They are cashing in on education reform. Politicians will grasp onto anything. Its a racket. Just publish a book telling teachers that they are doing it wrong, and this is the right way. Florida gave each teacher a copy of one of Marzano's books.

We didn't even get a book, just some printed outlines. I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I spent about 3 hours today on the "pre-conference" paperwork. This is worse than student teaching. Plus we have to do it on our "free" time.

either Danielson or Marzano. Marzano, the prolific writer of books giver of trainings about how to improve teaching:

http://www.marzanoresearch.com/instructional-strategies

My district is using Danielson. What's really bizarre is that I swear I read something back when I first heard about her, in which she said that her staff development model wasn't about evaluating teachers, but improving their practice. That part of her work is not bad. The Danielson evaluation model is a nightmare; too many domains with too many parts to keep track of, and the rubrics make teachers responsible for what students SHOULD be responsible for, just like the current demand to use student test scores to evaluate and pay teachers.

He actually introduces himself with, "I sell books." A friend of mine met him at a conference once, and that's how he introduced himself.

(TYNT) in 'what makes good teaching'.

I don't know if she's done good work or not so good. But now we have to evaluate all teachers according to HER ideas.

The latest unfunded mandate, foisted upon schools. It certainly doesn't seem like anything positive. Maybe it is just bad timing. But I always am suspicious of anything that says or dictates conformity in teaching. That is not good. As General Patton said "If we are all thinking alike, then nobody is thinking." (I may be paraphrasing that, but I agree with the sentiment.)

As a principal, I have to spend THREE days, yep, 24 hours, getting trained in her method. I will have to pass a test to be certified, and in this test, I have to grade (I believe videos) of teachers, and my grading must match, or be within some range, of whatever TPTB decide.

I thought my master's degree and education specialist degrees taught me how to evaluate teachers? Well, I guess not.

It has to be torturous, devoting so much of your day to endless paperwork. For those who don't know, each teacher evaluation must have a pre-conference and post-conference as well as the actual evaluation. There is tons of writing involved. Beginning teachers are evaluated several times per year.

It has to take valuable time away from the children. I am convinced it is yet another way the politicians are getting rich while imposing punitive measures on public schools.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/who-is-charlotte-danielso_b_3415034.html


A New York Times editorial endorsed the state imposed teacher evaluation system for New York City as "an important and necessary step toward carrying out the rigorous new Common Core education reforms." The system is based on the Danielson Framework for Teaching developed by Charlotte Danielson and marketed by the Danielson Group of Princeton, New Jersey. Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city's teachers union, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also announced that they are generally pleased with the plan. According to the Mayor, "Good teachers will become better ones and ineffective teachers can be removed from the classroom." He applauded State Commissioner John King for "putting our students first and creating a system that will allow our schools to continue improving."

Unfortunately, nobody, not the Times, the New York State Education Department, the New York City Department of Education, nor the teachers' union have demonstrated any positive correlation between teacher assessments based on the Danielson rubrics, good teaching, and the implementation of new higher academic standards for students under Common Core. A case demonstrating the relationship could have been made, if it actually exists. A format based on the Danielson rubrics is already being used to evaluate teachers in at least thirty-three struggling schools in New York City and by one of the supervising networks. Kentucky has been using an adapted version of Danielson's Framework for Teaching to evaluate teachers since 2011 and according to the New Jersey Department of Education, sixty percent of nearly 500 school districts in the state are using teacher evaluation models developed by the Danielson Group. The South Orange/Maplewood and Cherry Hill, New Jersey schools have used the Danielson model for several years.

According to the Times editorial, the "new evaluation system could make it easier to fire markedly poor performers" and help "the great majority of teachers become better at their jobs." But as far as I can tell, the new evaluation system is mostly a weapon to harass teachers and force them to follow dubious scripted lessons...The group's services come at a cost, which is not a surprise, although you have to apply for their services to get an actual price quote. Individuals who participated in a three-day workshop at the King of Prussia campus of Arcadia University in Pennsylvania paid $599 each. A companion four-week online class cost $1,809 per person. According to a comparison chart prepared by the Alaska Department of Education, the "Danielson Group uses 'bundled' pricing that is inclusive of the consultant's daily rate, hotel and airfare. The current fee structure is $4,000 per consultant/per day when three or more consecutive days of training are scheduled. One and two-day rates are $4,500/per consultant/per day. We will also schedule keynote presentations for large groups when feasible. A keynote presentations is for informational/overview purposes and does not constitute training in the Framework for Teaching."

