What can work in teacher evaluation: Lessons from Boys in the Boat

Daniel James Brown’s 2013 bestseller, The Boys in the Boat, illustrates four powerful ideas that ought to inform our teacher evaluation systems.

You would think by now both educators and policy makers would have learned a lesson or two about what does not work in teacher evaluation. In recent years, both the federal government and the Gates Foundation have put results-oriented teacher evaluation at the front and center of the school reform movement. However, as Kevin Close and Audrey Amrein-Beadsley describe in their article, using students’ scores on standardized achievement tests to assess teaching effectiveness has proven to be quite problematic. Not only are the statistics behind value-added models unreliable and biased but administrators are “tempted” to align their assessment of teachers’ classroom practice to the VAM scores they’ve already received.