Performance evaluation of teachers could count toward tenure, if we would take performance evaluation half as seriously as the National Football League does. As it stands, performance evaluation of teachers is a crude, untested mechanism languishing in the past, compared to the sophisticated multi-dimensional assessments of professional football teams.

In the months leading up  to the NFL Draft I was struck by the innumerable dimensions used to evaluate football talent– size, speed, quickness, strength, vertical leap, intelligence,  work ethic, “coach-ability”– these are only a sampling of criteria.  Draft prognosticators have learned to qualify the individual traits to make a complete assessment, such as “He’s only 4.7 in the 50-yard dash, but he’s quick off the ball.”   You could learn something about evaluation by listening to the media talent scouts who devote their entire year to preparing for three days in April, when the football draft ends the mind-numbing speculation.

Here are some insights I filed under “evaluation of complex skills,” based on the evaluation of football prospects.

1) No single trait outweighs the sum of the traits;

2) No statistic has more significance than the so-called “character” variables;

3) The context of the performance (weak opponent vs. a Major Bowl game) matters more than the performance itself;

4) The trajectory of a player’s development is more revealing than the performance of a single year.

Every professional football coach and director of player personnel takes these principles for granted. Why don’t they matter when we evaluate teachers?

Well, of course we don’t evaluate every teacher to the extent that we evaluate two hundred athletes with consummate physical and mental skills, but can’t we learn something about evaluation from the experts here?

Foremost, should the test scores of a teacher’s students sum up the talents of a teacher without considering:

• The context
• The trajectory
• The complementary data
• The “work ethic”?

Of course not, no more than the time of the fifty-yard dash overrules the many other parameters of football talent.

Second, should our coaching and intervention strategies be focused on a student’s success on a two-hour test once a year? Hmm, would a linebacker’s skill be multiplied if we got his 50-yard dash down to 4.5 from 4.7? That’s not what I hear from football coaches, whose jobs depend on successful evaluation of the whole player.

Third, should we just hire enough excellent teachers to manage 40-student classrooms, instead of hiring more teachers of heterogeneous ability to manage 25-student classrooms?  Maybe you could explain to Bill Belichek why two healthy players at each position is enough to keep his team competitive through a sixteen-game season. Depth turns out to be more essential than selectivity in hard-knocks football, and a deep, collaborative faculty also make a viable school.

Fourth, should we assign new teachers the most challenging classes and hold them to same standards as the veteran teachers with their college-prep schedule of classes?  Right, and we also expect the rookie quarterback to run the entire offensive playbook in his first game as a professional football player. And we break him in against the defending league champions, right? And we compare him to the retired previous  quarterback, who will probably get into the Hall of Fame.  Professional football coaches are far too shrewd to spoil young talent.

Sounds pretty stupid when we compare school policies to professional football, doesn’t it? Is this an unfair comparison or should we take a few pages out of the NFL playbook? Can we learn something from the most sophisticated machinery of talent evaluation in the civilized world? Can we consider the evaluation of the teachers of our children as important as the evaluation of our entertainment gods?

When the evaluation of teachers rises to a comparable level to the evaluation of professional athletes, public education will find status and peace. Then we can consider performance evaluation as integral to the tenure system in education.