School Evaluation and Assessment of Teachers in Greek Primary and Secondary Education

Abstract

  The aim of this article is to briefly describe the successive efforts made in Greece from the fall of the dictatorship (1974) until now (2011), in order to establish a system of school evaluation and teachers’ assessment in primary and secondary education. All the above efforts led to failure for different reasons, the most important of which was the strong reaction of the teachers against the official propositions. The absence of evaluation for a long period has had a negative impact on Greek Education and some of these aspects are mentioned in the article. An additional goal of this paper is to explain teachers’ reactions and the failure of the Greek Government to administer a system for evaluating both teachers and the way schools function. The authors claim that the above situation is the result of many factors including the bad experience regarding the role of inspectors, the ideological and political conflict on the subject of evaluation, its misconception, the unstable and discontinuous educational policy in Greece and the fragmentary character of the evaluation reform projects. Finally, the authors make some suggestions in order to overcome the above problems.