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Editorial Observer

Principal and Teacher, a Complex Duet

A first-grade class in Chicago. The city has turned to evaluations that involve more classroom observation by administrators.Credit...Jim Young/Reuters

Dedicated principals tend to work endless, exhausting hours. Along the way, they struggle with budgets, staffing problems, disengaged parents, gang violence, holes in the roof and finding clean clothing for impoverished children who arrive disheveled and unwashed.

Clarice Berry, president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, recently described the public school principal’s life in her city as “near impossible.” She explained: “It is impossible to come to the end of the day and say you finished that day’s work. That just doesn’t happen.”

The harried principals of Chicago have even more to do since the city introduced a new teacher evaluation system that produced its first teacher ratings this month. The possibilities and pitfalls of the new system are on vivid display in a probing analysis by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, an influential research group. The study includes important lessons for the 40 states that are constructing new evaluation systems and especially for large cities that plan to introduce systems similar to Chicago’s.

In addition to taking on the evaluation challenge, school administrators across the county will oversee installation of the rigorous new Common Core standards, adopted by all but a handful of states. The ambitious learning goals are intended to move schools away from rote learning and memorization and toward intensive writing and high-level reasoning skills.

Traditionally, principals reviewed teachers by making brief class visits, and then declared almost every teacher excellent or at least competent. Struggling teachers did not get the help they needed and disastrous ones stayed on the job.

The new evaluation regimes taking hold across the country call for administrators to perform more frequent observations, during which they focus closely on things like the classroom environment, how well lessons are planned, and whether or not the teacher engages students and conveys information effectively.

This approach — and the mentoring that is supposed to support the teachers — will require a great deal of training for principals and an enormous investment of time, something school administrators don’t have. Beyond that, for the new system to work, administrators need the trust of teachers, who often view the evaluations as part of a plan to dislodge them from their jobs.

Some of the bad feeling in Chicago is a hangover from last year’s acrimonious teachers’ strike, which itself was partly a product of bad blood between the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the leader of the teachers’ union, Karen Lewis.

Despite this history, teachers have responded to the new system in generally favorable terms, according to the consortium’s analysis. Eighty-seven percent reported that the evaluator had provided fair and unbiased assessments of their work. Ninety-four percent of school administrators said the classroom observations and the conversations with teachers that followed had deepened the discussion about teaching. And principals said they had seen instructional improvements that seemed to flow from those conversations.

The study also suggests that principals desperately need better training in how to help teachers improve. One administrator said of struggling teachers: “There’s 15 things they need to get better at, and so all 15 of them are important, where do I begin?” Another spoke of struggling to find the right ways to reach teachers with markedly different sensibilities. Some do well with the direct approach, he said, but the phrase “this is what you should do” turns others right off.

Lack of time is a huge challenge. The average elementary school administrator in Chicago, for example, spent over two weeks solely on teacher observations. The workload will increase for all principals next year, when tenured as well as nontenured teachers will be evaluated. For a high school principal, the study says, that could take six and a half weeks. Principals at all levels say they are already sacrificing other important duties, like working directly with students and parents.

A majority of teachers surveyed felt that student test scores counted for too much in their evaluation. But many did not understand how the ratings were calculated; some thought they were based entirely on scores, but the weight given to test scores ranges from zero to 25 percent, depending on the grade level and subject. The rest of the rating is based on a principal’s observations of the classroom. Clearly, the city needs to do a better job explaining the process.

Despite the concerns about test scores, the teachers generally believed that the evaluators who observed them were fair and accurate. Some of the mixed feelings are no doubt tied to the fact that these evaluations turn principals into both judges and coaches. If you were a teacher, would you voluntarily confess to weaknesses that might be used against you at the end of the year? An able, self-assured teacher might have no problem with this. A struggling, less-confident teacher could reasonably view that kind of disclosure as too great a risk.

The Chicago researchers rightly warn that “if there is not a level of trust and transparency across all sectors of the district, the positive sentiments toward using this system to improve practice could be replaced by contention and disengagement.” States and cities that hope to follow Chicago’s model need to keep that caution in mind.

Reformers have sometimes described teacher evaluations as data exchanges, in which information is shared and logical conclusions are reached. But the Chicago example shows that this process is anything but mechanical. The new systems will succeed or fail depending on how well they accommodate basic feelings like anxiety and whether they inspire confidence in the teachers they are meant to help.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Principal and Teacher, A Complex Duet. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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