I do not believe you can evaluate teachers objectively… that’s part of the reason for the multiple measures approach I’ve outlined all week.

All teacher effectiveness assessment is, in my opinion, going to be biased. Subjectivity rules.

Matter of fact, I don’t think teachers can even assess students in an unbiased manner – but that hasn’t stopped anyone from giving grades this year, has it?

Or stopped the bubble test makers from giving out all those scantron sheets to fill out, I’ll note.

Let’s say you gave a kid an 89 on their persuasive essay. If three other teachers read that essay, do you think they’d all agree it was an 89? Might not one see it as a 90? Thus we have an A- being given out as opposed to a B+ for the same exact work. Maybe it’s an 86 to someone else, a mere B.

Extrapolate the math out now for 3 million teachers across the country. Nope, there will be no objectivity in this process and only a fool would dare even try to promise it.

A multiple measures approach is about gaining representative insight. It will never be exact because I do not think we have even yet mastered the art of being exact with our student assessments, and we’ve been giving out evaluations to kids for years and years.

And kids have been complaining about the grades we’ve been giving them for just as long.

Assessment, like beauty, is ultimately, to some degree, going to be in the eye of the beholder. Jim Burke talks about how one of his high school teachers didn’t flunk him simply because the two of them played racquetball together – though Jim definitely feels he earned an F for the course. (And Jim turned out to be one our most keen thinkers in the field of teaching… yet to get through high school, he needed someone to simply cut him some slack. Was that a “wrong” decision by Jim’s teacher? Would Jim do something of similar sort for one of his students? Would I? Would you?)

Assessment, is it objective? No. Fair? Sometimes. The way the cookie crumbles. For sure!

Just like life!

However, if you diffuse the amount of assessors and modes of assessment and they all arrive at a similar conclusion, I’d say the conclusions that can be drawn will be more than just coincidence… and can work to better inform all of us about what is actually going on in a teacher’s classroom.

And it’s certainly better than trying to connect teacher effectiveness directly to high stakes bubbles tests – don’t even get me started on that silliness things for the ten-millionth time.

But come on, do you really grade the last essay of the night at 11:12 p.m. with the same attentive eye you graded the first essay at 4:45 in the afternoon with a cup of joe in your hand? The world is imperfect, everywhere, and when we do finally get around to measuring teacher effectiveness, I’d be most wary of the person that tries to sell you on the flawlessness of the accuracy, the perfection of the insight of the evaluation.

It ain’t gonna happen. Subjectivity, when it comes to assessment, is the order of the day. From college admissions to who flunks what class (racquetball anyone?) to how we will ultimately be measured once the U.S. Dept. of Education gets this measuring teacher effectiveness kite to fly, we are just gonna have to realize that there is no such thing as objectivity.

We live in a world where all opinions, even those of experts, (and assessment really is nothing more than a sophisticated term for putting forth an opinion) must be taken with a grain of salt.

Thus ends this series…

Okay, I am not saying the book is dead. No way. But reading is changing. It already has.

And this change will continue. And our schools MUST get on the bus if we are to serve the needs of our students in a manner that is authentic to the needs they will have over the course of the next few decades.

Responding to reading in schools is changing as well. After all, for a whole lot of years our schools have been almost Pavlovian about the manner by which we operate:

Red this book… write this essay… repeat.

Now our nation’s best teachers don’t do this — they always bring life to the classroom — but come on, we know that a whole lotta of American classrooms operate — or at least prior to the year 2000 — operated, very much in this manner… with the occasional speech/presentation mixed in to add some flavor, of course. (And don’t forget the bubble test! LOL.)

But I was just reading Thomas Newkirk’s book The School Essay Manifesto: Reclaiming the Essay for Students And Teachers (yes, that Thomas Newkirk… the man who wrote the quite popular new book Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones: Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For) where Barry Lane says in the intro: “Newkirk’s basic hypothesis is that the school essay as we know it is an obsolete assignment that evolved out of the need for teachers and textbook companies to control student writing, organize student’s thoughts and more easily grade writing assignments.”

Wow, powerful stuff!

And this is why I say the book is dead. Because it no longer is the emperor-type ruler which it once was. Books are being forced to make space on the mountaintop.

It’s also why reading — and writing — as they exist in our schools (how we teach/what we teach) is changing. BECAUSE IT MUST! While we are doing some things well, we are also doing some things poorly and the advent of technology allows us to rid ourselves of what is stale and ineffective (prosperous as some of these “educational solutions” have been for some folks over the past few decades) and bring in a host of “new” tools that add to new abilities to our arsenal. Gunpowder changed warfare. The Steam engine changed transportation. Microprocessors have changed reading.

Fact is, there are new literacies out there — new ways of reading, new tools to use to read, new, new, new. I mean, as I type this right now, there is probably somebody inventing yet another way for me to interact with text of somehow. Truly, I never even knew what hyperlinking was when I earned my master’s degree. Now, well, it’s fundamental to my blogging because reading has changed and readers have changed right along with it.

So the book is dead. At least as the grand emperor, primary, if not sole, mechanism of all reading. I still do not know how comfortable I am with this idea, but just because I do not like the reality of something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Room has to be made at the top of the mountain for more than just dead tree books (which are the primary passion of my life. After all, I read them, I write them, I feed my family by them. Trust me, dead tree books are HUGE to me… and still I blog on a ning.)

Yep, the book is dead. But long live the book!!