Legislators trying to help save a generation of Milwaukee children from lives of poverty and unemployment want to add a new law to the books in Madison this week.

They should, if they want to make a real difference, also delete one.

Part of the new education bill passed by the Senate the other day, and now being considered by the Assembly, calls for rigorous, annual teacher performance evaluations – something that many districts all across America already supposedly administer.

But not really.

Last year, the New Teacher Project researched teacher evaluations in 12 districts, both big and small, across the country. Methods and frequency of evaluation differed from district to district,  but one thing was found to be strikingly similar. Virtually all teachers in the districts studied are told over and over and over again that they are either good or great. In districts that use binary rating systems, for instance, (generally “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” categories are used) more than 99% of teachers are given the “satisfactory” designation, according to the researchers.

It’s harder to find a poor teacher in America, it seems, than it is to find someone who can’t hit a Doug Davis fastball.

Critics, inevitably, point out that this universal back-slapping and teacher aggrandizement makes it tough to identify and root out proverbial bad apples. But there’s actually a more insidious problem. As the New Teacher Project notes, when all teachers are rated good or great, the truly exceptional ones are never really identified. They are informed they are wonderful – but so is everybody else.

The truly exceptional are melded with the mediocre. They are demeaned by a message that all teachers are interchangeable and exactly the same – mere “widgets,” as the New Teacher Project calls it, in the education factory.

Curious if truly excellent teachers in MPS are being treated as widgets as well, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute tried to do in Milwaukee what The New Teacher Project had done elsewhere. We filed an Open Records request with the Milwaukee Public School Board seeking copies of evaluations of all teachers at six different MPS schools – the same sorts of foundering schools the new legislation in Madison targets, places like Auer Avenue Elementary, John Burroughs Middle School and Pulaski High School.

We were not looking for evaluations of individual teachers by name. Personnel files of individual public employees are almost always confidential. We just wanted to be able to extrapolate the “curve,” as it were, the percentage of teachers being given the equivalent of “A”s and “B”s. We made it clear to Lynne Sobczak, the MPS board clerk, that she could delete the names of individual teachers before releasing the evaluations. 

Sobczak’s response?

No way. 

Sobczak, after receiving advice from both the Milwaukee City Attorney’s Office and the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office, declined to release anything at all –even evaluations with names of specific teachers removed.

“The prohibition from disclosure cannot be remedied by redaction of personally identifying information,” wrote Sobczak in response to our request. “Accordingly, we must deny your public records request due to the specific statutory exemption that prohibits disclosure of employee performance evaluations.”

In other words, it is the district’s position that no one can know how many MPS teachers are thought to be good, how many are thought to be great and how many – if any – are thought to be trouble.

It would be nice to be able to blame Sobczak alone for the secrecy – or even the attorneys who might simply be misinterpreting a law. But it is our legislators – through 19.36(10)(d) of Wisconsin state statutes – who have made that misinterpretation possible by prohibiting  the release of not just individual teacher’s evaluations but evaluations “relating to one or more specific employees.”

Legislators in Madison can easily correct the problem this week by making it clear that evaluations with names of teachers removed must be public records. Without that change, without records that are public, no one will ever know if MPS teacher evaluations really mean anything – no matter what legislators do in Madison this week.

Everyone will remain wonderful in MPS.

Except, of course, for the kids who can’t really read or write and who are going to grow up one day and wonder why, in the real world, things are so hopeless.

-April 20, 2009