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Sixteen years ago, Charlotte Danielson, an Oxford-trained economist, developed a description of good teaching that became the foundation for attempts by federal and state officials and school districts to quantify teacher performance. The Danielson method - articulated in her book, "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching" (ASCD, 1996) - describes good teaching using numerous criteria within four broad areas of performance: the quality of questions and discussion techniques; a knowledge of students' special needs; the expectations set for learning and achievement; and the teacher's involvement in professional development activities. "If all you do is judge teachers by test results," Ms. Danielson told Ginia Bellafante in an interview for a Big City column in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times last month, "it doesn't tell you what you should do differently."

Before union leaders blasted off an angry letter to the Department of Education to complain about teacher evaluation abuse last month, they had to confirm that their complaints were warranted. To do that, they went straight to the woman who designed the evaluation model the city favors: Charlotte Danielson. Danielson's "Framework for Teaching" has been adopted for evaluation purposes at 33 struggling schools. But the union was receiving reports from chapter leaders that principals in at least one other network of schools were using a checklist based on the model to evaluate teachers. When the UFT obtained a copy of one of the checklists, it shared it with Danielson herself to get her thoughts.

Ms. Moloney has been testing a new framework for evaluating teachers this year at the school, which is actually in Brighton Beach, after receiving training over the summer. It was designed by Charlotte Danielson who wrote a common-sense framework to help both teachers and administrators identify good teaching. It's similar to a tool kit, with 22 strategies every teacher should master. The city is trying out the Danielson framework at 107 schools to learn how much training principals need so they can become certified evaluators once the state's evaluation system goes into effect, said Kirsten Busch, executive director of the Office of Teacher Effectiveness. The city has until next January to negotiate an evaluation system with its teachers' union. At P.S. 100, Ms. Moloney and her teachers believe classroom observations are much more valid than a controversial rating system the city used that was based solely on student progress on state exams.

One thing that the DOE and the UFT seem to have agreed upon is that the instructional framework developed by consultant Charlotte Danielson is potentially useful and constructive, though they disagree about how these rubrics are being used to evaluate teachers currently in NYC schools. Below are the observations of one teacher about how the Danielson rubric is being applied in his school.

Here is a new critique of the Khan Academy, the subject of a widely read post I published Monday about the hype and reality of the academy. You can find that post here. And you can find a response to that post from the founder of the Khan Academy, Sal Khan, by clicking here. The following was written by Christopher Danielson and Michael Paul GHoldenberg. Danielson holds a Ph.D. in mathematics education from Michigan State University. He teaches math at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. He maintains the blog "Overthinking My Teaching" and has written for Connected Mathematics. As of this writing, he has three badges and 11,041 energy points on Khan Academy. Goldenberg holds a master's degree in mathematics education from the University of Michigan, as well as master's degrees in English and psychological foundations of education from the University of Florida. He writes the blog "Rational Mathematics Education" and was a co-founder of the group Mathematically Sane. He currently coaches high school mathematics teachers in Detroit.

I could, of course, create longer rubrics that attempt to cover every eventuality, but such beasts would probably be too thick to attach to a student's paper without leaning my full weight upon the stapler. And even with such a rubric, it's inevitable that some students would still come up with things I never anticipated, because great writing is nuanced, complex and much larger than the sum of the component parts of any rubric humans could devise. This is essentially my complaint about the Danielson framework that will now form the basis of teacher observations in New York State. It features a beast of a rubric that has all the stapler-bending properties mentioned above, coupled with the daunting task of somehow reducing "good teaching" to its component parts so that it can be quantified and evaluated.

"I believe that one of the reasons my framework has become so widely accepted is that it gives voice to what all educators know, that teaching is very complex work, it's a thinking person's job and you cannot follow a cookbook." Charlotte Danielson

The teachers union is threatening to curb its efforts toward new teacher evaluations if the Department of Education doesn't remind principals again that the old evaluation system is still in place. The threat comes at the end of an angry letter sent by UFT Secretary Michael Mendel sent to the DOE yesterday. In the letter, Mendel says that UFT members report some principals are preparing to use the Danielson Framework, an evaluation model that the DOE favors, to rate teachers - even though the union hasn't agreed to the change.

Regarding teachers' unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process - with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake - they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state's teachers' unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can't handle. As the governor put it on Monday, "Our schools are not an employment program." What has been lost in these performances of reproach and imperiousness is the extent to which the city and state, and the related unions (the United Federation of Teachers in the first instance and New York State United Teachers in the second) are generally in agreement over how classroom evaluations ought to be held and what, in fact, constitutes sound teaching. As it happens, the state union was at work devising substantive evaluation reform more than a year before Mr. Cuomo even took office.

Lessons Learned from Classroom Observations, Principal-Teacher Conferences, and District Implementation