The American Idol Model of Professional Evaluation

Have you ever wanted to evaluate teachers or principals or superintendents? Want to know what it takes to do so? Here’s what you need to qualify by state law in Texas.

To evaluate a teacher, you must first be one. That means completing a college degree. To become an elementary teacher you will major in elementary education. To become a secondary teacher you will have to major in a teachable subject like math, history, biology or the like. After you complete your subject area major you must take education courses and complete student teaching. It takes almost a full year longer to become an elementary or secondary teacher than it does any other major. Once you have finished college you must pass two state competency standardized tests to become certified to teach. Once you are certified to teach you get a job. (I have ranted before on the idiocy of the state requirements to become a teacher, and shall not vent on that topic again here. Might want to check an earlier post entitled “Certification”)

After you have taught for five years you can get a masters degree in either administration or supervision. (Some folks work on this while they are in their first few years of teaching, but those are very demanding years, so many wait until much later. I waited 10 years.) While you are at it, you must also get another certificate as an administrator. So yes, a master’s degree in education requires more course work than other masters. Once you complete your masters you must pass another state competency standardized test to become certified to be an administrator. Once you have done that, you must take training in the state process of evaluating teachers and pass the test at the end, and you must take training in instructional leadership and pass the test at the end. At that point, you are certified and trained to evaluate teachers. And only then. Most administrators will tell you that even once you have your master’s degree and are trained and certified it takes several years of actually doing teacher evaluations to get good at it.

OK, so to evaluate teachers legally in Texas you must be degreed and certified to teach, must have taught, must get a masters degree, must become certified to be an administrator and must get training in teacher evaluation and instructional leadership. The qualifications, education, time and money invested in higher education and educational training to legally evaluate teachers is pretty steep. Bill Gates is not qualified. Nor is the legislature (who made these rules in the first place), nor are governors, nor are parents, mayors, good ole boys, or school board members. But once you have all those credentials and have a job and have several years experience working with teachers on a daily basis, you are qualified and can legally say this teacher is a keeper and this teacher is not.

Evaluating teachers is tough work. Some teachers teach disabled kids for whom learning how to use a spoon or go the bathroom is a major accomplishment. Some teachers teach poor kids who come from a home environment that is actually hostile to learning. Some teachers teach the really bright kids of Tiger Moms or Bear Moms and compete to get great grades. Almost all teachers show up and do the best job they can each day. They take roll, enforce dress codes, do duties, stand in the hallway, write lesson plans, master Xerox machines, iPads, grading software, attendance software, and interact with a 100 kids or more each day and are expected to teach. Teachers are held accountable for all those things. No untrained person could. No untrained person can evaluate them. Surely, there is no way to use a questionable standardized test score administered once a year to measure them. That’s like applying the mortality rate to oncologists and plastic surgeons. And surely, no lay person can assess them.

Want to evaluate administrators? First, you have to do all the above to get to the point you can evaluate teachers. Then it is back to school to get post masters hours. Then you must pass another state test to get a superintendent's certificate. Then you must get trained in one of several administrator assessment models. I am trained in three and am certified to be a trainer for all three. I have done all the above and am certified to evaluate teachers and administrators. Thank God I'm retired!  If you have not done all this, it is illegal for you evaluate administrators.

Administrators not only run herd on kids, they run herd on teachers and paraprofessionals. They are responsible for custodians and cafeterias and budgets and accountability and PTO and keeping the supe happy and out of the frying pan. They are responsible for so much more than just the instruction in their buildings and none of them would ever want to protect an incompetent teacher. It is just not worth it given all the damage that can be done. They will also go to the wall for teachers to protect them from some lay person's perceived malfeasance. That’s what good administrators do, support teaching.

Don’t get me started on superintendents. They are all crazy. The worst of them are manipulative, ambitious, political animals more prone to pander to American Idol than good instruction. The best of them are grounded in ethics, kids, teaching and support. Funny that we allow only school boards to evaluate these folks and those board members are really not required to have much training at all. Many board members have no education beyond high school.  School boards cannot legally evaluate teachers or administrators, but are legally required to evaluate superintendents. Hence the frequent clash between boards and supes, and hence the annual average tenure rate of 2.5 years for superintendents in Texas

I recognize that teachers and administrators are evaluated all over town in coffee shops, barber shops, church and back yards. I also know that the kind of perception held by parents and others is always defensive for their loved ones enrolled in school. I have always found it amazing that many of the teachers with the highest expectations and highest standards for their kids are the ones least popular with the public. Sometimes the teachers kids like the most are teaching the least. Sometimes it is the other way around. Teaching is a venture in changing the future and one never really knows how powerful a teacher is for years yet to come. (I am still getting emails from kids I taught 30 years ago thanking me for the influence in their lives. Geeze, I thought they hated my class.)

Teaching and administrating are professions practiced by professionals and evaluated by professionals. If you do not have the credentials you are not qualified to judge. We should never approve contracts or move teachers or administrators around based on the phone calls from the lay public or a school board perception. If you are not a pro, get out of the business of passing judgment or evaluating teachers or administrators. This is public education delivered and evaluated by pros.

This is not American Idol.