The release of Connecticut’s teacher evaluation results in a school-funding trial has revealed that only 1 percent of teachers were evaluated as either “below standard” or “developing.” Recently, a CT Mirror story covered a discussion among members of the Connecticut Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC) about whether and how to amend the teacher evaluation process. In that story, Connecticut unions represented that the inclusion of a state assessment in the evaluation process is unfair to teachers. But, as a former teacher, principal, and superintendent, and a father of six Connecticut children—it strikes me as somewhat obvious that, quite to the contrary, these results indicate a strong, existing bias in favor of protecting teachers from data…

I’ve been an educator for two decades, and if Connecticut were unfairly using data against its teachers, I’d be the first to object. But when the data are as skewed as these recent evaluation results in Connecticut, that tells me that we actually need to find more balance in favor of accountability. Connecticut’s legislature has responded to concerns about teacher evaluations by establishing the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council and charging it with managing that process. Let’s let PEAC do its work.

Read Jeffrey’s full explanation here.