The beauty of K-12 education is that teaching and learning take place in ways that accommodate collaboration and teamwork among teaching professionals across grades and cohorts. Unlike postsecondary education and beyond, early cognitive learning and maturation occur along a continuum of skills and aptitude development that is not necessarily quantifiable by a certain grade level or attributable to a particular teacher or class. This uniqueness about elementary and secondary education underscores why it will be difficult to devise teacher evaluation methods that focus primarily on the success of the individual classroom teacher. Just as tests are not always good indicators of student achievement, evaluating individual teaching professionals is not the panacea for measuring classroom success. It is true that classroom teachers must be evaluated based on their own competence, preparedness, and professional development, as one critical component of an evaluation process; however, a larger aspect of the assessment process must concentrate on the efficacy of teacher cohorts. The very nature of K-12 teaching requires the kinds of evaluation systems that account for not only individual capability but also the art of collaboration and teamwork among lead teachers and those not as experienced.

Developing teacher evaluation systems that make sense in the context of how teachers teach and students learn is going to be one of the most difficult aspects of elevating the delivery of K-12 public education. Even though most agree that an important element of the evaluation process is student achievement, there is a wide range of opinion about how to isolate and measure the range of factors that affect the teaching and learning that goes on inside and outside of classrooms. Not only is it virtually impossible to identify all of the sources of learning in young people’s lives, it is hard to categorize objective measures of teacher effectiveness because you don’t always know what or to whom to attribute success. For example, is the teacher, parent or personal tutor responsible for the reading progression of a child? It does seem evident that new means for measuring teacher effectiveness will have to incentivize and reward teaching professionals based largely on the work of cohorts. This makes the most sense and it also places the responsibility on school administrators to recruit and train highly competent professionals for their classrooms while also creating school environments that are conducive to the kinds of collaboration and teamwork that produce great teaching and academic success for students across the learning spectrum.

Many of the proposed teacher evaluation systems that are being reviewed don’t even fully account for the fact that student learning and development that is occurring beyond classrooms and schools is not necessarily measurable or even attributable to classroom teachers. A fair amount of student academic success being exhibited on assignments and tests, and expressed in classroom activities is a result of dedicated academic exercises in their homes, private tutoring sessions, or academic initiatives sponsored by community organizations, churches, and other enterprises. These family and community interventions highlight the need for teacher evaluation methods to focus more on teacher cohorts. Placing individual teacher effectiveness at the heart of any evaluation system could unfairly reward individuals for student academic success that may not be to their credit, but could be the result of externally-sponsored enrichment programs and initiatives designed for school-aged youth in targeted schools and communities. It would make more sense to reward an entire teacher corps, as opposed to individual teachers, especially in schools and districts whose students and families are participating in programs and activities that are being funded by outside entities or the families themselves. The efforts of classroom teachers, families, community organizations, and all kinds of stakeholders reveal that teaching is truly an art of collaboration that links everyone who cares about teaching and learning at the K-12 level.