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Oh no! The dreaded "establishment" is once again erecting barriers to school reform!

No, not the education establishment. The research establishment. The National Research council's Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA), to be exact. BOTA just released their comments of Race to the Top, and the Department's proposal for performance evaluation comes in for a bit of a drubbing:

BOTA has significant concerns that the Department’s proposal places too much emphasis on measures of growth in student achievement (1) that have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals and (2) that face substantial practical barriers to being successfully deployed in an operational personnel system that is fair, reliable, and valid.

To be fair to the Department, Race to the Top does offer states and districts some wiggle room. It requires that student growth data be a "significant factor" in evaluating teachers' and principals' effectiveness. "Significance" may be in the eye of the beholder, so districts don't have to go whole hog on performance pay.

Still, is it too much to hope that the biggest boosters of performance pay might learn a little humility? Barnett Berry rightly criticizes pundits who "do not report on why unions often object to merit pay" but choose instead to "castigate them as purveyors of the status quo."

The researchers certainly do not close the door on innovations that link evaluation to test scores. But they do ask for the gift of time:

Many of these difficulties could be addressed in time—with further research and development of [Value Added Models] statistical approaches, expansion of testing programs into more grades and subjects, improvement of data bases, and careful development of personnel evaluation systems that use multiple measures. However, it is unlikely that any state at this time could make a proposal for using VAM approaches in an operational program for teacher or principal evaluation that adequately addresses all of these concerns.

This kind of caution provokes derision from some reform advocates. In Dr. King's words, it's "justice delayed." But in the long run, caution might be the salvation of our most ambitious reforms.

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