Today is Michelle Rhee’s last day as school chancellor in D.C., and Bill Turque at the Washington Post says Rhee took the opportunity to issue a final warning to the city’s teachers. “Now we have a new teacher evaluation system where we know who’s ineffective, minimally effective and highly effective,” Turque quotes her as saying to a room full of educators last night.
Valerie Strauss, also at the Post, claims the “parting shot” was “gracelessly delivered.” Further, asserts Strauss, IMPACT—the evaluation system Rhee put in place—is nothing to be proud of.
The multimillion-dollar process is based partly on standardized test scores of students, which should never be used to evaluate teachers, and partly on a badly designed system of classroom evaluations. It is open for abuse, both by teachers who have found ways to get around it, and by principals who can manipulate results to get rid of troublemakers.