( – promoted by buhdydharma )
There are no numbers here. There will be no links to research backing up my assertions. Because this is not about data, it’s about people. As one teacher out of many I will tell you my opinion. As someone who teaches purely for altruistic and idealistic purposes and has done so for 31 years, I will tell you what I think.
What I do know is that drawing any connection between the performance of students on a high stakes test and the quality of the teacher is tenuous at best. Some might say non-existent. Even if there does exist such a connection, assumptions about what such a connection means really ought to be examined.
How does one tell the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher? I hate that phrasing. Bad Teacher? Really? People are dedicating their lives to doing public service, teaching our young people…and increasingly our older people as well…and other people think they have the right, even the duty, to call some of us Bad Teachers Let’s get out the scarlet letters. Lets burn them at the stake. Bad Teacher?
We have teachers and we have better teachers. A bad teacher would be someone who enters the profession for the purpose of destroying the lives of the students. None of the teachers I ever had in my life were bad teachers.
I know there will be people who will immediately frame in their heads this picture of some teacher they had who they think did them a huge disservice in life. Revenge is a dish best served cold. So those people just possibly might want to be getting back at that teacher they disliked. What a better way to do it is there than to attack the whole profession.
Make no mistake. Attacking the profession is what this is about. Teachers stand between the powerful and their goal of destroying the educational process, so that you, the little guy, can be an undereducated twit, just good enough to hold onto your job until someone younger and cheaper becomes available. Your teachers are all that resist. And some people think we need to be debased for our efforts. I’m definitely certain that few people think we should be paid what we’re worth.
Testing a teachers’ students discovers what the students are capable of doing. It does not discover who had the better teacher. It cannot do that. The students are an uncontrollable variable. Better, smarter students presumably will do better on this test. Nothing tells us anything about how much value the teacher added to any of this transaction.
Teachers with better, more motivated, and smarter students will have those students do better. Well, duh. They should be rewarded for having better material to work with over someone who had poorer students, both in terms of native ability and socioeconomic status? Make no mistake that the latter has a huge influence on motivation and preparation. So how are we to control for that variable? i’m sure some think they can. I don’t.
A teacher with better prepared, better motivated, smarter students has the luxury of being a better teacher. And it is a luxury. Give me a class of all A students and I become the best teacher on the planet. Imagine that.
One teacher starts with a bunch of F students and turns them into a bunch of B students. Another teacher turns a whole class of B students into A students. Who is the better teacher? Are you going to judge this based on the final grade of the students???
So how are we supposed to assess the quality of our teachers? Ask the students? You can tell who the most popular teacher is that way. And you can tell who has the better student, since the number one factor correlating with student evaluations is “expected grade.”
There is an illusion present that there is some cheap, fast, and meaningful way to separate the teachers into different classes based on their ability to teach. I defy anyone to prove that it can be done.
How is the quality of a teacher determined? We measure it by following the students and seeing how their lives develop. We measure it in the future. Teaching is not about the end result of a human life, it’s about the value added along the way.
Measure that.
But before you do, could you maybe rethink the idea of why you think it necessary to do so.
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…from Teacher’s Lounge.
challenged me…to think differently, to learn differently…they also taught differently…they expected me to learn & found a way to make me understand (one teacher even brought her son in to explain some science I just didn’t get)
i recently saw a movie (netflix) called The Hobart Shakespeareans…very powerful movie about a guy who expects a lot from his students…and gets it! I encourage everyone to find & watch this…we could all learn a thing or three from this teacher.
Him, and his sister (who later became principal of the middle school) invented math baseball, and we played spelling basketball, and all kinds of fun science projects (like making smoke bombs and throwing them in his sisters mobile classroom) We also turned history and literature into plays that we enacted, and taped. He got everyone involved, and feeling part of the group. Mr. Crane was a wonder. 🙂
1) Our perverse, bass-ackward society pays teachers (and other crtical public servants, e.g., public safety officers) ridiculously low salaries, while obscenely overcompensating so many CEOs, professional athletes, politicians, etc.–who contribute so litlle to the common good in comparison.
2) One day spent with any (allegedly) “bad teacher” is worth one nanosecond one might (unfortunately) spend with anyone from BushCo and/or their enablers and acolytes.
All thanks to all teachers.
I’ve encountered quite a few… well, let’s just say not good teachers in my day. Anyway it was my observation that they did more than simply “not teach” and in some worse-case scenarios could even do lasting harm.
Fortunately those teachers were (and hopefully are) in the minority because I too hold teachers in very high esteem; my father taught English at a local college for forty years and my sister taught high school French for almost ten years before she passed away.
In high school, I remember a blur of mediocre teachers but then there was the relatively small handful who really made a difference – not just to me but practically everyone.
It’s funny though… While I wouldn’t at all call myself a “teacher” in the traditional sense, not too long ago I held a job where I was required to teach quite a bit. I found myself looking back, not on the good teachers that I’d had, but the not good ones to make sure I didn’t repeat the mistakes I felt they’d made.
