One of the hardest things about this project, and about offering any kind of counter-narrative to the “Public schools suck/Teachers are terrible/If only we could [insert gimmick here] our problems would be solved!” party line, is dealing with the culture of fear that exists in so many schools (and other work environments, for that matter!). The culture of fear is what prevents so many teachers from coming forward and talking about their experiences as teachers, and what causes others to do so anonymously or pseudonymously.

Because of this, it’s easy for self-styled reformers (you know, the folks who’ve never taught, and may not have ever even attended public schools, but know all the answers to the problems in education) to pretend we’re all lying or exaggerating when we talk about the pitfalls of their pet projects. I’ve come to think of the culture of fear in schools as one of the most public secrets ever– most teachers have experienced it in at least one school, but many people outside of schools either don’t like to admit it exists, or can’t believe that it does.

For instance, when I first started having trouble with my administration this year, a lot of my non-teacher friends would say things like, “Well, don’t you have a union? Aren’t they supposed to crush your principal into dust for even looking at you wrong?” From there, a conversation would ensue about how lucky unionized teachers are to be so well-insulated from any kind of accountability, and how in no other profession can you be terrible at your job and keep it for life blah blah blah, and I would tune out and drift to the mental happy place I visit during savasana in order to not go completely nuts.

(I won’t really get into the union thing right now, ’cause that is a can of worms I’m saving for a day when I have a much heartier stomach. For now, I will offer this well-clicked link instead: The Myth of the Powerful Teachers’ Union. Note that I offer it only for the comparative statistics on teacher job security in unionized vs. non-unionized public school systems, and the appropriate call to stop blaming schools for societal problems. There are a few places where I think he’s being really disrespectful to low-income students and communities, and I disavow that completely. Bottom line: Teachers’ unions are not as powerful or protective as people think.)

In well-functioning school environments, there is no culture of fear. Teachers, administrators and parents (and students, wherever possible) trust and listen to each other, respect and value each others’ input, and make decisions based on mutual consent. Students win because the adults in their lives have the energy and resources to do what’s best for them; teachers win because they’re respected as professionals and are free to focus on instruction; administrators win because they can focus on positive management of personnel and resources; and parents win because they can trust that when they send their children to school, they’ll be safe and well-educated.

Unfortunately, too many schools these days don’t fit that description. Districts responding to state and/or federal mandates are increasingly inflexible, and judge schools based on a few easy-to-report measures of performance. Those measures–the all-important Data– may or may not tell anyone much about real learning, but to folks who don’t understand education or see schools or students up close, they’re all that matter. If a school comes up “short” on these measures, then harsh “turnaround” strategies are often employed.

Fear kicks in.

The fear pushes administrators to crack down on those areas that are most visible to the district. If they don’t, they risk losing their own jobs in a turnaround or school closure. They pass the fear along. For teachers, there’s a difficult choice: should you teach to the Test, or to whatever your principal and district value at the moment, or teach to students’ needs, abilities, and interests? Theoretically, those things should not conflict, but when high-stakes assessments can’t be adjusted to suit different learning styles, only account for a narrow range of subjects, and produce information only after a cohort of students have left a given classroom, conflict is inevitable. The fear looms: is it best to go along with the program–”play the game”– even though it’s not real education? Is it worth it to risk a steady salary/your professional standing/your entire career to stand up for what’s right for the kids?

When teachers question anything about the current way of doing things, that poses a problem for administrators. On the one hand, they have a point. On the other hand, no one’s listening to that point, and I can’t do anything about that this year. Do I allow that, or do I shut it down so I can keep the bus rolling until this fad passes? The easier thing to do is to shut it down. Silence those teachers, so others don’t start questioning too. The other teachers witness what happens to someone who doesn’t quietly go along, and they quickly learn to keep their mouths shut. Yeah, this situation is failing the students, but I’ve got a family to support. I’ve worked my whole life for this career. I can’t afford a bad evaluation, or an involuntary transfer, or to get passed over for a promotion, or to lose my job completely. They might gripe in the teacher’s lounge, or blow up at kids for being bad, or lazy, or unmotivated. But they won’t publicly take a stand, because they fear what might happen if they do.

