How does Banker & Tradesman know if Cohen the Columnist is “doing a good job?”

Is it the bags of flirty letters he gets from female readers? Is it the fact that readership plummets and the threats to cancel subscriptions rise when Cohen takes a week off? Is it enough that Cohen turns his stuff in on time and rarely misspells anything? Is it enough that when someone works for as cheaply as Cohen, being sober is more than sufficient?

This murky business of quality control is especially hard with writers; the craft is mysterious and the impact of the product and its impact on the bottom line aren’t easy to determine.

On the other hand, my job status is “at will.” I can be dismissed for reasons good or bad, without doing great harm to the public policy interests of the world at large.

Not true with public school teachers in Boston, of course. They are coddled and fed and watered and licensed and granted tenure protection and compensated in a way that suggests being a teacher is similar to being a coal miner or steel worker or other traditional, union grunt: Everyone is identical; compensation is based on years of service.

Cohen the Columnist is not only jealous, but he is curious as well. It’s not easy to evaluate his performance, but at the end of the day, he could get a big raise or a promotion to sports editor – whether the evaluation was accurate or not.

What about those tenured teachers? How is their performance analyzed, and, does it make any difference?

‘In Sight’ Insight

In most jurisdictions, in the good old days, class visits and observation by a school principal, or really, really, stern assistant principal, provided the oversight to determine whether a teacher received magical job protection after a designated period of time.

Union representatives and lawyers trained in the field of protecting teachers found the process hilarious, dubious and easy to deflect at an administrative hearing. Part of the big, bad, awful truth: Many of the principals weren’t well-trained in personnel analysis – nor was it necessarily easy to determine how “well” a mediocre teacher was doing.

In an where student achievement is tested and reported, and the “school choice” age, where the public school/neighborhood school monopoly has been cracked, the pressure is on to evaluate, teachers based on “output,” or the performances they coax out of their students.

Of course, the teachers’ unions in Massachusetts (as in most jurisdictions) have opposed even the most modest efforts to link student performance to teacher compensation – even a dinky $100 incentive to encourage some Massachusetts teachers to bludgeon high Advanced Placement course participation and test scores.

Merit pay? No. Loss of job protection to teachers whose students don’t perform? No. Teachers can give stirring speeches about how they are mistreated compared to other “professionals,” but when push comes to shove, they want to be treated like Teamsters.

All that being said, the teachers and the school administrators are well aware that the quality of the kids and, most embarrassingly, the quality of the parents, has a profound influence on the performance of the kids in class – whether the classes are taught by a robot, a maniac, or a truly gifted teacher.

That is why the teacher-evaluation craze will never be a complete success, until schooling is constituted as a market environment where schools can provide niche services to different sets of students, using teachers appropriate to the particular task.

The resistance to garnering measurable educational results resides not only amid the teachers, where it is fierce, but also among the vast suburban middle class, which takes great comfort in unverifiable puffery about the “quality” of local schools.

The pressure to treat teachers as professionals, stripped of stultifying job protection and slovenly evaluation tools, won’t come to pass until the students and parents have the freedom and knowledge and motivation that empower real consumers. If families can escape a lousy teacher by choosing another school, in a real educational marketplace, the pressure for teacher evaluation will come alive.