Struggling schools often must rely more heavily on substitute teachers leaving both students and teachers at a disadvantage.
Policymakers in recent years have focused on boosting teacher quality by designing new teacher evaluations that use student test scores to judge teacher performance.
But teacher evaluation systems are rendered meaningless if there’s no full-time teacher. And that’s the case in many classrooms across the country, especially in high-poverty schools, as reported in this Dec. 5 story.
[High-poverty schools often staffed by rotating cast of substitutes]
“Teacher evaluation is certainly important, and it’s been in need of repair,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor emerita at Stanford who now heads the Learning Policy Institute, an education think tank. “But at the end of the day, it’s whether you can get and keep good teachers, not whether you can evaluate the bad ones out.”
Read the entire article on the Washington Post website.
