Teacher Evaluations Out Of Sync With Outcomes

The Detroit News reports that a national education test shows Michigan students have shown less academic improvement than those in any other state since 2003.

But you would never know it from the annual evaluations Michigan public school administrators have given their own teachers. All of Michigan’s approximately 95,500 public school teachers are given an annual evaluation. From 2011 through 2015, that’s 477,292 evaluations. Of these, just 2,739 came back with an “ineffective” rating, about one-half of one percent. Another 168,189 evaluations, 35 percent of the total, received the top “highly effective” rating.