President's Perspective
Assessing teacher quality
Mar 29, 2007 10:33 AM
Note: The election results just came in and I want to say thank you for allowing me to serve as president for another term. What drives me every day is the incredible passion and heart of you, our members — and I rededicate myself to helping the union be a strong champion of our collective interests of democracy and social and economic justice and educational opportunity for the students we serve, the institutions in which we work and the members we represent.
One thing I have learned after years of advocacy work is that it’s very hard to change people’s belief systems. So it is with the issue of what makes a good teacher (aka “teacher quality”).
The good news is that, finally, there is universal consensus among liberals, moderates and conservatives that good teachers are the single most important resource we can give students. The better the teaching, the more children will learn (all other things being equal, which of course they never are).
So what education reforms follow from this epiphany? It depends on how you see things. For me, the conclusion is obvious: We should do whatever we can to help teachers develop and hone their skills and knowledge and to give them the conditions and resources that enable them to practice their profession to the best of their ability
To others, it means we should find out who are the most effective and least effective teachers and punish the “bad” ones and reward the “good” ones. And if there aren’t enough effective teachers for every classroom, then take the good teachers away from where they are — whether or not they want to go — and put them where they are “most needed.” (I always find it ironic when “free” marketers talk about moving teachers against their will.)
Which approach did the first commission out of the box to recommend changes to No Child Left Behind (the “Aspen” Commission) take? Unfortunately, it was the latter.
Declaring victory in the effort to see that every child has a highly qualified teacher (HQT), the commission decided that the law didn’t go far enough. They want the reauthorized law to require not only highly qualified but also effective teachers (HQET). Despite the fact that many states have still not complied with the “qualified” requirement and are disputing its definition, the commission wants states to accept an even less definable and harder-to-measure standard: effectiveness.
What is an effective teacher? To you and me, and I daresay to almost every parent, an effective teacher is one who knows her subject matter and can communicate it and instill in children a love of learning. The teachers we all remember are the ones who helped us feel confident that we could learn and instilled in us a commitment to work hard at it. We remember those who helped us understand the world around us and inspired in us the desire to make it better. We appreciate those who taught us to think independently and to speak and write expressively, thoughtfully and persuasively.
I could go on and on, and so could you. But no matter how long our lists, few, if any, of us would say an effective teacher is one who raises her student test scores.
Yet, that is the definition that the commission, and many others, would apply. The ability to raise student’ test scores, they say, should determine whether or not teachers get tenure, how much they are paid and where they can teach.
To me that definition reveals a very limited and distorted view of teaching, reducing it to a lifeless drill-and-kill pedagogy focused solely on test preparation. Sadly, however, it is now a popular definition that is shaping school practices, narrowing the curriculum and suffocating both inspired instruction and children’s excitement about learning. To make matters worse, it is most emphasized in schools with large numbers of poor children, depriving them of the rich experiences they need for intellectual growth.
Equally troubling is the effect that using student test scores to evaluate teachers and administrators could have on where we put our priorities. With such high stakes riding on the test results, it wouldn’t take long for educators to figure out that it pays to conduct the educational equivalent of battlefield triage: Ignore students who are solidly in Levels 3 and 4 (because of course they “need no further help”) and students in Level 1 or low down in Level 2 (who, naturally, have “little chance of making it”). Concentrate instead on those close to Level 3 (who are “most likely to make it with a little help”).
While such a hard-hearted analysis may be necessary in the heat of battle or in a hospital emergency room, it is simply immoral in the classroom. Imagine if insurance companies paid oncologists only for patients who survive or whose condition improves? Who would treat the most advanced cancer cases or, worse yet, those deemed incurable? Picture the public outcry that would result from such a policy. Similarly, how will we attract teachers to the neediest schools if their careers depend on how many kids they can get over the proficiency line?
Basing life-altering judgments on someone else’s standardized test scores is a seductive sounding panacea to the untrained ear, but in reality it is a reckless strategy with lots of unintended and very deleterious side effects. Furthermore, there is serious doubt about the technical viability of such a system. Are the statistical methods reliable enough to accurately separate one teacher’s contribution to a student’s learning from all the other powerful factors that influence a child’s progress? RAND researchers say no, pointing to the lack of adequate district data bases linking years of student test scores to their teachers. (It’s no secret that the purpose of the new $80 million data management system that the DOE recently purchased from IBM is to establish just such a research base.)
And that’s not the only question. Add, for example, these: Was the test aligned with the standards and curricula that teachers were required to use? What if the teacher is among the 78 percent who do not teach subjects in which standardized tests are given? Why do different value-added methods produce vastly different results?
For all of these reasons, even Dale Ballou, a researcher and proponent of merit pay, citing the “uncertainties and inequities,” concludes, “Those who look to value-added assessment as the solution to the problem of educational accountability are likely to be disappointed.”
Which is not to say that student test scores cannot be one of many aspects of a teacher’s evaluation. They are also an important (but should never be the only) indicator of a child’s progress. And they can signal broad trends across schools and across systems, especially when they are viewed over the span of several years. As such they can serve as warning signals about how our schools are doing.
A Staten Island teacher, however, wrote me the following wise words:
“The danger is when we read too much into scores. Does a downward move in one class in one year really mean anything? How much can we attribute to the size of the class, for example; the individual tragedies that individual students faced (the broken legs, broken hearts, broken marriages); the disruptions of a classmate; the date when students entered the class or the country; how hot or cold or noisy the room was; or the number of times the administration pulled the teacher out of the classroom in order to, well, grade the standardized tests?”
Just last weekend, at the PBS panel on Teaching and Learning, Hugh Price, head of the national Urban League, said much the same thing.
One wonders how much of the relentless focus on tests, test prep and test results is for the legitimate pursuit of improving instruction, and how much is to play “Gotcha!” so the powers-that-be can deflect blame when the results aren’t what they promised. Whichever it is, it’s gone too far. I hope the growing alarm among educators and parents will be heard downtown at Tweed and on the Hill in Washington.
