Went to an interesting presentation yesterday morning by Arthur Recesso
that examined the types of evidence used to make educational decisions about
teachers. He used the law as a backdrop for talking about evidence and even
referenced the Federal Rules of Evidence. It was a fun presentation and got me
thinking about evidence and education. Is there a [Your State Here] Rules of
Educational Evidence? Should there be? When school administrators make
decisions about teachers based on hearsay evidence (perhaps even hearsay
evidence from kids) should that be enough to take negative employment actions? Do
we ever talk about making judgments about evidence in any of our ed. leader
prep. classes?

On top of that, the thing that we need to think more about
is the system of ensuring the validity of evidence used to make decisions in
schools. In law, the adversarial nature of all proceedings is (at least theoretically)
the thing we use to ensure validity in evidence used to make legal decisions.
Presumably, if some evidence is not valid, the opposing party, using the Federal Rules of Evidence, will point that out which will either eliminate that
evidence or at least devalue it. Is there a corresponding mechanism in
education? What’s there to ensure validity in evidence used to make educational
decisions? The knowledge and goodwill of the administrator? There are
adversarial remedies (think union grievance), but this typically occurs after a
decision has been made at which point irreparable damage may have already been done.

Anyway, some fun evidentiary issues in education to
consider.