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So the uproar seems muted now. I thought it would be a little louder. Perhaps most teachers think this will go away all on its own.

The issue: How are teacher’s evaluations tied to student progress? But this needs to be properly divided into its components. First, the matter of teacher evaluations.

Teachers should be evaluated based partly on effectiveness. This doesn’t seem to need much debate. How we define effectiveness, or impact usually gets some acclaim, though in reality the way this is defined varies as much as the person doing evaluations. Second, the matter of student progress.

This is a little trickier. Do they all start at the same place (“grade level”)? NO. Are they individuals, subject to many different interests, skill sets, and learning styles? YES. Do they each receive the same advantages in terms of family background, social expectations, and resources? NO. Do they all receive the same instructional inputs? NO.

So— how to measure “growth?” I thought this is what I was supposed to decide with my grading system? Wouldn’t the most valid measure be progress towards daily learning objectives? My gradebook, when properly executed, is a range of assignments of varying complexity and difficulty, measured over periods of days, weeks and months. Ideally, students who receive an “A” in my class should be making more progress than those with a “C” (only average). On the other hand, there is a clear difference between those who are average and those who are “F”ailing.

Recently as I’ve been looking at what my students can and can’t do at this point in the year (and being inevitably frustrated), I’ve been looking at it differently than ever before, and thinking that I’m going to completely blow up my system. I’ve never thought my tests were very good measures of progress to the learning objectives I’ve set— probably because they’re pretty difficult. But one thing I’ve always tried to separate was the varying differences between cognitive, academic learning and execution.

Poor behavioral, executive skills are frequently standing in the way of progress towards learning. It’s simple, right? If the student can’t get to class, very often they fall off in large gaps with whatever the learning objectives are. They miss context, they’re not prepared for class, they miss deadlines, they miss explicit content teaching or skill acquisition. Thus I have students who have more gifted skills to begin with who often may fall behind where they should be, all because they are not working, or they are working ineffectively or inefficiently.

So, do m y rubrics accurately reflect this? They need to.