This paper is a summary and analysis of the book Teacher Evaluation: Six Prescriptions for Success, a compilation of approaches to evaluating effective teaching. School administrations continue to search for comprehensive tools for evaluating how well their teachers do their jobs. The six approaches presented here offer six different perspectives on the problem, each of which contributes significantly to the discussion, from emphasizing the need for ongoing staff development to analyzing the precise tasks and ways of thinking that a teacher needs to use in the classroom. None gives a comprehensive solution. Taken together, however, these six prescriptions illuminate some of the possible traps and areas of concern that school administrators face in asking how effectively their schools educate their pupils. The prescriptions were commissioned specifically to provide administrators with an objective, legally defensible way to identify and remove incomptent teachers, but they all address the much broader difficulty of assessing competence and effectiveness in the classroom.
The administration of the pseudonymous Elm Hill School dismissed Harriet Halverson, a teacher they clearly found incompetent. However, because their existing policies did not include a clear enough method for evaluting incompetence and removing teachers who did not live up to district standards, they were forced by the courts to reinstate her. To prevent this unfortunate situation from reoccurring, the administration asked six different experts in the field of education to address the problem and offer solid plans for setting up an evalution structure. W. James Popham, a professor in the University of California at Los Angeles Department of Education and one of the experts solicited, along with a Ph.D. candidate from his university, Sarah J. Stanley, collected these analyses into a single volume. Stanley's background includes experience as a teacher, an el...