There is plenty of evidence that many teachers need to upgrade their skills if our kids are to achieve the kind of educational success we all want for them. So, there has been a lot of emphasis recently on making teacher evaluations more meaningful and useful. And, a number of states are ahead of Kentucky in introducing revised teacher evaluation programs.

Unfortunately, Education Week reports in “Teachers' Ratings Still High Despite New Measures” (Subscription?) that early results from recently revamped teacher evaluations in states like Michigan, Florida, Tennessee and Georgia still are coming up short. Despite revisions, principals and others are still ranking enormously high percentages of teachers in those states as good or better. In some of these states with new programs, satisfactory rankings are being given to 97 percent or more of the teachers.

That just won’t work.

Take a look at what the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the ACT college entrance test results look like for some states with recently revised teacher evaluation systems.

Given that education statistics don’t usually change very quickly, and with such low percentages of students passing muster in both middle and high schools, it is clear that nowhere close nearly every teacher in these states is likely to be doing a really great, or even terribly good, job.

These teachers don’t necessarily need to be let go, but they desperately need someone to show them where their weaknesses lie and to insure something is done to deal with those weaknesses. Pretending there are no weaknesses is no way to make improvement.

As EdWeek points out:

“Those results, among the first trickling out from states' newly revamped yardsticks, paint a picture of a K-12 system that remains hesitant to differentiate between the best and the weakest performers—as well as among all those in the middle doing a solid job who still have room to improve.”

While these are only early returns, it still could be that lots of critics are right and the traditional public school system simply isn’t up to the challenge of making real change where it counts – with our teaching corps.