Charlotte Danielson is supposed to be "an internationally-recognized expert in the area of teacher effectiveness, specializing in the design of teacher evaluation systems that, while ensuring teacher quality, also promote professional learning" who "advises State Education Departments and National Ministries and Departments of Education, both in the United States and overseas." Her online biography claims that she has "taught at all levels, from kindergarten through college, and has worked as an administrator, a curriculum director, and a staff developer" and to have degrees from Cornell, Oxford and Rutgers, but I can find no formal academic resume online. Her undergraduate degree seems to have been in history with a specialization in Chinese history and she studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and educational administration and supervision at Rutgers. While working as an economist in Washington, D.C., Danielson obtained her teaching credentials and began work in her neighborhood elementary school, but it is not clear in what capacity or for how long. She developed her ideas for teacher evaluation while working at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and since 1996 has published a series of books and articles with ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development). I have seen photographs and video broadcasts online, but I am still not convinced she really exists as more than a front for the Danielson Group that is selling its teacher evaluation product...The United Federation of Teachers and the online news journal Gotham Schools both asked a person purporting to be Charlotte Danielson to evaluate the initial Danielson rubrics being used in New York City schools. In a phone interview reported on in Gotham Schools, Danielson was supposedly in Chile selling her frameworks to the Chilean government, "Danielson was hesitant to insert herself into an union-district battle, but did confirm that she disapproved of the checklist shown to her." The checklist "was inappropriate because of the way it was filled out. It indicated that the observer had already begun evaluating a teacher while in the classroom observation. She said that's a fundamental no-no." Bottom line is that 40% of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student test scores on standardized and local exams and 60% on in-class observations. In this post I am most concerned with the legitimacy of the proposed system of observations that are based on snap-shots, fifteen minute visits to partial lessons, conducted by supervisors potentially with limited or no classroom experience in the subject being observed, followed by submission of a multiple-choice rubric that will be evaluated online by an algorithm that decides whether the lesson was satisfactory or not.



MORE AT LINK

http://www.danielsongroup.org/Default.aspx


SHE'S MIGHTY HOMELY-LOOKING....

http://www.danielsongroup.org/article.aspx?page=charlotte

I was looking for the "rest of the story" if you know what I mean!

Before talking about ideas or worth, we first point out a woman's outward appearance.

I mean, she's homely. What else needs to be said?


On edit: She's firmly constructivist. Argh. (Not my favorite philosophy of teaching. You really have to struggle to get kids to get the photoelectric effect using that approach. Then, if you're trying to teach real thinking skills, you're stuck answering a billion questions that they don't need to know in the few days for the topic. And let's not get into the strong and weak forces.)

We must have crossed paths.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11247893#post7

Someone is raking in the big bucks .... wonder what kind of kickbacks are going to the politicians who foisted this upon us.

And she might be a fictional character! HA! They could have picked someone more pleasant looking like Betty Crocker!

The Charlotte Danielson Who Is Getting Rich on the Misuse of Her Intellectual Property

While I could speak until I drop about the absurdity of standardized assessment as the heavy indicator in learning, what is equally—if not more baffling—is the way in which teachers are handled and currently evaluated according to new systems across the country. They are based on Charlotte Danielson’s Effective Teaching Rubric and the rubric, as implemented in New York and many, many other states, is composed of 22 domains and sub-domains of observable and non-observable teaching practices or requirements that are meant to determine not only the effectiveness, but the development of a teacher along a spectrum that ranges from ineffective to highly effective.

Teachers, of course, use rubrics all the time so it only stands to reason that they might be employed in their own professional evaluations, however not only is such a comically huge rubric off-putting and worrisome, this particular one has no scientific research, focus group, control group, or experimental backing—no evidence based research of the sort teachers are legally mandated to employ themselves in classroom practice—that has ever been presented to justify its ubiquitous installation in national standards.

Additionally, Charlotte Danielson herself appears to have very little substantial evidence to credential her existence. The artifacts are few and far between. There are rumors swirling that she is a fiction developed by the Danielson Group to propagate their highly lucrative consulting services and texts. Purportedly she appears and speaks about her research, and is generally dismayed at its usage…but there is no empirical evidence of this in the media, and the Google Results yield very little beyond corporate propaganda and this very theory.

