Education Week - April 5, 2017 - 22

COMMENTARY

We Must Not Abandon Teacher Evaluation

W
By Scott Laband

hen Gov. Bill Ritter signed Colorado's teacher-evaluation framework into law in 2010, he set in
motion a powerful transformation of the state's education system. By passing Senate Bill 10191 with bipartisan support, the
state led the nation in forging a
new path forward for tenure and evaluation reform.
As is the case with all revolutions, we understand it will take
time to sort out the full impact. But we also know that Colorado's law immediately wiped out an arcane and ineffective
evaluation and tenure system, which has governed most of the
nation's schools for more than 50 years.
The 2010 law requires districts to reimagine their talentmanagement and educator-support systems by requiring annual performance evaluations, ensuring tenure is earned and
not the guarantee of lifetime employment, and ending both
seniority-based layoffs and the forced placement of teachers
into schools where they neither want to be nor fit well. This has
prompted profound change in districts and schools across the
state and provides a useful model for states across the country
that are also in the early phases of implementing similar policies.
From the beginning, the main objective of teacher-quality
laws was to open a policy window around evaluation and tenure to promote local innovation and improve human-capital
practices. In response, we are seeing tremendous examples of
local ownership and buy-in, as leaders adapt and modify their
evaluation systems to suit local needs.
Look no further than Durango, a small, rural district of
roughly 4,700 students on Colorado's Western Slope, for an example. It is committed to thoughtful implementation of these
new talent-management practices and is one of the state's fastest-improving school districts, with some of the state's highest
student-growth scores.
"Our evaluation system is generating far deeper conversations with teachers than we ever had before. We are evolving

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the role of principal from building manager to instructional
leader," Durango Superintendent Dan Snowberger recently
shared with me. "This is a shift that takes time, support, and
training so that we customize professional development and
feedback to ensure that improvement is not only possible but
likely."
Critics will point out that relatively few teachers have been
rated ineffective under new evaluation systems. However, focusing solely on this fact and declaring the whole enterprise a
failed experiment is a classic case of losing sight of the forest
by getting lost in the trees. Any endeavor as complex as transforming the talent-management system is going to encounter bumps in the road. We shouldn't overlook the significant,
positive changes that evaluation laws across the country have
created.
Talk to teachers, principals, and superintendents across Colorado and you'll hear that educators now feel they're receiving

Why I'm Worried About the
Future of Charter Schools

By Greg Richmond

ver the last few weeks,
I've been asked repeatedly about U.S. Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos. Friends
and neighbors who
know that my work involves charter schools
have said, "You must be happy." But the
truth is, I am worried about the future of
charter schools.
I have little doubt that there will be more
schools with the word "charter" in their
names in the years ahead. Yet I have serious concerns about whether these schools
will be faithful to the principles upon which
the charter school philosophy is built: providing parents with the ability to choose a
good school for their child, giving educators more freedom to innovate, and holding
schools accountable for student learning.
When all three of these principles-choice,
autonomy, and accountability-are practiced in concert, we have seen that charter
schools can change lives.

Over the years, these principles have created odd bedfellows. In state legislatures,
the loudest champions of charter schools
are often political conservatives who are
attracted to the concepts of choice, competition, and deregulation. But in many communities, the charter school movement is
led by liberal social-justice advocates who
see an opportunity to help millions of lowincome black and brown students get a
quality education that the traditional system has failed to provide for generations.
For the last 25 years, in what may be the
last outpost of bipartisanship in our country, these odd bedfellows worked together
to create the nearly 7,000 charter schools
that are serving more than 3 million children, according to estimates from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
But now that coalition is splintering.
Tensions simmered for a few years before
coming to full boil last spring. Many liberals attending the 2016 NewSchools Summit celebrated the conference's elevation
of diversity, with teacher-blogger Marilyn
Rhames noting that it "echoed sentiments
of the Black Lives Matter movement."

22 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 5, 2017 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

frequent, meaningful feedback about their performance. The
kind of feedback they can use to retool their practice and get
better. Linda Barker, the former director of the Colorado Education Association's Center for Advocacy and Professional Practice, agrees the system for evaluating educators has changed
for the better: "Now it's really about teaching and learning systems that support continuous improvement, both for teachers
and principals, but also for the profession."
Contrast that with the old system, under which tenured
teachers were rarely evaluated, and when they were, it was
often in a superficial, drive-by manner. Yet the traditional opponents to these types of common-sense reforms haven't stopped
fighting against the policy.
It's also critical to remember that the full implementation
of evaluation laws across the nation has been slowed by a
number of external factors. Since most bills were signed into
law, there have been well-funded legal attacks and multiple

The conservative-leaning Thomas B.
Fordham Institute's Robert Pondiscio,
however, saw it differently. In a blog post,
he warned that the left was trying to "push
conservatives out of education reform," and
he proclaimed the collapse of the "informal
agreement" between liberals and conservatives in education reform. Pondiscio's
words sparked a summer of education reform bloggers on both sides of the debate
scolding each other for being insensitive
and jeopardizing the fate of reform.
Under a new administration, the gulf
continues to widen. For better or for worse,
Secretary DeVos has become the personification of the charter movement in the
eyes of the general public. Liberal charter
school supporters are terrified that charter
schools will now be associated with Donald
Trump, Betsy DeVos, privatization, and
for-profit companies. "God save us from our
friends," wrote Steven Zimmerman of the
Coalition of Community Charter Schools, in
New York, in a blog post lamenting DeVos'
"market based" reform agenda following
the election.
On the other hand, many conservative
charter school supporters (but not all) are
delighted. Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform has treated the Trump ascendency as an opportunity to push hard for
less oversight of charter schools. Since the
election, she has thrown her support behind
DeVos and accused other charter school ad-

vocates of being too regulatory. Other conservative advocates go even further, arguing
against virtually any form of charter school
accountability to anyone or anything other
than market demand. In their mind, failing
academic outcomes or gross mismanagement of public funds are not the business of
government and taxpayers.
This free-market approach to charter
schooling embraces the principles of choice
and autonomy while gutting accountability, but true supporters of charter schools
will not abide by this co-optation of what
it means to be a charter school. Those of us
who have seen generations of urban school
districts mismanage public funds and fail
to provide a quality education to children
will not support efforts to cast the same
plague on charter schools.
At the same time, we reject the burgeoning idea that charter schools would be better if forced to follow all the same rules as
traditional public schools. This idea has
led to efforts to infringe on charter school
autonomy, including the recent calls for
blanket regulations on discipline practices
in Washington, D.C., which true supporters
of charter schools will not allow. Those of us
who have seen the power of giving schools
flexibility will not stand by and watch charter schools stripped down to look no different from the traditional schools we sought
to replace with something better.
For charter schools to succeed, educa-

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Education Week - April 5, 2017

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