NY Should Try a Pilot First

A thoughtful blog from Aaron Pallas, this time on teacher evaluation systems, focusing on NY but of much wider interest. He discusses balancing efficiency with fairness, notes big holes in so-called 'value added,' asks whether an unfair system will decrease the numbers of people willing to go into teaching, wonders how NYC, for example, will train 1500 principals or other raters to reasonably provide classroom evaluation. He suggests pilot projects make more sense. And one commenter notes that efficiency can contradict effectiveness.