Difficulty of Establishing a Good Teacher Evaluation System 31

It is generally acknowledged that establishing and implementing a good teacher evaluation system is a difficult task. Danielson (2000) pointed out that a good system of teacher evaluation must answer four questions: How good is good enough? Good enough at what? How do we know? Who should decide? If these questions were asked in a typical manufacturing enterprise, answers might be much easier to provide, as there would be clear standards and criteria at hand to measure the process and products. However, in the field of education, such standards and criteria that are commonly accepted for the evaluation of teacher performance have often not been available. Sykes (1985) described teaching, like parenting, as a natural, spontaneous, organic human activity. As such, one’s teaching style depends largely on one’s

personality, as well as on tacit, idiosyncratic approaches to human relations. In addition, a number of studies have suggested that the cultural context of both students and teachers should be observed in classroom teaching so as to avoid possible cultural conflicts and in order to promote a pleasant class environment. This type of pedagogy is referred as culturally-sensitive pedagogy (Thomas, 1997), or culturally responsive, culturally respective, culturally-rooted, culturally relevant, and culturally appropriate (Nguyen et al., 2006). In any case, the primary ingredients for success usually are defined as knowing one’s subject matter and caring about children, around which technical embellishments can marginally matter. However, teaching is such an enormously complicated and philosophically multifaceted act that its full import has eluded the increasingly

Defining what is a good teaching is by no means an easy assignment. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2009) defines “highly qualified teachers” as those who must be fully licensed or certified by the state and must not have had any certification or licensure requirements waived on an emergency, temporary, or provisional basis.” In addition, teachers also must demonstrate subject matter competence (Title IX, Part A, Sec. 9101). However, the certification standards for highly qualified teachers have been lowered by statute and the final regulations allow teachers who have enrolled in

alternative-certification programs, not necessarily completing them, to be designated as highly qualified as well. Moreover, some states such as Texas, Florida and California have proposed standards that allow candidates who have not attended teacher preparation programs to be certified so long as they have a bachelor’s degree and pass a state test (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003). Obviously, teacher qualifications are being interpreted in a variety of ways throughout the country.

It is worth noting that the evaluation of teacher effectiveness can involve many different aspects of pedagogical practice. According to one research-based protocol, the Framework for Teaching (FFT), developed by Charlotte Danielson in 1996, teaching activity can be divided into 22 components and 76 smaller elements, which are clustered into four domains of teaching responsibility: planning and preparation, classroom

environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. Whether a so-called

outstanding teacher should be defined as excelling at all of these aspects to the exclusion of other pedagogical attributes does not admit simple and straightforward answers, especially given the enculturating nature of teaching.

Teacher evaluation is complex because it serves a variety of purposes. This further exacerbates the difficulty of establishing a sound evaluation system. During the past decade, constant efforts have been attempted to establish a better teacher evaluation system and, more diversified factors have been included to evaluate teacher performance for various purposes. For example, principals and other school personnel conduct

observations of teacher practice in order to make tenure and retention decisions. Teacher salary and pay decisions, conversely, are more based on their experience, degrees and some “value-added” scores produced from their student performance on state

assessments. Other promotions or professional development responsibilities may depend on some combination of personality, motivation, classroom performance, academic degrees and some external credential such as National Board Certification (Hill et al., 2012).

Could one solution be to construct a better teacher evaluation system by

incorporating multiple extensive indicators of teacher effectiveness? This plan seems to be not viable not only for technical reasons related to implementation. Among scholars it has been difficult to obtain consistent results regarding credible and reliable indicators of professional practice. The same inconsistency marking traditional measures of teacher effectiveness characterizes recent statistical studies. For instance, teacher experience and teacher test scores are asserted to be mostly consistently linked to student achievement in one study (Clotfelter, Ladd and Vigdor, 2007), while they were found to explain only a modest fraction of the variation in student outcomes in other studies (Kane, Rockoff and Staiger, 2008; Goldhaber and Brewer 1997; Hanushek 1996).

There could be other obstacles to establishing a good system of teacher

evaluation. For example, many principals and assistant principals have to face the time issue while trying to balance their work between completing teacher evaluations and other tasks such as managing their other day-to-day operations and handling many other issues with more immediate timelines (Danielson interview, 2013). Provide a second or a third issue as well, for example, opposition from teachers’ unions or the expenses

entailed in ramping up assessment at the cost of other potentially reforms that might lift student achievement more rapidly, such as new curricula or better professional

development.