Willie Fox

It’s Time to Do Away with Standardized Teacher Evaluations Teacher evaluations are starting to look a lot like standardized testing for students. We built both for accountability. We were told both would improve outcomes. They didn’t. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation MET study showed we got better at identifying differences between teachers. That’s it. It didn’t lead to widespread improvement in teaching. It just gave us a more organized way to sort people. Same thing happened with testing. It didn’t suddenly make kids better learners. It changed behavior. Schools adjusted to the system. More focus on what’s measured. Less on what’s not. Teacher evaluation follows that same path. Put a rubric in place, and people start thinking about the rubric. What gets checked gets attention. Everything else fades. Charlotte Danielson built her framework for reflection and professional conversation. We turned it into scoring, which it was never designed to do. Now it’s less about getting better and more about where you land. And here is part of the problem, in education, when something doesn’t work, our instinct is to add more. More walkthroughs. More categories. More data. More forms. We keep stacking layers on top of a system without ever stopping to ask a simple question: Is this even the right approach? Not “How do we improve it?” But “Should we be doing this at all?” Because if the foundation is off, adding more just makes it more complicated. Not better. Now we’re talking about running that same system through AI. Faster write-ups. Automated feedback. Cleaner reports. Still the same system. We built it for efficiency, not for people. So it does what it was designed to do. It standardizes. It documents. It creates consistency. It doesn’t develop professionals. After years of refining this—more structure, more detail, more time—we’re still not seeing the kind of improvement that justifies it. At some point, you stop tweaking and admit the idea itself might be off. And here’s the reality—many of the highest-performing systems in the world don’t even use a standardized teacher evaluation model like we do. It’s time to do away with it. Keep feedback. Keep accountability. Lose the system built on rubrics, checklists, and scores. Replace it with leadership that actually helps people get better. Aspirational Conversations. Coaching. Knowing your teachers well enough to support them. If teachers are professionals, they shouldn’t be evaluated like this. And most people in schools already know that.