In the NYT Michael Winerip praises teacher peer review in Montgomery County, Maryland. In The Washington Post Michael Chandler takes a look at the state of Maryland’s struggle to design a teacher evaluation system as part of its Race to the Top plan. Sounds easy. Why doesn’t the state just copy Montgomery County?
Short answer: Because Winerip puts the glossiest spin on the numbers that you can. Peer review is fine insofar as it goes but it’s not a comprehensive solution. Here are the numbers across several districts. What they show, overall, and what union leaders and district officials say (when not doing PR) is that peer review is pretty good at addressing observably poor teaching. Teachers who can’t manage a classroom, organize a lesson, work through material sequentially, engage with the material themselves, or worse can’t regularly get to school on time or in a condition to teach. These are, of course, a minority of teachers but when you’re talking about 3 million and the scale of hiring in larger districts these are all real issues. And that’s reflected in the data on peer review.
But what peer review doesn’t get at is the real problem the field faces: Unobservable poor instruction. And that’s why districts and states across the country are trying to come up with better measures of effective teaching and why – when used responsibly – test scores can tell you something, too, and are one necessary ingredient in the mix. Realistically these news measures will have problems and there will be failure along the way. Just for example, it’s worth questioning whether statewide systems are really the way to go and where the best places to invest resources and energy are – in tools or training? But the bottom line is that we need this learning process and we need new methods because even in places like Montgomery County the overall averages obscure some very real problems – problems that are even more acute for students in many other places. There are a lot of reasons for our poor school outcomes today, but this is one of them.