How should we evaluate teachers?

With our office in downtown Chicago, members of the Century staff are becoming used to the drifts of red-shirted teachers moving about the streets, some with placards, some with their families, most looking energized and purposeful—though that may well change if this strike continues. On the fourth day of the strike, the power play between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis is wearing thin on many Chicagoans as they weave their way around rallies to delayed and rerouted buses and trains.

Lewis says that 43 issues are keeping the strike unresolved; the school board claims that only two issues remain. One is the protocol for rehiring teachers who have been laid off. The knottier one is teacher evaluation. In a panel discussion on PBS affiliate WTTW’s show Chicago Tonight, Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, notes that the current evaluation system is 40 years old—and adds that it doesn’t work. According to data on teachers’ evaluations from 1997, says Knowles, 99.7 percent of the teachers in the Chicago Public Schools were rated “satisfactory or distinguished.” 

How can almost all of a district’s teachers fall into this category? How do we build a system that improves teacher quality? The controversial proposal would rate teachers based on three factors: principals’ observations, student test scores and student feedback. (Some peer observation is also included.) The grating point with teachers is the word “tests,” tests that would evaluate student growth.