Avaliação de professores - 'the american way'

Os sindicatos e o governo dos Estados Unidos têm andado às voltas com um tema bizarro - a avaliação dos prpofessores.
Imagine-se que, nos EUA (atenção, nos EUA...), a avaliação é ineficaz - os professores avaliam-se uns aos outros, têm todos notas muito boas (apesar de mais de metade conhecerem colegas incompetentes), a avaliação não tem em conta os resultados obtidos pelos alunos, e os professores mais novos não têm qualquer hipótese porque os mais antigos ocupam não largam o osso.
Estranho país, este.
Agora, o governo anda a tentar negociar com os sindicatos uma mudança do sistema.
O New York Times - um jornal de referência, sabem o que é? - dedicou um editorial ao assunto. Eis alguns excertos:

- She [a líder de um dos sindicatos] not only echoed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s call for evaluation systems that take student achievement into account but also expressed support for “a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers.”

- The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.

- The process shortchanges students, who are saddled with ineffective teachers. It also hurts the careers of the talented beginners who rarely get the help and guidance they need to become master teachers.

- Ms. Weingarten called for a new collaboration between schools and unions that would replace this “perfunctory waste of time.” She called on the states to adopt basic professional teaching standards that would spell out what teachers should know and be able to do.

- She rightly warned against using test scores in crude, statistically invalid ways, and proposed a sophisticated analysis to determine if students were showing real growth under a given teacher.