If we put students first, shouldn’t ineffective teachers go first?
I thought this op ed by Jane Hathaway in the USA Today was an interesting perspective on teacher evaluation.
Washington, D.C., is front and center taking on the challenge. For decades here and in school districts coast to coast, seniority provided what seemed to be a fair, transparent and moderately efficient layoff strategy. Years in the classroom can be counted with little dispute. Districts viewed teachers as largely interchangeable, and students were presumed to be largely untouched by personnel matters.
If anything, more experienced teachers — those protected by seniority — were assumed to be better than younger instructors. Meanwhile, greater employment security rewarded loyal employees, no doubt fostering good management and teacher relations. It all worked smoothly.
That was then. Today, things are different. Thanks to more and better data about individual students and teachers, we can base policies on a truer understanding of what goes on in schools.
We know, because of research from the federally funded National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) — and elsewhere, that the differences in teacher effectiveness, as measured by tested student achievement gains, are huge. Strong teachers get nearly triple the results that weak teachers get with their students.
So which teachers stay and which leave matters.
Surprisingly, our research also shows that job experience relates only weakly to teacher effectiveness, again as measured by student achievement gains, and the overlap between experienced and inexperienced teachers in effectiveness is considerable. In fact, many rookie recruits outperform their veteran counterparts.
I agree with Jane when she suggests that we don’t need a perfect system to incorporate teacher effectiveness measures into evaluation.
For sure, we can learn more about how to measure teacher performance. Out of fairness to both teachers and students, we should. Meanwhile, student test results should be used jointly with other measures, such as ratings of classroom practice by administrators and third-party observers, for a fuller, more reliable performance picture and sounder personnel decisions.
This is the way Washington is deciding which teachers stay and which go. If the lessons spread, maybe, when bells ring again, they can herald brighter days for our schools.
Assembly Republican Caucus public vs private job numbers LA Times does what school districts are afraid to try
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