Low Validity and Reliability of Teacher Evaluations.

So we have talked about how scheduled observations for evaluations are pretty pointless because they are artificial and too planned. We also talked about how even a "surprise" visit can be fake (we now understand this from Glassman's own experience!). Well when I was volunteering in a second grade classroom, the teacher told me that her students were in the music classroom when the music teacher was getting evaluated. This was a scheduled observation so the second grade teacher knew her students would be there during the observation. She told me that she bribed the kids with extra recess and a fun activity if they were good in the music class. She said she did this because it was the music teacher's first year teaching... ever. So she wanted to help make things go smoothly for her. I really liked how she looked out for a fellow teacher, and I hope most teacher relationships are this caring. But it just reinforces the idea that evaluations aren't really observing what truly goes on in the classroom. The observations seem like a waste of time because they aren't reliable. Here is a small overview of an article written by a professor at Brown University reviewing the validity and reliability of teacher evaluations.