By Thomas Toch | Future Ed
“For most of public education’s history, teacher evaluation was an after-thought. Despite the centrality of teachers to the education enterprise and the fact that taxpayers spend a fortune on public school teacher compensation and benefits (today, upwards of half a trillion dollars), the standard evaluation model was a quick classroom check-in once a year by a principal looking for clean classrooms and quiet kids—things that didn’t directly capture the quality of teaching, much less student learning.”