Chapter $15$ Practice Your Skills: Case for Critical Analysis

Grading the Teachers

Cousins Lynn Decker, Trish Harper, and Alice Warner looked forward to meeting up during the Christmas holidays to compare notes on the results of midyear teacher evaluations.

All were public school teachers in districts scattered over the state. In the pressured search for new levels of teacher accountability demanded by legislators, the state department of education had joined $16$ other states in implementing a new teacher evaluation system. The goal was to hold teachers accountable for student learning progress in the classroom. Under the guidance of the National Council for Teacher Quality, criteria varied by state, but in most cases, $40$ percent of each teacher's accountability score was based on the principal's evaluation and ranking based on personal observation, $30$ percent was based on personal observation by a master teacher from outside the district, and the other $30$ percent was based