Washington D.C.'s Teacher Evaluations... Worked?

It looks like if you put together a program that offers incentives -- and penalties -- you can get better performing teachers.

Will we see more programs like this?

 

Test scores!

 

Wow, provide

From the article:
"Test scores played only a secondary role for most teachers, along with principals’ assessments of the teachers’ contributions to the entire school."

So no, not just "Test scores!"
What a surprise. When you reward those who do well and run off those who don't, you get a better product. Moreover, you encourage those at the top to get even better. I can't believe something that has worked in every other successful business in this country works in schools too.

 

This isn't true.

 

Getting rid of the worst performers is at least as important, and this appears to have done that, and done it better than was expected.

 

As you are well aware, I think education in this country is fucked.

That said, I don't think turning teaching into "The Hunger Games" is the panacea Rush Nation thinks it is.

 

It doesn't need to be like the Hunger Games, but they do need to have practices in place where teachers who have stopped caring and are going through the motions while waiting to retire are held accountable. When they have tenure they're not held accountable.

We've all had the teacher who makes the class read aloud for the majority of classes or shows films once a week or more. That's not to say they're not all like that, there are certainly great teachers out there, but there are also quite a few who are just sleepwalking through their jobs.

 

No question. I think that the frequency of testing and the design of the tests is in question, along with, as I said, the lust for "Hunger Games"-style battle royale where union members kill each other for Republican sport.

I like the Common Core standards because it addresses writing, finally. But because it's Obama-backed, it's evil personified among the people who would typically support it.

 

You need to bounce the new teachers who can't hack it too.

 

Education policy has become almost as politicized and dogmatic as abortion. It's very frustrating. But it produces the best workers in the world, according to the president. So I guess it all must be working out great.

 

One thing that hasn't improved in DC since the introduction of Impact four years ago is student achievement. Isn't that sort of the goal?

 

I don't think you can do it based on testing because it penalizes teachers who are in schools where the kids don't come from families where education is emphasized and it basically encourages the teachers to cheat.

We dealt with an incident last year where my oldest's teacher was on maternity leave for the first four months of the school year and they had a teacher take over the class. She was horrendous. She wrote no notes on report cards and couldn't answer basic questions during the parent-teacher conferences. She wouldn't respond to emails and wouldn't return phone calls. After the parent-teacher conference where she couldn't answer basic, standard questions about how my kid was doing, I went to the principal and he said, "You're the eighth parent to call me about her."

She's still there.