Above the Line: A Framework Too Big

Above the Line: The Table She Asked For

A child cried at dinner because no one waited to eat together, the way her class does at lunch. At Alief Montessori, independence is taught by arranging the room so the habit gets practiced again and again.

Jason Kjos's problem with Marzano was not the ideas. It was the size.

Menahga had used the framework. Kjos liked parts of it. But he kept thinking about the young teacher staring at 65 components and trying to decide what to fix first.

That is not much of a growth plan. It is a menu too long to order from.

Kjos has a blunt phrase for what happens when evaluation gets that large. Most teacher evaluation frameworks, he said, become "jumping through hoops to get them done."

Menahga is a small rural district in Wadena County, Minnesota. Kjos named a few things that make the district unusual: small classes, few behavior issues, and a shorter school year. That matters. Smallness can make some kinds of coaching easier. But smallness is not the whole story.

The more interesting part is how Menahga keeps teachers from trying to improve everything at once.

Kjos described a cabinet that looks at how the school is doing and decides what teachers should focus on. The point is simple. Before a teacher is asked to carry the whole framework, the school narrows the work.

A teacher can still self-evaluate. An administrator can still observe. The district can still care about good instruction in full. But the next step is smaller than the framework.

Teachers also go watch other teachers teach. Kjos said teachers observe three other teachers each year.

That changes the feel of evaluation. Teachers are not just waiting to be observed. They are looking for practice in the building. If one teacher has a strong way to manage discussion, check for understanding, handle transitions, or keep students working, another teacher can see it, borrow it, and try it.

That is one of the easiest things to lose in a formal evaluation system. The strongest teaching in a school often stays trapped in individual classrooms. Menahga has a way to let it move.

The PLCs do similar work. Teachers work on specific practices together. The point is not to talk about instruction forever. Try the thing. Look at what happened. Adjust.

Menahga also uses common assessments for classes. That keeps the conversation from stopping at whether the teacher tried the strategy. The harder question is whether students learned more because of it.

Kjos even used intervention language for adults. Underperforming teachers, he said, need Tier 1 intervention too.

Schools already understand this logic with students. A student falls behind, and the system is supposed to respond early. Kjos was applying the same idea to teachers. Do not wait until the formal process becomes a record of what went wrong. Step in while the work can still change.

Minnesota law leaves room for that kind of local design. It allows school boards and teachers' representatives to create local evaluation and peer review processes, and it frames evaluation around growth plans, peer review, collaboration, professional learning, student data, and support for teachers not meeting standards.¹ The law leaves room for evaluation to be more than a score.

That matters because Kjos was not describing a better form. He was describing a better field for the form to land in.

Louise Stoll and her colleagues make a similar point in their review of professional learning communities. They describe teacher capacity as more than skill. It also depends on motivation, organizational conditions, culture, and support.² Kjos did not use that language. But the Menahga system depends on those pieces: a shared focus, chances to learn from peers, short cycles of practice, evidence from students, and support before failure hardens.

"When you ripen," Kjos said, "you soon become rotten."

It is an old line, and he meant it plainly. A teacher can get good and stop changing. A school can get proud and stop asking questions. A district can keep the paperwork moving and mistake that for growth.

Kjos did not seem worried only about low scores. He seemed more worried about adults deciding they had already arrived.

That helps explain another part of Menahga that might otherwise sound like a side note. Kjos talked about his "pork feed," an annual event where he smokes a couple hundred pounds of pork at the school. People come. The district listens to what they want.

It is not an evaluation strategy in the narrow sense. But it fits the same belief about schools. Adults are more willing to be honest when the relationship is intact. Teachers have to believe that being observed is not a setup. Parents have to believe that change is being made in service of their children. In a small town, school trust and community trust run through the same pipes.

Kjos put the larger idea this way: plant a beautiful tree in a bad field, and it is going to die.

That line explains why the framework debate can only go so far. Marzano can have useful fundamentals. Danielson can have useful language. Hunter can have useful structure. A local framework can borrow from all of them.

The question is what kind of school all that language lands in.

In Menahga, it lands in a district where leaders choose a narrower focus, teachers look at their own practice, peers watch peers, PLCs test ideas in short cycles, common assessments bring the conversation back to students, and struggling teachers are supposed to get support early.

That does not make teaching simple. It makes improvement possible.

The framework can stay big. The next step cannot.