The Nagging Question of Teacher Quality

If you set the way-back machine to October 2nd (yes, I'm a bit behind in my reading) you'll find this neat commentary by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. It's not the most ground-breaking article--pay enough attention, and you'll see 20 or more like it in a year--but there is some thought there that bears attention, particularly this:

Professor Kane and I were discussing what he believes are the two areas that have the greatest potential for radically improving the way children are taught in the U.S. Both are being neglected by the education establishment.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

What is counterintuitive, but well documented, is that paper qualifications, such as teacher certification, have very little to do with whatever it is that makes good teachers effective.

.....

Concerned about raising the quality of teachers, states and local school districts have consistently focused on the credentials, rather than the demonstrated effectiveness — or ineffectiveness — of teachers in the classroom.

New forms of identifying good teachers and weeding out poor ones — by carefully assessing their on-the-job performance — have to be established before any transformation of American schools can occur.

This can be done without turning the traditional system of teacher tenure on its head. Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can usually be identified, if they are carefully observed in their first two or three years on the job — in other words, before tenure is granted.

Developing such a system would be difficult. But it’s both doable and essential. Getting serious about teacher quality as opposed to harping on tiny variations in test scores would be like moving from a jalopy to a jet.

These are the good intentions with which the road to hell is paved. Some thoughts:

1) The thought taht you can judge a teacher from their first couple years in the clasroom is a tough one for me to agree with. My first year was great; the kids performed at a high level, and I felt really good about what I was doing. My 2nd and 3rd years were terrible, and I seriously thought about leaving teaching. In my 5th year I was voted Teacher of the Year for my school and getting great results again.

It's a cycle, like many things in life. If you use results as a sole measuring stick in those first few years, you're going to run some people out of the profession who have a chance to make a real difference.

2) The idea that you can wed classroom performance and evaluation without impacting the tradition of tenure is a bit naive. If you look at how the kids do on their tests as an evaluation tool you're going reflect negatively on many, many teachers, fairly or not, and that will have an impact.

3) I wish I had a good answer for getting the best teachers to the kids who need them most, I really do. The pisser for the academics who think about these kinds of issues is that all the free-market, Taylorized incentives in the world aren't going to get the hueristic answer, for the simple fact that people change, their goals change, and how they teach changes. I might to a great job with the kids I have, but there's no way of knowing if I can replicate that with inner-city kids or not beyond experimentation that I don't want to be a part of.

I don't know what the answer to teacher quality is in the system we have now. Intuitively, I don't think that the recent NYC merit pay proposal is a step, for many of the reasons that NYC Educator discusses in the link. Intuitively, it feels like extending the school day should work, but as Ken over ad D-Ed Reckoning is fond of pointing out all the extra time in the world won't make a difference for the kids who get it if we keep on with the same lousy practices that have gotten the same lousy results.