A principal finishes a walkthrough and notices a pattern: the teacher is asking questions but not giving students time to formulate a response. The principal makes a note in her evaluation system.
The teacher鈥檚 coach, working separately, has spent three sessions on wait time and questioning strategies. Neither knows what the other is doing. And the teacher鈥攚ho鈥檚 getting feedback from both鈥攈ears one thing from the principal and something slightly different from the coach.
This is not a personnel problem. It鈥檚 a systems problem. And it鈥檚 happening in nearly every district in the country.
Jena Draper wrote in these pages earlier this year that teacher evaluation keeps missing the mark because the systems were built for compliance, not growth. She鈥檚 right. But there鈥檚 a layer underneath that diagnosis worth examining: evaluation data is only one piece of what instructional leaders collect.
There鈥檚 also professional development attendance, coaching logs, walkthrough notes, and informal observation records. In most districts, each of these lives in a different system鈥攐r a different spreadsheet鈥攎anaged by a different department.
The result is that every person responsible for supporting a teacher鈥檚 growth is working from a fragment of the picture. A coach knows what happened in their sessions. A principal knows what they saw during observations. A PD director knows which workshops a teacher attended.
None of them can easily see what the others see. And the teacher feels the fragmentation in the feedback they receive.
What would it look like if they could?
I鈥檝e spent the last decade working with school districts on this question鈥攆irst as a former teacher who experienced fragmented support firsthand, and more recently through conversations with instructional leaders in over 200 districts across 30 states, representing more than 300,000 educators. Three patterns keep showing up.
Documentation eats leadership time
Principals report spending four to six hours on each formal evaluation write-up. Coaches spend 20 to 30 minutes after every session reconstructing what happened from memory.
That鈥檚 time they鈥檙e not in classrooms, not giving feedback, not following through.
The documentation meant to improve teaching quality is actively reducing the time leaders have to do the work that actually improves teaching quality.
Disconnected systems create disconnected feedback
When evaluation data lives in one system and coaching data lives in another, alignment happens by accident鈥攊f it happens at all. In one large district鈥檚 data, the most-attended PD topics and the most-coached areas had almost no overlap.
Nobody planned it that way. Nobody noticed until the data was connected. That district isn鈥檛 an outlier. It鈥檚 just one of the few that looked.
Making high-stakes decisions with low-quality information
District leaders allocate millions of dollars to professional learning every year. When asked whether that investment is changing classroom practice, most can鈥檛 answer with confidence鈥攏ot because they don鈥檛 care, but because the data they鈥檇 need spans three or four disconnected systems.
They know how many teachers attended a workshop. They don鈥檛 know whether the teachers who needed it most were in the room, or whether anything changed in their classrooms afterward.
Working from the same picture
The fix isn鈥檛 more data. Districts are already drowning in data. The fix is connected data鈥攅valuation evidence, coaching records, PD participation, and walkthrough observations visible in one place, to everyone whose job it is to support a teacher鈥檚 growth.
When that happens, the principal who noticed the questioning gap can see that the coach is already on it. The coach can see whether walkthrough data confirms progress. The PD director can check whether the right teachers are in the right sessions. And the teacher gets one coherent direction instead of three conflicting ones.
Some districts are already moving here. They鈥檙e connecting their coaching, evaluation, and PD data into unified systems and discovering things they couldn鈥檛 see before鈥攍ike the fact that teachers who receive coaching aligned to their evaluation focus areas achieve their professional goals at significantly higher rates than those who don鈥檛.
This isn鈥檛 a technology argument. It鈥檚 a leadership argument. The question for superintendents and their cabinets is straightforward: Can the people in your system who are responsible for supporting teacher growth actually see what the other people are doing?
If the answer is no, the feedback loop is broken鈥攁nd no amount of investment in any single piece of it will fix the whole.
The good news is that the pieces already exist in most districts. The coaching conversations are happening. The evaluations are being completed. The PD is being delivered.
The missing step is connecting them鈥攕o that every instructional leader is working from the same picture, and every teacher feels it.
The image above was created by AI.聽
