How can students fail and the teacher be rated as "effective" or "proficient"?

Great article on how most states evaluation systems (including TKES) are essentially used as a list of items to be checked off rather than as a tool to support student learning.  The article was entitled Teachers Get Effective Ratings Even When Student Gains Are Low.  According to the article, 40 states have recently revamped their teacher evaluation systems to include "evidence of student learning."  However, most states have found a way to dance around that element while paying lip-service to it.  According to one study called The Widget Effect, only 1 percent of teachers nationally have received an unsatisfactory rating as of 2009 -- albeit, before most of the changes took place.  But still, just 1%?

Furthermore, only two states require that student growth be a significant part of the eval process -- Indiana and Kentucky.  I would love to see how this has impacted teacher morale as well as student growth.  This hasn't been studied yet as far as I know.

As we dig into TKES, I wonder how effective the state of Georgia has been?  The article was primarily based on a study entitled: RUNNING IN PLACE: How Teacher Evaluations Fail to Live Up to Promises (2013).

I have been at a struggling school the past 7 years, and it never occurred to me to link the two measurements:  student growth and teacher effectiveness.  After reading this, how can the two not be related?  How can a teacher be effective and their students show no improvement?  I shared the article with a couple of my co-workers.  One suggested that since the evaluators treat it like a box to be checked off, the teachers can only follow suit.  We talked about how education works in other countries.  To become an evaluator, you go through a two-day seminar.  How can you learn to evaluate all of the nuances of "effective" instruction in a two-day seminar?  You can't... but, that is what we currently do.  In fact, I'll be getting my certificate this summer through Griffin RESA.  

This is where I would say that cameras in the classroom make sense.  The "dog and pony show" are eliminated when cameras are used.  Evaluators can compare different strategies being used to accomplish the same task.  Do teachers lose some of their autonomy... yes.  I firmly believe that isolation prohibits growth.  In football, we look at film to more closely examine the players and make necessary adjustments.  Teaching needs the same attention.

While it would be interesting to see how cameras would impact the evaluation process, I can not imagine designing an evaluation system where student growth was not at the center of the process.  It is the very reason why we do what we do.  Hopefully, Indiana and Kentucky show the rest of the state gov'ts the way forward.