{"id":2343,"date":"2010-08-26T13:47:29","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T17:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2343"},"modified":"2010-08-26T13:47:29","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T17:47:29","slug":"long-term-question-on-rttt-teacher-evaluations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2343","title":{"rendered":"Long-term question on RTTT: Teacher evaluations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy Rotherham repeats the important long-term questions<\/a> on RTTT–will there be fidelity in the long run, and will it help students?–important to keep in mind because the temptation over the next few weeks will be to rehash why Murkowski and McCollum should have beaten out Ohio and Hawaii. Uh, wait. Am I confusing punditry in two different arenas? <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Back to the long-term issues, especially the question of teacher evaluation. Several months ago, during the debates over proposed legislation in Florida and Colorado, there was some netherworld consensus that "50% or more" of evaluation must be tied to student outcomes. That always seemed to me to be a form of reform machismo or reform theater<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet even when bargained by willing unions, I've seen some very rigid weighting systems, including (and perhaps especially) here in Hillsborough County (Tampa). I've heard some complaints by teachers at the consequences of such a system, but I'm not sure what an alternative could be. It makes no sense to have a set percentage of evaluation come from student outcomes, but it is difficult to construct a system with a differentiated evaluation system that teachers in different situations would see as fair, wouldn't have some perverse incentives, and wouldn't be difficult to administer (or for unions to check for violations of contracts).<\/p>\n

If you think this is a trivial concern, and you also loved TNTP's The Widget Effect<\/em><\/a>, I have one question: do you support a rigid evaluation system? If you don't like step-and-lane pay systems, why do you think that we can have a single weighting system for evaluation when some subjects have tests and others don't, some students have one teacher and others don't, some students have extra services and others don't?<\/p>\n

Thus, my guess at the moment is that the key issue regarding teacher evaluation will be the politics of differentiated evaluation within<\/em> teaching. Maybe not today or this year or the next few years, but at some point: a widgetized evaluation system is no better and in many ways much worse than a widgetized salary system.<\/p>\n

It is important to get this right and think carefully about this because of the connections between evaluation and evolving performance-pay discussions. As I've written before, the best reason to have something like performance pay is for the politics of the public sphere: I am skeptical that performance pay does anything for student achievement in the long run, but if the experience of taxpayers is that salary is not on a rigid schedule, keeping salaries on rigid schedules may undermine support for public education. <\/p>\n

But there's the converse, too: you can't have a performance-pay system that fails a smell test for fairness, and that's for people who have different<\/em> definitions of fairness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…a widgetized evaluation system is no better and in many ways much worse than a widgetized salary system…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-BN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2348,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}