(Note how slippery this is for a teacher’s union. If a teacher gets fired for questioning or resisting district, state, or federal policy, there’s not much they can do to protect that teacher. If “doing your job” means going along with the policy, then that teacher was not doing his or her job; there’s really no official recourse for that teacher. The only way to keep good teachers in the system (and support them to do real teaching) is to work to change the policy. Of course, if the flawed policy is touted as a much-needed “reform,” how can you resist it without also appearing to be against reform?)

So, as a teacher, you’re on your own. Work becomes about keeping up your guard. Can I trust my teammate enough to share my real feelings about how things are going? Should I admit that I’m struggling with something– class size, lack of materials, a new curriculum, forms and reporting requirements– and ask for help, and risk being seen as incompetent, or a complainer? Should I talk to outsiders about what’s going on, and risk a superior finding out about it and retaliating against me?

Which school would you rather send your children to: the one where people work together and teachers can spend their time focusing on their actual work, or the one where administrators and teachers don’t trust each other, and don’t do what they think is best for students because they’re all afraid they’ll lose their jobs?

The good news about this situation is that it’s fixable. Cultures develop as people respond to the circumstances they face, and we have the power to change our responses and those circumstances. The bad news is, that means we need to be brave enough to make those changes. Teachers need to come together and speak out against abuses in the system, and reclaim our expertise in the education reform arena. If the public is going to become informed enough to resist well-intentioned but short-sighted (and thus, potentially harmful) plans to “fix” public education, we are the only ones who can inform them. Likewise, administrators need to be brave enough to foster cultures of openness and respect, and take their employees’ concerns seriously. Districts need to hold everyone–teachers, administrators, and themselves– accountable for behaving professionally, which includes addressing well-founded dissent instead of suppressing it.

“I said, ‘Somebody should do something about that.’ Then I realized I am somebody.” -Lily Tomlin

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

Puh-lease. That some school officials and other educators may be engaged in this level of child social engineering is disconcerting to me as a parent and as a citizen. As misguided as I believe this approach to be, it’s also just a plain sign of public education mission creep. I’d hate to think that students in these schools not only are being actively urged to avoid having best friends but also are lacking proficiency in math or reading.

I certainly also hope this anti-best friend campaign is anything but widespread in Colorado schools. Because if we are having trouble fulfilling the consensus fundamental mission of public education, what good would be we accomplishing by delving into such a controversial area at best — or quite likely, doing something that’s counterproductive:

Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child’s self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships — everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up. If children’s friendships are choreographed and sanitized by adults, the argument goes, how is a child to prepare emotionally for both the affection and rejection likely to come later in life?

“No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a treacherous and betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a treacherous and betraying friend,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist who is an author of the book “Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children.”

It may take a psychologist and published author to point out what should be common sense. But exactly what sort of policies should it take to ensure all our schools are first and foremost focused on education’s bottom line? Maybe some of my other Facebook friends (best friends or not) can help me figure that out.

Basically, the article takes advantage of a teaching approach at the Air Force Academy that provides a natural experiment (contemporary economists’ favorite thing – known as “clean causation”).  Calculus is taught there by several different instructors but using the same core ideas, and all the students take a common test at the end – and, students are assigned randomly to the instructors.  Thus, the hidden “quality” of the instructor is fairly well isolated as the cause of any variation in student performance.

The study finds that less experienced and/or lower ranked instructors (e.g., without Ph.Ds) produce higher performance on the final test taken in the semester in which the course is taught – somewhat counterintuitive, but interesting.  The real interesting part, however, is that the students who took the more experienced and more senior instructors may perform lower on the test in that immediate semester, but they perform better in subsequent required math and engineering courses.

That is, the short run performance of students is different from their longer-run performance, depending on the type of instructor they have.

More experienced instructors appear to provide a broader, longer-lasting learning experience, which does not pay off on the immediate standardized test but does pay off in future learning.

Conversely, lower ranked instructors move student achievement higher in the short-run, perhaps by teaching more to the test, but their students perform less well in future courses.

Now, as with all such research, this is only one study, with one type of student examined (smart, hard working, Air Force Academy types), so lots of caveats must be applied.

