It’s coming.  Whether you like it or not, it’s coming.

            To all my fellow teachers out there, stay awake and pay attention.  Your job is about to be on the line.

            No more can you hide in your classroom except for the once every two-year visit from your administrator.

            No more can you pooh-pooh standardized testing.

            No more can you keep private test results of your students.

            With the state Board of Education voting for a database that will share information about teacher effectiveness, the gig is up.  The free ride over.

            Your lifetime job security is about to be extinct along with free healthcare.

            President Obama isn’t on your side and neither is education secretary Arne Duncan.

            The age of evaluating teachers qualitatively has arrived.  For those teachers who have clocked in and out of work, doing the minimum effort, knowing full well they’d still have a job, it’s time to wake up.  For those teachers who have always been remarkable, it’s time to shine.

Value-added evaluations, using student test scores to determine if a teacher is effectively teaching or not, is being tried in certain school districts around the country.  This is a Nightmare on School Street for the National Education Association (NEA) and other teachers unions.  The last thing they want is for teachers to be evaluated for the job performed.  The union’s goal is to maximize membership and to serve in a protector role for all teachers regardless of ability level.

            What’s missing in the value-added evaluation discussion is the next step.  Evaluating teachers based on student data must be only one piece of the overhaul needed to ensure high teacher quality.  Tied to value-added evaluation must be the reward and punishment, i.e., if a teacher is determined to teach well, that teacher deserves an increase in salary and bonuses, and if a teacher is determined not to teach well, that teacher deserves to be fired.  Otherwise, identifying which teachers are good becomes a bragging rights exercise.  Not building a payoff into the evaluation system makes such judgments meaningless.

            The uproar over using student test results to determine teacher effectiveness, and to publicize it, is strangely muted, only erupting into a protest against The Los Angeles Times for printing them.

            One reason being that it is a Democratic President who has been leading the charge.  Imagine if a Republican President were rattling the teaching establishment and union leadership, there would be no end to the on-street protests and public tongue-lashings.  But when the NEA almost without exception financially supports Democrat-only candidates, this call for change is indeed a hard pill to swallow.

            And you know what?  It’s about time.

            For while some teachers cringe at the idea of having their incompetence spotlighted and broadcasted over the Internet, there are many others who applaud any effort to attach some kind of quality label to the teaching profession.

            Outside of a few progressive schools districts across the nation, teachers have never been given true job performance evaluations. 

            The healthiest aspect to this discussion is that finally, finally the argument about the inability to determine if a teacher is good or not can be buried forever.  You can tell if a teacher is effective.  But test scores alone don’t reveal a teacher’s quality.

            How well a teacher communicates to students is a component not easily tested.  The well-thought through lesson plan cannot be looked at quickly either.  The comments on student work that provides insight and encouragement also don’t show up on a scan-tron form.

            So before we all go numbers crazy about trying to squeeze a teacher’s complete skills set into a couple of digits, let’s use the value-added discussion not as opening the door to a new way to evaluate teachers but as a stick of dynamite to blow the door clean off to a complete overhaul on how teachers are trained, evaluated and, yes, paid.