....Regardless of the actual existence of the philosopher, the philosophy has been used to Machiavellian ends to assist in the destruction of public education by removing the art from teaching. There is no room for creative, thoughtful practice. There are no teachable moments. You have to follow the script outlined by CCLS and Danielson—this is the unfathomable “even worse” evolution of the boxed-curriculum. Both the CCLS and Danielson leave very little room for creativity—indeed they call for so much mathematical data and assessment they hardly leave time for teachers to have lives. If the turbulent tides of education don’t soon change course—almost entirely—you can expect that many teachers won’t hive livelihoods either, because the system and the expectation, in light of the disorganization, misinformation, and under-resourcing of public education is designed to drown the system and sink us all in the crashing waves of an engineered perfect storm.

Scripted learning is an insult to teachers, and it harms students.

From Huff Post

Who Is Charlotte Danielson and Why Does She Decide How Teachers Are Evaluated?

A format based on the Danielson rubrics is already being used to evaluate teachers in at least thirty-three struggling schools in New York City and by one of the supervising networks. Kentucky has been using an adapted version of Danielson's Framework for Teaching to evaluate teachers since 2011 and according to the New Jersey Department of Education, sixty percent of nearly 500 school districts in the state are using teacher evaluation models developed by the Danielson Group. The South Orange/Maplewood and Cherry Hill, New Jersey schools have used the Danielson model for several years.

According to the Times editorial, the "new evaluation system could make it easier to fire markedly poor performers" and help "the great majority of teachers become better at their jobs." But as far as I can tell, the new evaluation system is mostly a weapon to harass teachers and force them to follow dubious scripted lessons.

Ironically, in a pretty comprehensive search on the Internet, I have had difficulty discovering who Charlotte Danielson really is and what her qualifications are for developing a teacher evaluation system. According to the website of the Danielson Group, "the Group consists of consultants of the highest caliber, talent, and experience in educational practice, leadership, and research." It provides "a wide array of professional development and consulting services to clients across the United States and abroad" and is "the only organization approved by Charlotte Danielson to provide training and consultation around the Framework for Teaching."

More:

Administrators are instructed how to race in and out of rooms and punch codes into an IPad with evaluations actually completed in cyberspace by an algorithm. Teachers will fail when supervisors do not see things that took place before or after they entered the room, if lesson plans do not touch on all twenty-two dimensions, or when teachers adjust their lessons to take into account student responses.

On Edit:

It took me a while to find this post I remembered from cachukis from 2011 here at DU. It describes Danielson's system

There is an inherent antagonism built into the system. The evaluators are overworked and limited to specific criteria for evaluation, very cookie cutter by the way. They are required to present an explanation of that evaluation and offer recommendations based on that rubric. That's it.

Read Danielson's book, look at her tapes. Copy. I'll be back to see how well you mimic. Your students better be able to pass the test based on your mimicry. If they don't you are not a good mimic and must go.

My principal gave me good marks, but reminded me that I had to be more Danielson. That was what was expected.

The evaluators are human and have personal judgement experiences. They all want to do a good job, but have moved into a totalitarian system. Rebel, you're out. Once you've made that move you are defending that paycheck.(Sinclair anyone?)

More at the link.

We have not been properly prepared and yet here we are in the throes of this hell. It is beyond complicated for teachers and administrators alike. We are all running around trying to implement something that just about no one has a complete grasp on.... OJT, I guess. Too darn bad that peoples' careers are on the line because of it.

I have taught for almost 30 years plus subbing for about 10 more. Yet I have to be evaluated like a student teacher. Plus, the framework is not even applicable to my subject area (art). It is demeaning and demoralizing.

If enough people stood up for teachers, they would not be in this situation of being treated like 2nd class citizens. But since it is the policy of both parties and the president to turn public schools into charters run by private companies....most even here at DU accept it readily..

I am SO glad I am retired.

I am a School Nurse and have decided that I have had enough crap. This is my last year and from the buzz I think there are even more of us leaving. If you think it is hard to replace a School Teacher, try finding a School Nurse. Districts think they are competing against other districts for Nurses but they are really competing against hospitals. Hospitals have deeper pockets and you have less liability, responsibility, and hassle.

