Sadly there is no simple rubric to make this work. There's probably not a 25 question list that will give the insight required to tell this but I would suggest these guidelines:

-Evaluate each student to see which academic and artistic classes they do better in and which they do worse in. Then compare that evaluation against other student evaluations, are there patterns? Do some classes and thereby teachers seem to come out ahead?

-Ask the students which classes they prefer and why they're not doing so well in other classes. Some teachers will come out ahead and some information will be provided on why others aren't through these sort of informal questions, when the students aren't BSing you.

-Evaluate class curriculum against grades and then see if the classes that are have a high or worse that desired failure rate have all the steps in place for students to understand them (steps=prerequisite classes). Make sure those classes adequately prepare students for the next level.

-Drop No Child Left Behind and restore the best of the old systems where exceptionalism was encouraged and inadequacy fixed as best as possible. This is not the case as much now.

-Realize there is no universal panacea to cure education problems and every cure will be unique. Including sometimes the school will be doing the best they can and the problems stems from the community around it and not be afraid to say that.

This is all I can think of right now. But the foundation of it all is : There are no SIMPLE answers.

Hm. Good questions Sean. Though I think it is, hm, not a red herring, but only one small part of the problem. As you acknowledge. But I think we can't "fix" teachers independent of fixing the other problems, while fixing the other problems will open up more space to "fix" evaluation of teaching. That is: if you can start ironing out environmental factors, other factors (like teacher quality and personal factors) will become more obvious. And of course, to some extent, our assumptions about "personal factors" are somewhat different than other, more successful (in re: education) countries who tend not to assume some people just don't have what it takes to be taught.

Seems like for us to be able to evaluate teachers, we need to start paying them reasonably compared to what we *say* their value is (i.e. the educators of our "future", that is, our kids). See http://iamj.blogspot.com/2010/11/schools-school-reform.html and http://iamj.blogspot.com/2008/09/radically-elementary-wisdom-on.html.

Second, it seems like we actually don't even know HOW to define a good teacher, other than, "a teacher whose students improve", but we don't know how to operationalize what exactly that it. And when we do, we ignore it. (http://www.slate.com/id/2271733/).

Ah, this is what I was looking for:
http://www.slate.com/id/2247300/ : "No school or school district or state anywhere in the nation had ever proved the theory correct. Nowhere was there a real-life demonstration in which a district had identified a top quintile of teachers, assigned low-performing students to their classes, and improved the test-scores of low-performing students so dramatically in three, four or five years that the black-white test score gap closed."

There are some similarly good articles on the NYT, but I can't recall where they are. I think the problem is, we can't sit down and figure this out right now. What we need is to get real and systematic about figuring out what works, and that will probably (or almost certainly) including *working with* teachers of all stripes. The assumption, for example, that a bad teacher is a bad teacher for life is ridiculous; people can be taught (else why have teachers?) So we need some combination of consistent, iterative experimentation, cooperation, and continued education, and perhaps then the solution would come down to: getting rid of those who really, really refuse to cooperate. (Of course, even that gets tricky as sometimes people refuse to cooperate because the person managing a program--a principal, a superintendent--is themself some intolerably bad.)

In the end of the day, though, we definitely need to spend more in a number of cases. It's unpopular, it's controversial, but to me, it comes down to: resources are a root problem. We can't argue around it, we can't find some innovation that will get us something for nothing. Either we dedicate the resources to systematically trying out new things in significant, not half-assed, ways (and we needn't go blind; we can again look at all those models from countries that consistently do better than us!), or we resign ourselves to the fact that we're stuck with this. You can't hope to solve a problem without tackling one of its fundamental roots; you can't cure hunger with love; you can't cure loneliness with food; you can't solve underperforming schools without spending on the resources that will allow you to even figure out what you should be spending them on (i.e. how to teach, train, and retain good teachers).

So many problems and so many people looking for short-term sound-bite solutions. That's why we have "No Child Left Behind" which seems to have only ensured that all children are equally short-changed. As Mr. Chappell says, first we need to define what IS an excellent teacher, and I'm afraid that's going to be a fight in itself. Then we need to sort out what we can expect the teacher to do and separate that from the students' own responsibilities, the parents' responsibilities, and the society as a whole. It's simply wrong to say that this teacher is not good because the culture of the school's neighborhood is that academics are not the parents' charge. So if parents don't hold their children responsible for helping to create an environment where learning is primary, if parent's don't show their children that education is vital, and if parents don't teach their children to work at learning, we can't hold the teacher responsible for the lack of education going on.

Of course there are the heart-warming stories of teachers who succeed against all these odds. But we pay 'em squat so why would we wonder that there aren't more like that?

jte