But, to the extent that this result generalizes about teaching quality, it suggests that even examining student achievement on a good, valid test at the end of a year of learning with a single teacher, which is becoming the hoped-for gold standard of teacher evaluation (though we are a long way from being able to do that, accurately), might not tell you about the long-term impact that teacher has on her/his students’ achievement.

What most experts can agree on is that charter school quality varies widely, and that it is often associated with the rigor of authorities that grant charters. New York, where oversight is strong, is known for higher performing schools. Ohio, Arizona and Texas, where accountability is minimal, showed up in Ms. Raymond’s study with many poorly performing schools.

This, as well, is hardly new, but the idea that the charter authorizers (usually school districts) are themselves a major determinant of charter success has largely escaped the public debate.  Now I would add Denver to the historical list of top authorizers (although the critical ability to close poorly-performing charters is nascent), but even this ability is on a political tightrope.

Critical to the continued development of local school boards (as I wrote two years ago) is a shift from acting solely as a school operator to also managing an array of independent organizations that run schools and provide services.

This is not a simple transition — school boards rarely think of themselves an managers of independent organizations, and often they have no framework for recognizing what sort of skills and tactics are required.  However it is made far harder as many elected officials (particularly those with higher political aspirations) depend heavily on the political support and contributions of groups for whom charter schools are a threat to both membership and job security.

And lastly, many of these same officials are reluctant to make unpopular decisions — like closing poorly performing charters — that might upset any members of their existing or potential future constituencies. This invites contradictory positions, with even anti-charter board members voting to keep poorly performing charter schools open — as if they desired the continued failure of these charters to serve as a useful political punching bag while pleasing the inevitable parents who want the school to remain open.

What is required instead is continued research (building on studies like this) that looks at best practices and rankings of authorizers, and then compares the schools in those top districts with their traditional peers.  Secondly might be a comparative study of charters and TPS in districts with mayoral control — where the political process that so clearly contorts some authorizers is eliminated.

Now, don’t be fooled, as some ideologues will put forward not specific ideas on improving the authorization process, but merely impediments to charters at all.  But most practically the challenge should be placed squarely on the school boards themselves.

There should be no more question about the relative success of charter schools in DPS, thanks in no small part to the history of effective authorizing.  Nor, given the overwhelming parental support and substantial waiting lists in Colorado, do I think anyone serious believes in eliminating charters all together (or political stunts such as a moratorium, which is contrary to state law).

But will elected board members in Colorado’s 170+ school districts take seriously their role of authorizer and of themselves ask: not what can we do to dismantle the authorization process, but what can we do to improve it?

One starts with a teacher engaging his students – asking their opinion. The author asks how it is that he can “demand the absolute best” from these students – it’s clear that he believes this is core to his work.

The other starts with a discussion of teacher tenure, and mentions students only in passing.  Students “blow off school” or “suffer from myriad social ills.”

Perhaps they are both outstanding teachers, but it’s clear that they think about SB 10-191, and its impact on students, in very different ways.

It has never been fully clear to me why teachers earn the equivalent of career tenure, after the most minimal showing of competence/continuance over 3 years (and especially so when the research shows that many teachers don’t reach their best level of achievement until 5 years or more).  While tenure in higher education has some problems, for the most part it is a rigorous, 7 year process where a fairly high bar is set – and plenty of people are turned down, but only after very careful review of all aspects of a candidate’s record by multiple parties.  And, much of the argument for tenure, of course, is based upon the potentially controversial research that professors might engage in, not the teaching part of their job.

The teachers unions have argued that SB 191 moves too fast, too far.  The longer implementation time frame should help address the legitimate elements of those concerns – that is, we don’t now have valid and reliable assessments of student learning for a number of subjects and grades.  There is a kind of “chicken v. egg” quality to these arguments – supporters saying we won’t generate and test the valid and reliable assessments until we have high stakes decisions ready to be made, and opponents arguing that we need the assessments fully vetted beyond a shadow of a doubt before making any decisions based upon them.  While I’m more in the camp of passing the legislation and figuring out how to do the assessments right, it does take time, and money, to do it right.

Economists look at evaluating teachers as partly a statistical “sampling” problem – that is, teachers have a “true type” (good, bad, average, etc.) that districts can’t easily perceive, so we sample their performance.  We can sample inputs (resume, college degree, prior training, etc.), outputs (lessons plans, what they can be seen doing in the classroom, how they interact with peer teachers, etc), and outcomes (ideally longitudinal student achievement, but also student advancement, etc.).