I have done my community service and this late in my life am looking to pad my retirement while I am still healthy enough to work.

Parents volunteered, and can you imagine how they fed the gossip about which kids needed clean clothes, new jackets, etc. It was awful.

I started to keep clothes in my classroom closet for those who did not have enough clothes, and I gave them out privately.

School nurses are vital, so how in the world did we get this way?

giving insulin (most prone to med mistakes even in hospitals by RN's), identifying and correctly treating an asthmatic. And how about those folks that believe life threatening food allergies are a lot of hooey, and coaches that think you can shake a concussions off.

How did we get this way. Politicians peeling off funds to give sweetheart contract deals to their friends or tax breaks to their donors. They try to con everyone in to believing these cuts don't hurt education by using the scores on these useless tests to prove that students are still getting a quality education. When the veneer starts to crack it is the bad teacher's fault. They are blamed for things beyond there control and because they dummy down the test, teachers spend more time teaching test taking strategies than content. They can guess the answer but can't understand the content.

Oh. You didn't even mention head lice. I am so there with you.

My most unfavorite principal ever decided that head lice were no longer a problem. Just like that. It was one of the worst outbreaks we had ever had. We were told to ignore any cases. The parents caught the worst of it, trying to get things under control. One was so mad I told her to go to the county superintendent not to blame me. She did. He appeared in my classroom not long after that. He even asked me if I felt intimidated....I said yes. He said he understood.

And... in the Idiot Wind that's presently blowing through public education... it's selling like hotcakes.

Lot's of good stuff here:

>>>I initiated a short and amiable email exchange with Ms.Danielson in early 2012. She seems extraordinarily committed to her work. And anxious to defend it. So it couldn’t have been easy for to acknowledge the following: “However, I also can see that it would be inappropriate to require teachers of profoundly handicapped students to create higher-order questions.”

“No kidding”, I muttered to no one in particular. From my POV, I felt like like a dentist extracting an impacted, wisdom tooth from an unanethesized 600-pound gorilla. Even this admission of the staggeringly obvious didn’t come easy. Some analysts ( blogosphere edu-sleuth Susan Ohanian, for instance: http://www.susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=1094) have pointed to a previous collaboration between Danielson and the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching… the implication being that there is Gates money behind the Danielson Framework, pushing it indiscriminately , even into places where it plainly doesn’t belong. Of this I know not. I do know that the Gates Foundation has poisoned forever the public debate on public school reform nationally by discretely funding front groups and ‘think tanks’ that then produce “data” and “advocacy” that support Gates Foundation positions on pubic education policy.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/education/22gates.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&

Is something analogous happening here? It’s difficult to know. But I do think it’s incumbent on Ms. Danielson… given Gates’ scuzzy history… to make plain the full extent of her collaboration with him and be utterly clear on the question of exactly who is paying exactly whom for exactly what.>>>>

The rest:http://paulvhogan.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/the-district-75-danielson-pilot-crash-burn-fizzle/

Here is the part that jumped out at me, however:

Alas, we are kept in the dark. And, while were at it, let’s look at the building administrators: our principals and their assistant principals — the bottom rung of the ed admin ladder and consequently the paramecia, if you will, of the now-immense corporate “reform” movement food chain. These grim souls do the dirty work. Now functioning as professional nit-pickers and fault-finders, they are in fact ex-teachers (usually) with very limited ( almost always) hands-on experience themselves. They nonetheless go into classrooms, ( in teams, if you can believe it) observe the instruction in progress and try to make the Danielson-based Talent Management Rubric sound relevant to a situation where no objective, clear-thinking adult believes it has the slightest applicability. (same source as above.)

It figures that there is a connection to Gates. (Also to ETS.) I can just imagine Jon Stewart making a fist and muttering "GATES"!

Sort of....

Could you please post the link so I can send it to my fellow sufferers?

Thank you so much! It's brilliant.

I copied and pasted the URL from youtube and the video showed up here. Can you click the youtube icon at the bottom of the video? It should redirect you to youtube proper and you can get the link from there.

This is brilliant! I suffered through a Danielson evaluation last year. What a crock!

Just cut and paste the link at the top when it goes to youtube.

We can all use a little humor to get through this.

