Tim Daly, a friend with whom I usually and enthusiastically agree, recently published a three-part series autopsying the teacher-evaluation reforms of the 2010’s. In Tim’s view, the ed-reform community foisted this idea on educators, and the overreach doomed the project to failure, with lasting consequences.
As Tennessee’s Education Commissioner during the Race to the Top era, I had a front-seat view—maybe even a driver’s-seat view—of this large-scale reform. And much as I love most of Tim’s writing, his piece is wrong and wrong-headed for a few fairly glaring reasons.
Teacher evaluation reform, in his view and that of a few others, gets characterized as a crazy new idea that emerged from the depths of technocratic hell in 2009. But teacher evaluations have long existed—and they have long been an absolute joke. There were formal teacher evaluation protocols enshrined in law in most states, and these protocols resulted in zero differentiation and in extraordinarily limited professional development based on observations and feedback. It’s telling that critics claim that reformers “implemented” teacher evaluation. It already existed! It persists to this day! But it was—and remains—so laughably inadequate that when we talk about “teacher evaluation,” as Tim does, we are talking about the efforts to reform it rather than the slap-dash versions of it that are currently happening at a school near you.
Second—and probably most importantly—the reason teacher-evaluation reform “failed” in most places is because the states and districts didn’t actually implement it. It is a consistent theme in public education in this country: We half-implement a worthy initiative, fail to see it through, get limited results, and then declare that it didn’t work. So let’s get real about what actually happened. Most states that passed evaluation overhauls—either through Race to the Top or on their own—began the implementation process, then ran headfirst into opposition, tucked tail, beat a hasty retreat through a series of extended “pilot years” in which evaluation wouldn’t count, and then stopped altogether. The Race to the Top states were obligated to implement a set of reforms including teacher evaluation as a condition of getting their large-scale grants. But were Race to the Top states paid out by the Obama Administration despite not actually doing the Race to the Top work? Oh yes. Oh yes, indeed, they were.
One thing worth noting here. In Tennessee, by charging forward and implementing a teacher evaluation program that “counted” right out of the gate, teacher support for the system grew each year. Vanderbilt administered annual statewide teacher surveys, and as teachers became more familiar with the system and saw the benefits (e.g., actual feedback that helped them get better, plus stronger student achievement), the system polled better each year. In D.C., meanwhile, teachers increasingly opted into the IMPACT system. It’s a canard to say that teachers didn’t like the evaluation system that was never implemented in most states. Like most changes, you have to actually implement it, get feedback, and then improve it if you want educators to at least tolerate it. In Tennessee, that is what happened.
Which brings me to my final point. Providing structured feedback to teachers and ensuring that student growth was part of their formal evaluation led to student gains. In the places that went all-in on implementation—i.e., Tennessee and Washington D.C.—scores went up massively across most grades and subjects. It’s frustrating to see Tim and others say that implementation failed because the efforts didn’t gain popularity, or identify the consequences as impediments to other teacher-focused policy changes. If the goal is improved student-outcomes, then the reforms, when implemented, worked. And the consequence of not implementing them is that scores in most states, even pre-pandemic, had flatlined.
On a personal note, I find it somewhat maddening to watch ed-reform leaders assume the “adult in the room” posture in the face of enduring bad faith opposition to policy initiatives. As Andy Rotherham recently wrote with righteous anger, things actually improved in our schools and for our kids until we stopped doing the hard things! You want to apologize for teacher evaluation reform not achieving its stated ends? Well, I want an apology from the architects of the previous system—the one in which, in Tennessee, tenured teachers (i.e., everyone who hung around a few years) were evaluated twice every ten years, had almost no classroom observations, were not responsible for student performance, and were virtually guaranteed a high rating.
Over time, education reform became bastardized into a series of pat policy initiatives (e.g., charter school expansion, test-based accountability, closing low performing schools, and alternative certification programs). At its heart, though, “reform” was about one fundamental truth: the way we were doing things in schools was not working for most low-income students and it needed to change. That is still true today. And the burden of proof should not fall on the people doing their utmost to change the system, but rather on the people keeping an inequitable and ineffective system the same.
