Probably nowhere is the impartiality of a rubric quite as evident as when it comes to teacher evaluations. Teacher evaluations are about as equitable as a Baptist Sermon - and probably just as dangerous. A Baptist sermon promises hell, but at least provides a way to avoid it; in the teacher evaluation, it depends upon the 'preacher'.

I would never have thought this to be the case - and it wasn't really until school districts went to the rubric - that two dumbasses could wreck a career. But that's just what happened to me, and it's happened to several other people as well. Incompetent administrators come in, trained on the rubric and use it gradeteachers.

The problem is: An evaluation is only as good as the person doing the evaluation. That is precisely why I spent so much time early in the series saying it starts at the top. If you live in a bad school district - you have a shitty superintendent, shitty principals, and a shitty school board. The people who will tell you different are probably the people in those positions of power.

Good teaching does not look the same every day. It does not use the same methods every day. And there are days it will look boring. A in-depth, very involved dive into law consists of some class periods of studying just the facts of what a law is. Then you must learn the history and practice. After you know these things, you can apply. It will look different each day. Some days, the teacher will have to give lectures, have students write notes, read or watch cases and examples, and do some role play. The teacher - the same person doing all the instruction - would be evaluated differently for each part of the assignment, as based upon 'the rubric'. They'd be considered minimally effective on the note-taking day, but highly effective when students are doing the entity of the interaction.

Think on that. It's fucked up. What it means is that, depending upon the day the evaluator comes in to a class, an evaluation changes. The rubric has no room for teaching. One class, then, represents an entire school year. Before the 'impartial evaluation', this wasn't the case.

The most popular evaluative tool currently in use is The Danielson Model. (http://www.danielsongroup.org/). A lot of them are using it wrong. With this rubric, I had four different people evaluate me. Every one of them said this line, "I just fill in this rubric." If, as a teacher, I said that same thing to a parent, the administrator would mark me down for doing so. The first evaluator couldn't spell. I had to help him actually fill the thing out. That was fine. He was also the only one that had a suggestion for how to 'improve'. The second two principals - the two people that got me fired - had zero advice. I asked each of them directly how I could improve. The first one offered zero advice. I asked him this question, "You marked me down. How do you suggest I improve?" He had nothing. I asked the second person the same question, and she said told me to talk to someone else.

This is a major problem. We're losing good teachers to incompetent administrators using a bad device to be impartial. Charlotte Danielson realized teachers needed a better evaluative model. The same people that were doing it badly for years now use her model badly. Often, it's promoted through educational consultants.