell at them- my students don't like me because I am tough on them and fail many of them and yell at them to keep them disciplined- it wouldn't be fair to assess me on what kids think about me."

"Okay," I said, trying one more time, "How about a basket of many things including evaluations by students, AP scores, common assessment scores, evaluations by peers, evaluations by administration, number of after school activities, number of students signing up for your classes, and parent reviews?"

"NO," Mr. Liberal Teacher said, "There is no possible way to ever evaluate my job."

That ended our conversation in our staff meeting, but I'm curious- what sort of job do you think he is doing as a teacher when he refuses to be evaluated?