Performance anxiety.

Good for the nearly 100 Chicago university professors and researchers who signed a letter to Mayor Emanuel criticizing the plan to use student scores on standardized tests to evaluate CPS teacher performance.

This is a version of the plan that is required of all school districts throughout Illinois as a result of PERA, the Performance Evaluation Reform Act. PERA, written by a committee appointed by Governor Quinn and headed by IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin. It was adopted by the Illinois General Assembly so that Illinois could qualify for Race to the Top funds. The state failed to receive the Race to the Top grant. But, the law remains.

The letter to Rahm was released at a press conference yesterday in Chicago. The letter makes three points:

• There presently exists no reliable or valid way to measure teacher performance based on student growth scores.
• Research doesn’t support using Value Added Measures (VAM) to evaluate teacher performance.
• Students will be adversely impacted by this type of teacher performance evaluation.

Lord knows I’m no university researcher.

But here is what I know:

I teach in a high performing school district. For years, teachers in my district have been evaluated using the traditional performance review method. Tenured teachers have the principal observe their teaching in the classroom for about 45 minutes once every two years.

It is dumb and pointless.

And yet our students are among the highest performing elementary and middle school students in the state. This same evaluation method is used in other high performing districts.

This debate about teacher evaluation has as much to do with the reality of classrooms as an episode of Saved by the Bell.

Further proof of the disconnect: School districts like mine are not required to meet the new PERA requirements in Senate Bill 7 until 2016.

If student learning was a matter of one perfect way of doing teacher performance reviews, wouldn’t we all be doing it?

Wouldn’t high performing schools be evaluating their teachers using student growth scores on tests? Is that what they do at the Lab School where Rahm sends his kids?

No.

And trust me. Parents in Chicago are not clamoring for changes in teacher performance evaluations. Aside from Rahm’s paid protestors, what parents are clamoring for is that their schools stay open, that their teachers remain on the job and that the CPS board and the state legislature give them the support they need.

I mean no offense to the university researchers. They did what they do best. They crunched the numbers and found the metrics don’t work.

But here’s my research question: Is a great teacher a great teacher on the north shore but somehow is no longer a great teacher on the west side?

They’ve been using essentially the same performance review systems.

When asked about this, here’s what brother Mike said at the press conference yesterday. The guy is brilliant. And I say that not just because he’s my brother.

Video of Mike by Tim Furman.