Listening to the panels and report, I was extremely pleased with the deep involvement of practioners into the work. Too often these kinds of studies lack that critical component. I did have one fundamental concern about the discussion, however, in that it seemed a bit focused on evaluation purely from the perspective of rating people, rather than from the goal of continuous improvement. In education, too often both with students and educators we seem content with documenting failure as a goal in itself. I think in well run private industry employee evaluation is very much geared to be a tool for growth of the individual and the enterprise. Yes, those educators who are totally failing and may be innately incompetent need to be either aided or directed out of the classroom, and the superstars need to be acknowledged and emulated. However, the vast majority of students have teachers at neither of these extremes, and we should really focus our evaluation efforts towards enabling the vast bulk of our teaching workforce to performance at their highest levels. They want to and our students need them to, so I hope all your evaluation work can eventually lead to the real goal- improved performance by educators, schools, and thus, students.