I am over these domains. It's like Greek to me. I feel like I am trying to teach myself a college course.

gets weeded out with corporatization)

because she's attempted to take education and fit every bit of it into a little, tidy box, not allowing for changes in the student population year to year, change in the economy (which affects women and kids more than it does men), number of special needs kids being mainstreamed in the classroom or dozens of other variables teachers have to deal with among their students.

Every teacher evaluated by this framework seems to go from superior to substandard in a heartbeat. The "experts" that are supposed to evaluate the teachers spend far too little time in the classroom and far too much time in the teacher's lounge looking at their paperwork.

This, like other ivory tower scams, will eventually be scrapped. In its wake will be thousands of demoralized teachers and ill served students.

(No, I'm not a teacher, but many friends are)

It must take them hours and hours for each teacher -- pre-observation conference (about an hour), observation (90 min.) and post-conference, plus the paperwork.

Are their any principals here? What say you about the time involved?

I do know that our principals have spent hours watching "videos" -- on Teachscape, I presume. I do not know what other training they have had. One of our senior principals is retiring this year, in part due to Ms. Danielson.

And usually does.

Danielson lends itself to cut-and-paste commentary... and, alas, that's generally the nature of the much vaunted "feedback" that the teacher gets.

And a ( non-idiot) admin friend who does these evals tells me they're investing on some kind of speech-to-text gizmos ( Yay, even more $$$ for the tech companies!) that will help idiots maximize their output more fully. ( i.e. knock-off more observations in a shorter period of time so they ... admins... don't have to work too hard.)

The trend is toward non-teachers rating teachers and the DFWK is *ideal* for that. Strips away the complexity and nuances involved in the actual transmission of knowledge.

WARPY's got the gist of it, seems to me.

Last edited Wed Mar 5, 2014, 08:08 PM - Edit history (1)

I tailored my lesson EXACTLY to her stupid domains. I cross-referenced every single part of it with domains 2 and 3. And I felt completely out of my element.

I was critiqued that the students were losing interest and pacing wasn't right. Not one damn word about how I followed the formula down to the letter. I asked probing questions and had a lively discussion. I had artifacts out the wazoo and visual aids. I had groups and inclusive participation. It was partially student-led (for third-graders). I made accomodations for special needs. I even re-arranged the damn furniture.

I have my post-conference this week and then I am done.* I gathered artifacts for 4 freaking hours this morning and assembled them in the $20.00 binder I bought at Office Max yesterday. I still have to photo-copy about a ream of additional materials and put together a portfolio of examples.

*Done with teaching. I am retiring in June and this is the biggest crock of sh*t I have seen in nearly four decades in education.

Mission accomplished... from THEIR pov. It's public education in the Obama era.

Hope you have enough years in to qualify for pension, etc. Lots do not.

Sounds dumb, but sorry you had to end your career on such a sour note.

Cheap labor is SO much more cost-effective than paying people who know what they're doing.

If you can afford it, enjoy yourself in retirement. ( It'll drive them crazy.)

This was my bump year and I can finally retire and forget about it all. I do feel sorry for the younger teachers who have years of brow-beating ahead of them.

The post-conference went so badly that I just knew they were trying to get rid of me. She had nothing positive to say. After 19 years of perfect evaluations, I guess all of a sudden I'm a total fuck-up.

None of it was worth it. The fix was in from the beginning. I honestly don't know how those robotic clones (principals) that they hire now can sleep at night.

From a demoralized already (and I haven't even started the training!) principal. I will be joining your ranks of retired soon.

Our most senior principal (a really fine educator and veteran teacher in the district) is retiring this year. Rumor has it that he is fed up, too. I am betting that he will soon be followed by the next in line. The rest of them are younger and from outside the district. It seems they were brought in for the purpose of administering this travesty.

Good luck with your training. I understand that it is grueling.

I am feeling pretty isolated and alone on this. I don't think I can keep pasting a smile on my face and continue to take the insult to my intelligence ("Hey, forget all that education you had on being a principal, now we are all going to be THIS way!&quot .

I appreciate your kind words. I have no interest in inflicting any pain or extra work on teachers, but I am pretty sure that is how WI is setting us up to fail.

>>>I honestly don't know how those robotic clones (principals) that they hire now can sleep at night.>>>>>

As the John Huston character says in Chinatown: Most people never have to face the fact that, under the right circumstances, they're capable of *anything*.

A lot of people will do whatever they are told to do. Or *paid* to do. No matter how unethical, etc.


