You have to laugh at the state of education in Florida (and to some extent, the US). While NAEP scores continue to rise throughout the country for 30+ years, you still have people screaming for the latest fad to save us. In the case of Florida, they bought into Marzano’s “causal” framework.

Let’s start with the most obvious problem: it’s ridiculously convoluted. If I were asked to create a parody of an evaluation system, I couldn’t possibly make something more hilarious than Marzano. Even they state it “works best” with a year of planning and training. What the hell kind of evaluation system requires a year of EITHER, yet alone both? (Answer: A very bad one.) If you are going to invest this kind of time (and the resources) into a program, you better have extremely high expectations for it. Sadly, pretty much everyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that this is not going to change anything (yet alone significantly for the better). It shouldn’t be necessary to have to tell ostensibly well-educated people this, but a simpler (and thus more easily/better understood) system will work better than a complicated one.

How many “elements” (items) are in it? The answer is 60, in four “domains” (edu-speak for “areas”; you can’t charge $23/book for using simple language!). The evaluation system would be better as a bulleted list of “suggestions”–it would have saved millions of dollars. In that role (a list of “good suggestions”), Marzano is just fine.

Source: Venting My Cynicism: The Insanity of the Marzano Evaluation System…