Teacher evaluations not the whole story
I was appalled the information about public school teachers’ evaluations made front-page news recently. One set of evaluations does not qualify as incontrovertible research data. I’d like more information about the criteria used to establish the chart the Times Free Press published.
Furthermore, as years of research have reiterated and UnifiEd’s public speakers have corroborated, the best indicator of student success is the socio-economic level of the school. No news there. Yet in your report, I was surprised high socio-economic schools didn’t necessarily produce great results, either.
So Thrasher and Nolan, which fare reasonably well on the chart, prepare students who don’t perform well at Signal Mountain Middle/High? Lookout Mountain’s elementary, which feeds our three big prep schools, got tarred with the same brush used on every other Hamilton County teacher.
Many students from those communities go to colleges. Either “least-effective” teachers aren’t doing the damage the information asserts, or there’s some kind of disconnect between our county’s criteria for assessments and those of other counties and states.