From the state lawmakers across the country to the National Education Association to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, there’s been a call across the country for developing a better system of evaluating teachers.

But based on online response to a story in the Sunday Kalamazoo Gazette, it appears that Michigan teachers aren’t buying it.

More comprehensive teacher evaluations are at the core of a package of tenure reform bills approved last month by the Michigan Legislature and about to be signed into law.

Sunday’s story talked about how many people see better evaluations as one of the best ways to improve the quality of K-12 instruction, by building on an individual teacher’s strengths and addressing their weaknesses.

It also talked about one of the biggest concerns with the evaluation piece, which is using student test scores to measure teacher effectiveness.

But while the story led with a teacher who talked about she used the evaluation process to improve her craft, many of the online responses were from educators who are convinced that the evaluation process will be a punitive system designed to drive people out of the profession.

“The part of this story that you fail to address is that the teachers have no way to deal with issues of evaluations that target them for personal or political reasons? Thanks to the removal of the collective bargaining rights, the teachers have no true voice on how this process will be done!” wrote Frank Munster 707.

Agreed michaelcoferspecs: “Administrators will use this law to target and fire OUTSPOKEN or EXPENSIVE teachers. It will not have one darn thing to do with teacher ‘effectiveness.’ If you believe otherwise, you are either naive or stupid.”

“This law makes it hard to go against a bad administrator and speak up about it,” wrote owomike54321. “They have gained a major upper hand in dismissing a teacher based on personal bias. Not a great time to be in education. Glad I left in 2007. Make twice the money and work half as much.”

Some commenters acknowledged that evaluations, if done right, might be a positive development for the profession.

“I like the idea of using evaluations as targeted professional development and not as punishment,” wrote ibngrad. “Many good teachers do self-reflections and know their areas of weaknesses and would love to improve them given the opportunity. As it stands, with evaluations being a negative incentive, it would make one want to hide their weaknesses not identify them and ask for help. That won’t get us anywhere. You can’t fix what you don’t know is wrong.”

A commenter with the tag name Birdmark wrote that policymakers should be holding students accountable as well as teachers: “Potential exists to make something better out of this if it is done right. And to do it right, the first thing to do is make the testing important to each individual student. Whenever reading about tenure, no one ever mentions this.”

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