I saw The Widget Effect first mentioned on the Oakland Tribune education blog. At first, I thought it was just another fluff piece about how teachers are treated poorly, but as I read the executive summary I quickly realized that it was really a expose on the terrible state of teacher evaluation in our nation.

Suppose you are a parent determined to make sure your child gets the best possible education. You understand intuitively what an ample body of research proves: that your child’s education depends to a large extent on the quality of her teachers. Consequently, as you begin considering local public schools, you focus on a basic question: who are the best teachers, and where do they teach?

The question is simple enough. There’s just one problem—except for word of mouth from other parents, no one can tell you the answers.

In fact, you would be dismayed to discover that not only can no one tell you which teachers are most effective, they also cannot say which are the least effective or which fall in between. Were you to examine the district’s teacher evaluation records yourself, you would find that, on paper, almost every teacher is a great teacher, even at schools where the chance of a student succeeding academically amounts to a coin toss, at best.

In short, the school district would ask you to trust that it can provide your child a quality education, even though it cannot honestly tell you whether it is providing her a quality teacher.

This is the reality for our public school districts nationwide. Put simply, they fail to distinguish great teaching from good, good from fair, and fair from poor. A teacher’s effectiveness—the most important factor for schools in improving student achievement—is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way.

In their research the found that the "Widget Effect" leads to the following flaws in teacher evaluation:

• All teachers are rated good or great
• Excellence goes unrecognized
• Inadequate professional development
• No special attention to novices
• Poor performance goes unaddressed

They provide 4 recommendations for reversing the "Widget Effect":

• Adopt a comprehensive performance evaluation system that fairly, accurately and credibly differentiates teachers based on their effectiveness in promoting student achievement.
• Train administrators and other evaluators in the teacher performance evaluation system and hold them accountable for using it effectively.
• Integrate the performance evaluation system with critical human capital policies and functions such as teacher assignment, professional development, compensation, retention and dismissal.
• Adopt dismissal policies that provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit the district and a system of due process that is fair but efficient.

I could not agree more. Our present teacher evaluation systems are not only unfair to students who end up in classrooms with ineffective teachers, but it is also unfair to both effective and ineffective teachers. Effective teachers receive little recognition and no financial reward for their extra efforts and talents. In other industries these high performers are valued and rewarded. Ineffective teachers receive little useful feedback on the areas where their skills need improvement and in our state, they're subject to a two year period in which they have to reach a pretty low bar of qualifying for tenure. However, this all or nothing evaluation at the granting of tenure results in some who could become good teachers losing the opportunity because they simply don't have time. I suspect it also causes some districts to hire more "temporary" teachers than they really need simply because it allows them to avoid starting teachers on a tenure path.

Unfortunately, with our limited financial resources and obstinate teacher union contention, it will likely be very difficult to make any progress in fixing our teacher evaluation system. Perhaps the DC Public Schools model of a split system where teachers can give up tenure in exchange for a merit-pay system that provides higher salaries for highly effective teachers. Maybe some of that stimulus money that President Obama keeps printing could help pilot new teacher evaluation systems in some other states. Successes in those pilots could help legislators and teacher unions understand the importance of a better teacher evaluation system.