NFL analogies get tossed around all the time in the education world. And they get fumbled too. The most recent example: In December Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was talking about giving teachers feedback about their performance when she said, “Football teams do this all the time. They look at the tape after every game. Sometimes they do it during the game.” Not exactly. It’s against NFL rules to use video during a game. But Weingarten was onto something important: “They’re constantly deconstructing what is working and what isn’t working,” she said of pro teams. The heavy use of data and performance evaluations is indeed key to success in the NFL. But unfortunately, very few schools are good at this kind of thing.
For a deeper look at what educators might be able to learn from pro football, I talked with Tim Daly, a leading education reformer and president of the New Teacher Project, which trains teachers and conducts research and policy analysis, and his brother Brendan Daly, a former teacher who coaches the defensive line for the St. Louis Rams.
TIME: Let’s start with Weingarten’s statement about the use of tape. Is she right? How intensive is evaluation in the NFL?
Brendan Daly: She’s right in general, but it’s against the rules to use tape in the game. Instead, photographs are used. There are four photographs of each play taken from the sidelines and end zones, pre-snap and post-snap. With the photos you’re trying to see your alignments, what mistakes you’ve made and corrections you can make. I look for the tendencies of the offense and what they’re doing to us. [The set of photos] confirms if they’re doing what you thought or doing something differently. The video you’ve watched all through the week leading up to the game gives you the foundation to make those decisions during the game. During the game, the photos come in a book, and when I’m done looking at the book, the players ask to see it as well.
We evaluate everything. When we start training camp, we watch every practice with the players, and at the end of the day, we give a numeric grade to each player, so two practices a day means two grades. During the regular season, we don’t grade practice but grade every play of every game. We grade on technique, and we grade on production. Players have each other’s grades in front of them as we go through this.
Tim Daly: In schools it’s almost the opposite. [Video] is almost never used for making adjustments in the near term. There are not many conversations in general between administrators and teachers about what’s happening in the classroom and how to adjust quickly. When we did the “Widget Effect” [report in 2009], we found that most teachers got zero, one, or two periods of observation over the year. In some districts, we found that veterans were not even observed every year. It’s not a priority in policy, and many collective bargaining agreements limit evaluation.
