Rebecca Sellers, an eighth-grade English teacher at the Lester Pre-K-8 school in Memphis, looked wary as she walked into the teachers’ lounge on a Monday afternoon last fall, says the Hechinger Report. The previous week, the school’s assistant principal, Isaac Robinson, had dropped in, unannounced, to watch Sellers teach as part of Tennessee’s new evaluation system. Now he was about to reveal her scores. As he fiddled with a computer connected to a projector, Robinson asked Sellers how she thought she did.
“I’m not sure how I did because I had to make some adjustments,” said Sellers. Her students tend to do well on state tests, but the lesson hadn’t gone as planned. Her eighth-graders had been stumped by a quick review exercise on pronouns. Sellers had taken an extra 15 minutes to go back over the material…