Have you seen the commercial on TV that offers consumers a service where contractors and companies are reviewed using a data base to give people a better chance at obtaining satisfaction with their purchase?  The thought of how this may or may not be relevant to education came to me as I considered posting a review of the work recently done on the gutters of my house.  Here I thought, wouldn’t it be useful to alert other consumers about my dissatisfaction with the work?  Does it not then follow; why not alert the public about our relative satisfaction with our local school outcomes (i.e. test results)?

“From roofers to plumbers to dentists and more…” goes the tag line from the company that promises to provide “reviews you can trust.”  So why not reviews about educators?   In an age where our capacity to gather and produce reams of data that guides virtually all of our thoughts and actions it would seem plausible to ferret out the good from the bad using a simple system of computer generated reviews that get posted for all to see.  Popular choice that gives the average person the right and the ability to weigh in on what stands for quality takes place with everything from American Idol to the micro polls that dominate our political discourse.

Forget for a moment the false reviews posted which game the system to give the appearance that a restaurant has been rated highly effective.  Forget too the rigging of systems that have resulted in perhaps the largest cheating scandal in American education with the recent indictment of 35 educators in the Atlanta public school system.  If it’s good for business it’s good for schools, or so goes the conventional wisdom.  We have the tools, so why not use them to the fullest?  The reason is simple—it will not work to improve the results.

Measurement, assessment, testing, evaluation, and review are not interchangeable concepts—but they have played, and will play, a part of effective teaching and learning.  This is true, with or without the advent of highly sophisticated technological devices and systems.  The intrusion of market based metrics into the sphere that should be reserved as a covenant between the students of a learning community and the adults charged with stewarding them toward a disposition of lifetime learning is not enhanced by the current new wave of reviews and evaluations.  Neither public shame associated with poor performance, nor the oversaturation of systems used to drill down to a microscopic level at a huge cost to taxpayers, let alone the time it takes to manage such systems, will yield the desired effect on performance

Back to my gutters.  Instead of posting my dissatisfaction, I contacted the company that did the work and they will come back to fix the problem.  Open lines of communication, whether between a customer and a company or teachers and those charged with oversight, is a low tech, low cost way of enhancing outcomes.  Angie’s List may be helpful in many situations, but not as a means to rate teachers and administrators.