Opinion: Evaluating teacher performance is "tricky"

In her blog for The Washington Post called "The Answer Sheet," Valerie Strauss invited a member of the Teacher Leaders Network to comment on The Los Angeles Times article published August 15 that used student test scores to evaluate more than 6,000 teachers.

Her guest blogger, Larry Ferlazzo, who teaches English at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California, also writes a blog for teachers and is the author of two books, Building Parent Engagement In Schools and English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work. The Teacher Leaders Network is a network of teacher leaders dedicated to student success and the transformation of teaching into a true profession. It is a national initiative of the Center for Teaching Quality.

Ferlazzo asks: "What is the best way for teachers to be evaluated? ... Evaluating someone’s performance is always tricky. It has become even more so in education where public discussions of new forms of teacher evaluations are often introduced in the context of developing a tool to fire educators." Read more at the Post website.