While outcomes such as student growth are the place most reformers want to get to, these are still only imperfect samples of what students have learned – students have good and bad days, some students are sick on test day, the same students taking the test in September and May may be a small number due to mobility, how closely are the tests aligned to the actual curriculum, and other factors all influence the outcomes.  As Rona Wilensky noted in these pages, a singular focus on test scores leads to real cheating, perhaps curriculum narrowing, and extreme teaching to the test (these problems are all reduced if the assessment tests are really really good).

Similarly, observing teachers is the classroom is sampling – a “poor true type” teacher could become adept at putting on a good show for announced and unannounced observations by a principal or a peer group, but the more samples that are taken, the more likely the evaluations are to be accurate.

If I were a “good“ teacher I would want fair evaluations, a balance of both of outcomes and outputs assessments, that give me the best chance to show that I am effective. The more good sampling that is done (for example, the eight principal visits to teachers’ classrooms in Mike Miles’ plan), the smaller the “confident interval” around the evaluation and the more likely it is fair.  Especially if the pay and tenure implications become higher, we want teachers to feel that their evaluation is fair (and we want to prevent truly “bad” teachers from being able to somehow “game” the system to their advantage).

We should also recognize that there are exciting experiments going on, in Colorado, from which we should draw knowledge soon, including Procomp in DPS, Mike Miles’ evaluation and pay reforms in Harrison 2, Eagle County’s TAP program, the Gates MET studies being done in DPS that explicitly link new assessments and videotaped performance of teachers, and others.  With the longer implementation time frame, the right lessons can be learned, and applied, from these experiments.

At the same time, this will cost money.  I am often struck by the battle lines in Colorado of reformers, who believe we can make radical changes even with the same low (below national average) funding, versus those who advocate for more, and more fair, funding (and are often derided as somehow being “anti-reform”).  These things should go together more.

Reform done badly, often because it is done on the cheap, is likely to backfire and slow ultimate progress.  For example, teacher pay for performance is not a new idea – it had a major push after 1983’s Nation at Risk report – but it was done poorly, and even in recent experiments in Houston and Hillsborough County Florida, it was abandoned because notably poor teachers were being paid excellence bonuses (plus a few deceased teachers were paid, as well).

So, how about more money and reform working together?  “Gifts, donations, and private philanthropy” are probably not enough to produce a very good evaluation system for 50,000 teachers statewide, especially given the need for better assessments and evaluation training (and, at the same time that CAP4K curriculum changes will be implemented, without enough money).

While Alex Ooms provides some interesting ideas in his recent blog post about freeing up current money spent on paying for advanced degrees, ideas that Marguerite Roza and CRPE have championed, it just isn’t realistic to think that those sources of money will be available soon, as they would require enormous changes to the current system, and probably changes to legal and contractual obligations.

Finally, while questioning the realism of these funding sources, I do agree with much of Ooms’ recent blog post – this bill is important and worth a fight, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves too much about the impact, even if it is implemented well and with some real resources.   My sense, from the somewhat mixed extant research, is that we will have the ability to distinguish maybe 3 groups of teachers through better evaluations – a small percentage of poor teachers who should not be in the system, a small percentage of really excellent teachers who deserve more autonomy, career paths, and pay, and a very large middle group of solid teachers that is nearly average.

Rewarding the excellent and culling the poor teachers will help our system somewhat – this is by no means trivial.  But, we need to figure out how to improve the very large number of more-or-less average teachers to get a major boost to student outcomes.

I feel sorry for our children.

Locally and nationally, positioning and posturing for round two Race to the Top dollars is creating much of the acrimony.

In Denver, disintegrating relationships on the school board caused by the pension refinance/interest rate swap controversy is adding an additional layer of discord.

The Colorado Education Association used an op-ed column in The Denver Post by Education Commissioner Dwight Jones as a pretext for opposing the second-round Race to the Top application it seemed likely to fight in any case. In that column, Jones endorsed the tenure and evaluation overhaul bill introduced earlier this month by state Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver.

