Legal Aspects of Teacher Evaluation

The performance evaluation of tenured teachers in the public schools raises significant legal issues particularly in the context of recent education reform efforts. Collective bargaining has expanded to become a central part of labor relations in public schools and has served often to neutralize threatening evaluations. As reform efforts demand more and tougher performance evaluation, teachers and unions will mount more vigorous defense and press for the right to bargain the criteria, ratings and other key evaluation pieces. Consequently, legal issues will continue to expand into teacher evaluation. In all evaluation the burden of proof rests with the district which must design clear, unambiguous criteria. All states have some tenure or continuing contract laws which also provide for notice and a hearing before dismissal of tenured teachers. Often a teacher may seek to eliminate a negative evaluation by invalidating the evaluation process as unfair on some grounds. When an evaluator rates a teacher "unsatisfactory" the evaluation clearly becomes summative and the evaluator must be careful to preserve the integrity of the data and good faith in the process at all costs. (Contains 20 references.) (JB)