Turns out that worked out OK and I received a lot of kudos for my classes, so I guess I (inadvertently) learned something valuable from those not good teachers after all.
Little Steven Goes to Washington…and Wants To See Laura Bush
None of the teachers I ever had in my life were bad teachers.
Some of us weren’t so lucky. I think you weaken what are otherwise good points in your Diary by suggesting that bad teachers don’t exist. Denying that there are some bad teachers, imo, is a slam on good teachers, who make up the majority, and the excellent teachers we all crave to teach us, our children and our grandchildren.
I say this as someone closely associated with some excellent teachers. Both my late parents were teachers of secondary vocational education (a field almost obliterated in schools today). My wife was a teacher for nearly 15 years and has been a supervisor of teachers for 11.
Good teachers do a good job under bad conditions. I think our efforts should be directed toward making those conditions better – classroom size, compensation, paid-for prep time, moving away from the standardized bullshit (much of which predates NCLB) and a multitude of other issues.
I strongly believe that new teachers – and even ones who have been on the job for decades but have slacked off or gotten burned out – deserve a chance to improve and the administrative framework and assistance to make that improvement. They also need to be fairly compensated and respected, and politicians need to be pressed to better the lousy conditions under which many teachers must labor.
But bad, or, if you prefer, weak teachers who refuse to improve (or who can’t) need to be weeded out. And that can be very difficult. Here’ how it works in one district, the Los Angeles Unified School District:
My wife was an award-winning teacher before she jumped through the very considerable hoops it took to become an administrator (including a second master’s degree). She inherited many of the scores of tenured teachers under her purview in 36 schools.
She regularly visits classrooms, three times with the same teacher over a period of a couple of weeks. She conducts an interview with the teacher during which time she encourages the teacher to discuss problems in the school or special needs that aren’t being met. She knows the difficulties teachers face; she’s been there.
This process of review is much resented by a certain percentage of teachers, typically the ones who have never done or not now doing a good job. She makes detailed constructive criticisms (which include praise as well – I’ve seen many of her written reports to visited teachers). She’s highly energetic and knows what it takes in the classroom, and she does her best to motivate these teachers. She provides them with as much advice and assistance as the district (and state) will allow.
Teachers who are doing a good job, 85% or so, are OKed and not visited again for at least five years. In cases, however, where there are teacher inadequacies, my wife makes return visits – usually after six months. And in 25% or so of the cases, there has been no improvement. A teacher who hasn’t improved gets additional visits in another six months. But if the teacher has not improved after three visiting periods over 18 months, and s/he is tenured, it is still extremely difficult to act, and the process to “weed out” that teacher can take as long as three years, during which students continue to suffer.
For the record, my wife – 18 years with the district – makes the same pay as a teacher having 18 years with the district. And she works as hard as any teacher.
It is not so much bad teachers but the corruption of an entire institution.
Things in America are mostly for profit.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdo…
But even in addition to that.
Sometime in the early 1990s the focus was shifted from educating kids to complicance and that was done through the administration of education. When coupled with the deliberate suppression of wages nationwide over a period of twenty years measurements of anything become irrelevant.
but the process is much more direct and time-consuming than anyone would be willing to do as far as a national standard would be concerned.
Some disclosure: I work as an evaluator of teachers, and it requires a minimum (absolute minimum) of 3 contact hours: a discussion with the teacher before you ever step foot in the classroom, so that you can get a handle on the class, the students, the dynamic, and the possible areas of concern; an hour of observation followed by a 15-20 min session with the students (teacher not present); and another hour discussion with the teacher afterwards to discuss the observation, the student evaluations, etc.
If you’re skeptical, I’ll say this: the program has proven to be highly effective as a tool for teachers interested in outside evaluation. They love it, their students like it, and the system works.
But it’s a lot different than the type of evaluations you’re (rightly) criticizing here, because: 1. it’s not about standardization of teaching practices, but whether a particular teacher is effective in a particular class; 2. it elevates the personal over the generic, which is why it requires so much contact time; and 3. it understands that effectiveness is an unquantifiable (but not unqualifiable) dynamic that has to be seen to be understood.
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
I always read your posts but hardly comment…I’m one of those teachers from an impoverished urban school system that would likely be considered “bad” by some who comment around DK and elsewhere. It’s usually easy to ignore the constant jabs in re: test scores but this week in particular it really pissed me off. You said more politely what I thought – who the hell is anyone to judge any teacher these days? Yup, there are people who shouldn’t darken the hallways of a school building but I have encountered very few. In our district (the poorest and most under-funded in the state) we have more National Board Certified teachers and more with master’s and Ph.D’s than any other district in our county, and second in the state. By popular measures such as these, we should be flying high in test scores, but of course we are continually at the bottom.
So thanks again for sticking up for us and for our kids. For very complicated philosophical reasons I chose this job and I love it no matter how supposedly difficult. I’ve done it long enough that now I’m getting the children of kids I had way back in the day. These former students, now parents, always say to me – how do you keep doing this?! I consider this a compliment. The better question would be, to my thinking, how could I walk away?