How Should Teachers Be Evaluated?

In nearly 40 years of teaching in various institutions I have never encountered a teacher who enjoyed being evaluated. I have been both a teacher under evaluation and an evaluator of other teachers. As a teacher I have never received an evaluation less than above average and in the last half of my career my evaluations were consistently excellent, yet I still cannot say that I approve of teacher evaluations. In theory the purpose of evaluating teachers is to improve education. In practice I have never seen evidence of this cause and effect, but I have witnessed plenty of evidence to the contrary. Education is a very complicated business and there is no simple, efficient and effective way of determining how one teacher’s performance can affect outcomes. Assessing student outcomes in order to evaluate teachers is simply unfair and counter-productive--it leads to “teaching for the test,” the marginalization of weaker student cohorts and rests on two false assumption: 1) that the