That bill is the union’s bête noire, because it ties at least half of a teacher’s evaluation to student growth on standardized test scores and makes teacher tenure a bit less of a lifetime lock on a job. It also give more power in setting regulations around evaluation to the State Board of Education, and less to the legislature, where the CEA’s lobbyists wield a lot of clout.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a similar but more draconian bill passed through the state legislature but was vetoed by GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, eliciting howls of outrage from reformers and other Republicans.  Crist  is being outflanked on the right in the Senate race by a charismatic Tea Party darling of a fellow Republican, Marco Rubio, and so decided to tack left. Or something. Florida politics are as Byzantine as it gets. So who really knows?

Crists’s veto energized unions across the country, and built momentum for concerted opposition to similar bills in other states, including Colorado. In fact, a Floridian commented on the Education News Colorado website last week: “Colorado teachers, be sure you know exactly what is in the bill, and stand up for what is right, not just what is politically popular!” And another urged a major Facebook-based grassroots campaign like the one that allegedly prompted Crist’s veto.

So the fate of Johnston’s bill is very much up in the air as debate on it begins later this week. Tensions are high and in some quarters at least, tempers seem frayed. Race to the Top provides reformers of the Obama-Duncan stripe with momentum. Crist’s veto provides some counter-momentum.

And what to make of the Denver school board? I’ll let this little e-mail exchange yesterday among three board members speak for itself.

Angered by fellow board member Jeanne Kaplan’s insistence on continuing to belabor the pension refinance issue, Theresa Peña wrote her – and copied other board members and senior district staff:

“Tonight we have very important presentations on math and ELA and both will be shorter because you have insisted on another public opportunity to play gotcha with our superintendent and his team.  I’m extremely disappointed that our Board has not been discussing relevant issues that we are elected and entrusted to discuss:  the Denver Plan, curriculum, ELA are three important ones.  I will become much more public with my displeasure if you keep this up.”

Andrea Merida jumped to Kaplan’s defense:

“The insider meetings conducted outside of public scrutiny are coming to a screeching halt right now.  Transparency is what the public wants, and if it’s the last thing I do, they will get it.  You can spin all you want about agendas, and even continue with your personal attacks in the media, but the real agenda here is the public’s right to know how their tax dollars are being spent… As the former Board president, and as the de facto current president, I suppose there is much for you to hide, so I suppose this explains your posturing.”

And things only got worse at last night’s board work session. Little wonder that public education remains stuck in the muck and mire.

As long ago as 1985 I wrote a policy paper for Irv Moskowitz, then in the Colorado Department of Education, making the same point.  We definitely need to find ways to allow teachers to move upward in their profession without having them leave teaching for administration.  Having highly skilled teachers take on new mentoring responsibilities can revitalize their professional life and, if done well, can improve teaching throughout the system.

My concern is the means that will be used to identify these outstanding teachers.  State Sen. Mike Johnston speaks of multiple measures, but in fact Colorado has only one measure, the CSAP growth model.  Reliance on this single battery of tests to determine the trajectory of teacher and principal careers increases the ways in which these tests can further distort the system.

First, teachers would have even more reason than ever to teach to the test rather than to educate students.  The hyper-focus on the specific reading, writing, math and science skills and knowledge tested by the exams to the exclusion of other valuable dimensions of those disciplines will accelerate. In addition, the marginalizing of social studies, the arts and the social and emotional skills that all reformers claim to value will be exacerbated.

Second, the power struggles that already exist within most faculties to determine which students are placed with which teachers will intensify to the detriment of collegiality.  Demands that all classes be perfectly matched cannot be met without removing all discretion from schools and even if the outcome is accomplished it is unlikely to be in the best interests of anyone.

Classrooms are communities of learners in which personality, peer influences, and chemistry play as much of a role in student learning as demographics.  Schools need to be able to shape these classrooms without worrying about distorting the outcomes of the teacher compensation system.

Third, instances of outright cheating, which have already been documented in high stakes testing around the country, will undoubtedly come home to Colorado.

I absolutely support the creation of more robust, nuanced measures of student learning and teacher effectiveness so that a new system does not have to rely exclusively on CSAP growth measures.  Unfortunately, every such system that has ever been proposed or developed that is able to meet reliability and validity concerns without being a standardized test is time consuming and expensive.

