Thinking back to your school days, it is easy to pick out who your “good” teachers were and who your “bad” teachers were. What criteria do you use to decide who the “good” and “bad” were? Do you base your evaluations on how you performed on standardized tests that you took while you were under the tutelage of those teachers? Probably not. There is a very intricate mix of factors that make up that evaluation, like how much fun you had in class, or how approachable your teacher was, or even how the teacher chose to set up his or her classroom.

We have long wanted to be able to evaluate teachers in the same way most jobs can be evaluated: by output. A common logic goes as follows: a teacher’s job is to make our students learn – therefore, by measuring how much students learn, we can judge the effectiveness of the teacher. This is not entirely wrong, but is, in my opinion, too narrow-minded. We cannot evaluate everything that a student learns in a classroom. It is just as important for little Johnny to learn how to work in a team as it is for him to learn his times tables, but in the end we only choose the easier metric to give him and his teacher a “grade”: his performance on multiplication tests. This article from the Huffington Post illustrates that measuring schools like businesses leads to some backwards ideas. The article discusses a report that looks at the “efficiency” of schools as though they were businesses, and finds that some possible ways of making schools more efficient would be to pay teachers less or increase class sizes (I hope most people would agree that these two approaches can be detrimental to student and teacher success). The authors of the report say that these are NOT things that should be taken literally, but that “You have to explore within a country’s context what are you doing or what are you not doing that allows or does not allow you to recruit the highest-quality teachers or train them effectively.”

Some states have adopted teacher evaluations that are more varied than simply relying on tests, but, according to this article in The New York Times, when teachers are found to be “effective” under these new evaluations despite low student test scores, the arguably fairer system is criticized. From the article: “I think we need to get away from this notion that tests are an unfair tool. I think this shows that they’re the only tool that allows us to make comparisons.” (A quote from Jenny Sedlis, executive director of StudentsFirstNY.) Just because something is easier to make comparisons with, however, does not mean that the comparisons are accurate. The New York system for evaluating teachers is based mostly on classroom observation and similar metrics. This Huffington Post article from 2012 argues for more comprehensive evaluations of teachers, based on how professional athletes are evaluated, with one interesting piece added: student observations. After all, students watch their teachers every day, and we know they have opinions about them. Why not incorporate these into evaluations? When I was in classrooms, I took my student feedback very seriously. Although it was not a part of my final evaluations in teacher’s college, I tended to value comments from my students nearly as much as those from my associate teachers. A company located in Boston, Panorama Education, aims to take these comments and turn them into statistically significant feedback for teachers and schools. And the best part? Their product is open-source and free for any school system to use, with proven results.

With all the focus recently on teacher performance (particularly due to the California court case regarding teacher tenure), I hope that administrators can continue to reform teacher evaluations to be fair for everyone without relying on test scores that are not actually reflective of students’ learning or teachers’ teaching.