Pros and Cons of Teacher Evaluations

With a decade's-old battle still raging over student assessments such as those required by NCLB (No Child Left Behind), we are now turning our national attention to how we're assessing teachers. Tempers flare on all sides of both, but I think that's because there's an unstated underlying question we're not facing: what are we really trying to achieve in education?

If you consider assessment to be quantifying how well stated goals are being achieved, perhaps the better conversation would be over just what those goals should be in the first place. As many of today's educational thinkers point out, our current public system was developed to train workers for industrial jobs. Since we've evolved as a society since then, we need to re-think our goals - especially in light of the increasing numbers of school drop-outs and youth violence.

It seems so clear to me that we've lost our way, in part because we've been "racing to the top" so hard and fast that we haven't taken the time to consider what we were doing or where we were going. As a result, we've neglected the importance of those human qualities that simply can't be measured by bubble testing.

We've come to want things to be so neat and tidy, haven't we? Rather Dr. Spock-like, with our doors that slide open and close almost silently so that we can tend to the "important business", that controlled intellectual activity that feels so safe. Unfortunately, it's that less easily controlled business of the heart that makes life worth living, and if we don't reinsert that into education we'll just continue heading down.

So how should we redefine our educational goals? I vote that we enter into this conversation together ... with people on all sides of the table joining in. It will probably feel like herding cats, but it's the only way we'll reach a consensus that most can live with.

Once we've determined what our shared goals are, THEN we can determine what should be assessed and how - and my guess is that our methods won't even resemble cookie cutter thinking.