How does Kentucky evaluate teachers and principals?

Secretly!

Yesterday was the deadline for Kentucky school districts to forward information to the Kentucky Department of Education about how the districts conduct evaluations of principals and teachers.

Collecting and publicizing this information is one of the requirements for all states that accepted part of the $48.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, which is a part of the federal stimulus law. The idea is to increase public transparency concerning the performance of school staff.

But, while other states like California are already publicly releasing similar evaluation data for individual teachers, don’t look for that to happen here.

You will get to see something like a checklist that is used for the evaluation, and maybe some overall generalizations about performance, but forget about finding out if your own child’s teacher is one of the best, or worst, in the school. Likewise, you won’t learn a thing about the performance of individual principals.

You see, after 20 years of KERA, state educators don’t have any confidence in these obviously critical evaluations. State educators don’t think the results are going to be accurate enough to allow the public to learn if their teachers and principals are good, or not.

Forget about calling this failure to develop a sound evaluation system a “Novice” performance. This is an outright terrible failure to develop an open, accountable process that would insure all children in this state have decent teachers.

Hat tip to Holly Carter for finding the source article.