When the state of Washington identified the bottom 5 percent of its lowest-performing schools in 2011, five of the 19 schools in Pasco School District made the list. All elementary schools, they had failed to meet academic performance goals every year since the state began measuring schools against them in 2006. Over a three-year period, only 30 percent of the students at these institutions tested at the proficient level in math and reading. The schools also suffered from chronic teacher absences-nearly half of the teachers took at least 10 days of vacation a year, a figure far above the national rate. And yet to judge by some of the actions of Pasco officials, all seemed well. District Superintendent Saundra Hill declined to take advantage of the federal government's School Improvement Grant program, which could have given the schools up to $2 million each to turn themselves around. Even more remarkable, virtually no educator in any of the troubled schools had received a bad performance review. Under a perfunctory system in which employees were rated simply as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, 155 of the 156 teachers working at the schools, and all five of the principals, were rated satisfactory. Disparities like these have led states and districts around the country to make radical changes to their systems for evaluating teacher performance. According to newly available data, released as part of a recent federal funding requirement, districts across the Evergreen State have used rudimentary evaluation systems like Pasco's that utterly fail to differentiate between truly great teachers and those who should be dismissed. This raises the obvious question: If districts can't identify their employees' strengths and weaknesses, how can they reward and promote top-performers and help the low-performers improve? Laws recently passed by the state legislature have, among other things, increased the amount of time that third-year teachers--those on the cusp of earning tenure--must be observed, and they require that reviewers now consider objective data about student performance. Lawmakers acted because they had evidence that existing evaluations were virtually meaningless. Since the Washington law was passed, there have been encouraging signs from pilot projects in the state that districts are becoming more discerning in how they judge teacher performance. As these and other districts start implementing their new evaluations, they can learn a lesson from other states that have been early adopters of new systems: truly meaningful improvement--resulting in honest ratings--will require more than just tweaking requirements. It will take far more candor than what now characterizes conversations about teacher performance. The new data shows that nearly every school in the state has much work to do if it is to honestly appraise its educators and wisely use the results to make consequential decisions.