My name is Nancy, and I had a 30-year career in the classroom, where I was never evaluated, except by... (dramatic pause) checklist. And yet--somehow, I continued to teach and my students continued to learn, and the community continued to be satisfied with my teaching-- not to mention their public schools and my colleagues, similarly assessed via checklist.

Recently, nearly every story about improving teacher evaluation begins with t..., where substandard teachers slipped through the cracks, due to thoroughly inadequate attention to and assessment of their work.  If you believe these op-eds, teachers' core work was essentially carried out without scrutiny. Until--drumroll--new and rigorous evaluation protocols, always including lots of student testing data, turned everything around.  Evaluations! The cure for both listless teaching and anemic test scores!

I'm not saying that we can't do a better job of providing teachers with feedback to continuously fine-tune their practice. Nor am I denying that some teachers need to improve or be counseled, swiftly, out of a job. Only this: we might be granting shiny new teacher evaluation protocols a lot more power and veracity than they deserve.

A few core questions that ought to guide any evaluation of teaching:

Note: These do not seem to be the questions driving many of the new, "more rigorous" teacher evaluation models popping up across the country, driven by promises made in RTTT applications:

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