drive-by

The nonprofit National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) reports that, despite many calls for performance pay coming from state capitals, only 14 states require school systems to evaluate their public school teachers at least once a year, while some are much more lax than that. Tennessee, for example, requires evaluations of tenured teachers only twice a decade.

[snip]

Teachers union contracts dictate the professional requirements for teachers in most school districts. But the NCTQ study found that only two-thirds of them require teachers to be evaluated at least once a year and a quarter of them require evaluations only every three years.

The evaluations themselves are typically of little value—a single, fleeting classroom visit by a principal or other building administrator untrained in evaluation wielding a checklist of classroom conditions and teacher behaviors that often don’t even focus directly on the quality of teacher instruction. “It’s typically a couple of dozen items on a list: ‘Is presentably dressed,’ ‘Starts on time,’ ‘Room is safe,’ ‘The lesson occupies students,’ ” says Michigan State University Professor Mary Kennedy, author of Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform, who has studied teacher evaluation extensively. “In most instances, it’s nothing more than marking ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory.’”

It’s easy for teachers to earn high marks under these capricious rating systems, often called “drive-bys,” regardless of whether their students learn.

source: Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education
by Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman

My favorite was the department chair who told me that so-and-so was "an excellent teacher" because Department Chair had visited so-and-so's classroom and "all the students understand."

We were in the midst of a conversation about the fact that my own child, a member of so-and-so's class, manifestly did not understand.

That didn't affect Department Chair's evaluation because "he's the only one"^* and "you're the only parent complaining."^**

Principal concurred. "So and so is a fine young teacher. I've visited so-and-so's class many times."

That was it.

I've visited the classroom. They didn't even look at the freaking bulletin boards, for God's sake.


^* He wasn't.
^** I wasn't.