A recently published study 
by a New York City-based teacher training organization called The New Teacher Project (TNTP) concludes that grade inflation isn’t confined to students; it runs rampant in teacher evaluation. Virtually all teachers receive above-average marks on their evaluations in spite of significant differences in their effectiveness.
TNTP surveyed more than 15,000 teachers and 1,300 administrators in 12 districts scattered across four states (Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio) about teacher evaluation and concluded that, according to district evaluation records, almost every teacher is a great teacher, even when the chance of a student having academic success amounts to a coin toss.
In places that employed a binary (satisfactory/unsatisfactory) rating system, 99 percent of tenured teachers earned a “satisfactory” rating. In systems with more than two rating categories, 94 percent of teachers earned one of the two highest ratings.
In additon, an overwhelming number of teachers reported that their evaluations did not shed light on their professional development needs. Seventy-three percent reported that their evaluations did not identify an area where they needed to improve.
The systems also did little to remove ineffective teachers. Just 10 percent of the Denver, Colorado, schools that didn’t reach the testing goals in the No Child Left Behind Act gave an unsatisfactory rating to a teacher in the past three years. That despite the fact that 81 percent of administrators and 58 percent of teachers in the districts surveyed said they knew a colleague that was performing poorly and 43 percent of teachers said a colleague should be fired for poor performance.
Teacher evaluation systems have always been criticized but are receiving a higher level of scrutiny now because the Obama administration’s push for increased teacher effectiveness.
—“Grade Inflation Seen in Evaluations of Teachers, Regardless of System,” by Stephen Sawchuk, Education Week, June 10, 2009.