Even before the current budget crisis Colorado schools were underfunded and there is no reason to assume that this will change in the foreseeable future.  Until the underlying school funding system is overhauled and placed on strong fiscal footing I don’t see how we can commit to either a new teacher compensation system or to the development of high quality student and teacher assessment systems needed to undergird it.  We just don’t have the money to do the job right.

Trying to do it on the cheap with the information system we have will lead to all three outcomes described above as well as other unintended consequences that we cannot yet imagine.

We have three challenges in improving the quality of teaching.  The first is finding fair ways to remove the relatively small number of incompetent teachers who have managed to acquire tenure.  The second is finding effective ways to continually improve the teaching skills of all current teachers who wish to remain in the system.  And the third is creating a profession that is attractive to the best and brightest.

The last two are system-changing but also expensive and therefore currently unattainable.  My recommendation is that legislators work closely with unions to find new ways to address the first issue that are doable within our current fiscal constraints.  That will make a difference we can all be proud of.

I’m all for changing the whole system.  But not when we don’t have the means to do it right.

Rona Wilensky was the founding principal of New Vista High School, a small, innovative public school of choice in Boulder Valley School District.  She retired from that position last June.  This year she is a Resident Fellow at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago Illinois.

The irony is that my anger, frustration and disappointment with the evaluation process is exactly the situation we are asking our teachers to enter with the RttT plan under consideration by the legislature.

Just as Colorado’s fate in the RttT competition suffered from wildly divergent and poorly defined views on what a quality application looks like, we are asking teachers to accept an evaluation system that is based on a nebulous understanding of what quality teaching looks like.  And just like those of us who are frustrated with our outcome hinging on the wildly divergent views of our reviewers, teachers in the new evaluation scheme will be frustrated with evaluations, pay, and employment decisions that depend on the wildly divergent views of principals.

This boils down to a question of what is fair and reasonable.  Is it fair and reasonable to expect the RttT reviewers to grade proposals consistently, to expect different people to award  the similar scores to a proposal?  Is it fair and reasonable for a teacher to expect different supervisors to give the same evaluation ratings?

The bottom line is no, it is not fair and reasonable to expect absolute consistency. As I say to my six year old daily, “Life is not fair” nor is it reasonable.  The reality is we all have bosses whose evaluations of our performance (and subsequent decisions about our pay and employment) can be wildly divergent based on nebulous, poorly defined views of quality.

The more important question is what is the price we pay as taxpayers for making teachers accept the frustrating and nebulous world in which many of us already live?  We can see some of that price in the public doubt about whether to go for round 2 of the RttT.  I, and I think others, asked themselves, “Is it worth it?” when our application may be judged capriciously in Washington.

We should expect teachers to make the same calculation: Is it worth it to work in schools when evaluation, pay and employment are not judged consistently?

I think the end result will be teachers who are less attached and committed to working in our schools.  We will see higher turnover with the largest problems at high poverty schools.

And this will raise a new question for taxpayers:  Will we make all of our schools places where it is worth it for teachers to come back year after year when employment security is no longer a factor?  Who will own the problem of low-performing schools when less of the responsibility can (fairly or unfairly) rest on the shoulders of teachers?

Ultimately, more responsibility will rest on the communities’ shoulders, which raises the real question: Are we ready to carry that weight?

Factors other than an individual teacher’s efforts affect student performance in any given year. These include the efforts of other teachers involved with a student, the extent of support the student receives outside of school in completing homework and learning the material (tutoring, parental help, and the like), and other family and societal factors that might influence student achievement.

Is it “fair” to judge the effectiveness of a teacher based on factors outside of their control? A specific example is student attendance. If I teach in a class where 30% of the students attend on an irregular basis, should I be evaluated on their growth? How do we take factors beyond a teacher’s control, skipping, for the moment, just what is and is not in a teacher’s control, into consideration if we are to use student performance in teacher evaluations?

I think one of the strengths of the draft is that principals are also evaluated on the growth of students (65%) as well as being evaluated on the quality of teachers in the school building. This allows for whole-school approaches to problems that have been traditionally not addressed or left to individual teachers. By evaluating principals in this manner, I think the concern over what is in the control of a school versus an individual teacher’s control is addressed. But what about those factors outside of a school’s purview?