The "obedience" experiments of the nineteen seventies come to mind. I think the psych was.... Seligman(?).

I should have paid closer attention.

Forty lashes w. a wet noodle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

by those enacting the new evaluation system in my district, that the POINT is to find fault; to focus on critiquing.

I, too, have found the new requirements for planning, gathering and documenting data, self-reflection, etc. that is part of the new system to be excessively time-consuming and burdensome.

And I've got an administrator trying to be supportive and positive about the whole thing.

She didn't have one nice thing to say about my lesson and wasn't interested in all the "artifacts" that I was directed to bring to the post-conference. I felt like a whipped dog. I just wanted it to stop. Now I have to go back for even more brow-beating because I got an "NI" on some minor point.

I submitted my letter of intent to retire the very next morning.

Getting experienced teachers who knew the system before the current deform posse got a hold of it.

It's easier to shove this stuff down the throats of the young and inexperienced.

more like brainwashing. Danielson is a former economist, with no more education than I.

I "snapped" when they talked about making sure you "professional preferences " we're trained out of you.

Your valuable insights could get lost at the end of this one. I would love to read more about what the "training" consists of.

Who is conducting it? Are they from the Danielson Group? I read somewhere that they charge big bucks to put on those training sessions. What a racket.

Today, we all sat around our respective laptops, with earbuds in place, and watched training videos.

I watched, and quickly ran out of ways to say "You're kidding me!!" in polite company if you know what I mean.

It was like being in a funeral home, and I have been in plenty. Most are livelier.

Omg, it sounds even worse that I imagined! Thanks for your reply.

I told my spouse about it when I got home, he said the Nazi propaganda machine couldn't have put together a better system. Now that's harsh!

Last edited Tue Mar 18, 2014, 06:25 PM - Edit history (1)

craziness that is going on in Ohio. Does anyone know if Ohio is using the Danielson framework. It sure sounds like it to me. How to make a hostile work environment, indeed.

I went to the Ohio Dept.of Education website and read some of the sections on teacher evaluation. They do quote Danielson, but they seem to be using their own terminologies. There was also a reference to Race to the Top, so it could be what they came up with for their RTTT application process.

It does seem very similar to Danielson though. Maybe someone from OH will write in and let us know if it is based on her framework. I couldn't stand delving into it any further. It all sounded like gobbledy-gook to me.

It looks super-proscriptive and ultra-structured!

The evaluation process seems completely insane here in Ohio. I know it was instituted state wide. I have not heard anyone say anything good about the evaluation process. The horror stories are increasing exponentially. One 20 year teacher I know was forced to take a day away from her students to observe a first year teacher to "learn" from the new teacher. Now the experienced teacher had both of my children and is one of the best in our district. Another outstanding teacher who works with the most challenged students is being rated in the lowest rating, because her students do not test well. It is an insane system. It is clearly designed, here in Ohio, do destroy our public schools.

I hope parents are getting organized to stop this, but I am afraid most people are not aware of what is going on.

I am in PA which implemented Danielson state-wide this school year. It is a total nightmare.

Yes, they do seem to be targeting veteran teachers for "improvement plans." I do believe it is a systematic program to get rid of veteran teachers and hire more newbies who can be shaped to fit the mold.

Besides that, the evaluation process is extremely time-consuming. That is time that could be much better spent planning meaningful lessons which actually benefit students. It is maddening!

Sadly, I don't think parents have a clue as to what is actually going on.

... on top of it. In NYC they rewrite what Danielson wrote and call it something new ( but still pay Danielson for the training.).

An artificial need for all kinds of "coaching", "mentoring" "consulting" and "staff developer" jobs is created in the process.

Retired principals, cronies and APs often are hired back part-time at *extremely* attractive rates to fill this "void".

less than 5 minutes of actual classroom observation time. The people who are sent out to collect huge fees from the local school district will spend 99% of their time hiding out in the lounge and writing reports based on inadequate observation time.

Morale, already low, will go down the pan.

It's just another educational scam.

I think the total purpose of it... besides cashing in by the consultants, etc.... is to muster out the veteran teachers so they can hire impressionable newbies who are so grateful to have a job that they will jump through any hoop.

I was observed for 25 minutes by a building principal, though. Not outsiders.

Morale is the lowest I have ever seen it. Anyone who can leave is trying to find a way to do so.