Will the California Teachers Association (CTA) permit real evaluations of teachers? My guess is NO.

I found this article in Voice of San Diego. Reporter Alpert tracked down some great links and included them in the piece:

How Teachers Are Like Quarterbacks
EMILY ALPERT
January 22, 2009

I'm so glad I finally have an excuse to blog about this fascinating piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about teacher hiring and quality. The story I wrote yesterday about teacher evaluation on San Diego Unified touches on some of the larger points about the teaching workforce and how quality teachers are identified.

...He starts off by illustrating how difficult it is for professional football scouts to determine which college quarterbacks will make good pros...

"This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching."

And if you really want to go deeper, here is more analysis by two brothers, one an education expert, the other a professional football coach, on Eduwonk -- a blog written by Andrew Rotherham of Education Sector. (His co-director Thomas Toch had some interesting comments in my story and an analysis of his own.)






Here is San Diego Education Report's
SUGGESTED TEACHER EVALUATION PLAN:

Teachers would be evaluated through observations by experienced teachers from other school districts (to limit the role of politics). The evaluators wouldn't even know beforehand whom they're going to evaluate.

New teachers would accompany and assist the evaluators because observing and assessing is a great way to learn.

There would be a standard list of traits to look for, and every teacher would be given a score which would be based on:
I. the observations described above;
II. students' test scores;
III. standardized tests taken by the teachers themselves;
IV. interview of teacher.

The tests given to teachers would be used to determine (a) which teachers need training; and (b) which teachers can do the training.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE FINAL SCORES?

1. Average teachers would stay in the standard teaching job, but they would have the possibility of improving their scores and rising to master teacher level.

2. Every classroom would have one standard teacher, while the more effective master teachers would be given responsibility for several classrooms, teaching part time in each of these classrooms, and taking responsibility for guiding and educating the standard teachers.

3. The more effective teachers should be paid two to three times what the regular teachers are paid in order to attract really smart people--people who could have been doctors or physicists.