Quote Originally Posted by JohnAd View Post
When I as a school district administrator, I was assigned the task of becoming an expert on teacher evaluation so I could participate in a leadership role in redesigning our teacher evaluation system. I attended a national conference on teacher evaluation, and a presenter talked about this exact thing during a presentation on the different ways of determining which teachers were competent and which teachers weren't. A common attitude you hear in school districts is that everyone in a school knows who the good teachers are and who the bad teachers are, so why can't we find a simple way to measure and report it?

According to the presenter, studies have conclusively shown that the "everyone knows it" method is by far the LEAST accurate. Some of the teachers with the best reputations are among the worst, and vice versa. People develop reputations in a lot of ways, but if you actually go into the classroom and see them at work, if you look carefully at the results in student achievement, you may find out that those reputations do not hold up.
Teachers are like any other bureaucracy now, there is more spin on student outcome that has very little to do with student outcome and everything to do with metrics that can be presented.
Yet we have universities across the USA teaching basic skills to folks with high school diplomas from schools that have lots of metrics to justify teacher and staff raises.