How To Evaluate Teachers

The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the president of the teachers' union, Randi Weingarten, are locked in a bitter debate over whether test scores should be used to evaluate teachers. Mr. Klein thinks they should and Ms. Weingarten thinks they shouldn't. The legislature and the governor have sided with Ms. Weingarten, and it looks like New York is going to be the only state in the union that will forbid using test scores to evaluate teachers. As it happens, we're not terribly excited about this fight one way or another, because we don't think test scores should be the device for evaluating teachers. We have another contraption we favor for evaluating teachers. It's called parents.

We've been watching this schools debate for six years now, and we don't mind saying that it's become mindnumbing. We don't think anybody is going to get a better schools chancellor in the city than Mr. Klein, who's brilliant and passionate and committed. We don't think anybody is going to get a better union president than Ms. Weingarten, who's also brilliant, passionate, and committed. But by our lights neither is in the best position to decide whether our schools, let alone our teachers, are doing a good job. We don't think the Regents board is in a better position, either, not that it's a bad Regents board. By our lights, the authority best qualified to discern whether a school is working is its customers, the parents.

Ordinarily, we'd be in the camp that says that Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Klein ought to be able to use whatever method they want in evaluating teachers. They're management, after all, and it ought to be up to them. But, aside from backing charter schools, they have been on the sidelines in the fight to empower parents in the quest for better education. From the perspective of the lowly parents, mere customers, the fight over who gets to judge who's a good teacher is a bit of a sideshow if the customer can't decide whether to take the tax money he or she is paying to Messrs. Bloomberg, Klein, and Weingarten and spend it on another school that the customer thinks is doing a better job.

What would allow that, of course, is a system of school vouchers. It's the same system that would empower parents to sort out the curriculum issue that City Journal's Sol Stern and our own Andrew Wolf have been pressing. Instead, the mayor has spent his long quest to improve the schools belittling any attempts, with the exception of charter schools, to empower the customers of the schools to make their own decisions. If we sound, at this point, a bit dismissive of the particulars of the teacher-evaluation debate, it's how a lot of parents feel. What's the point of worrying about it? Even if a parent concludes that a particular school or teacher is not the right one for his child, the parent still has no choice in the matter, unless he's rich or wins a charter school lottery. So now Mr. Klein can't even use test scores to evaluate his employees. He'll have to pay them anyhow. It'll give him a taste of how the parents feel.