Why Are Teacher Evaluations So Bad?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why teacher evaluation systems consistently produce unhelpful results and what it would take to do better.
Key Takeaways
- Evaluators often lack expertise - Principals evaluating subjects they've never taught lack the knowledge to give useful feedback
- The system rewards compliance - Evaluations tend to check boxes rather than improve instruction
- Better evaluation requires better preparation - Administrators need deeper instructional knowledge and more time in classrooms to evaluate well
Transcript
Why are so many teacher evaluations so bad?
I think this is a pretty common experience among educators.
They feel like your evaluation is not really written for you, about you, to help you.
It's maybe even written for somebody else and copy and pasted.
There are all these quality problems with evaluations, and yet the evaluation process is also very ineffective at removing underperforming teachers like Overwhelmingly, teachers are rated satisfactory even when they're not.
So why do we have this process and why is it so bad at what it does?
I think a big problem is scope.
As an administrator, you have probably 30 or more people to evaluate and not all of those people are doing the same job, right?
They're teaching different subjects, different grade levels.
And from an expertise perspective, it is very difficult to have actually personally taught very many of the subjects that the teachers you evaluate are teaching.
It's pretty much impossible.
to cover more than a handful.
So that means people are going to be evaluated on their work by someone who has not done that particular job.
I think it's very strange in this profession that we don't have people evaluated on the specific curriculum they're teaching, right?
It's not even like there's a very clear benchmark for what the job should look like in that particular role.
Like if you're a band director, Your job is very, very different from the job of a math teacher.
And yet you probably have the same process, the same forms, the same evaluation criteria and the same evaluator.
And that just doesn't make a ton of sense.
So I want to know what you think about opportunities to improve this system.
Would it be better to be evaluated by students, by peers, by a central office administrator who specializes in your subject area?
what to you would be the best case scenario?
Because I can see problems with all of those.
And yet I also think that we could probably be doing better than we are right now where everybody pretty much gets marked satisfactory and it's not a super helpful process.
And yet it's a ton of work for administrators.
This is something I help people with and they are buried in paperwork.
So let me know what you think would make teacher evaluation more effective.