My rookie teaching assignment in the fall of 1993--the assignment to which I still report each day--was at an alternative high school in South Los Angeles. I was hired in late September after the students had run two other instructors from the classroom. It was a little intimidating to discover that, but I realized, almost immediately, that all I had to do to survive each day was to care about the students and express that by listening to them, recognizing each of them as an individual worthy of my respect and by working hard to give them an English class that was engaging, challenging, real and that helped them become readers and writers. In short, they just wanted me to do my job really well. They didn't say it, of course, and they tested me in all the usual--often brutal--ways, but the real test was in how they felt about what they were learning.
I was proud to be passing those daily evaluations--prouder than I will ever be of any professional evaluation from an administrator or anyone else. Actually, that first year, my principal never came in my room. She didn't have to. She saw me in the late afternoons hovering over the dilapidated photocopier or sitting at my desk marking papers, assisting seniors with their personal statements for college, or out on the cracked asphalt of the bone yard helping organize and coach the school's first basketball team. But the strongest evidence that I was performing satisfactorily as a teacher was probably the fact that I didn't become the third teacher that semester to get driven out by the students.
I don't suppose that on a large scale this method of evaluation would be practical or reliable--for many reasons too obvious to bother with--and it probably wouldn't be fair either, though there was something beautiful about the honesty of it and the empowerment to these otherwise disempowered inner-city children.
Back then, standardized test scores were not the political currency they've since become, though there was already a lot of talk about "accountability" and about merit pay. Almost a decade later, my colleagues and I were congratulated by the LA Unified School District for our exceptional teaching--as demonstrated by the state test scores of our students the previous spring--and informed that we were going to receive bonuses.
An assistant superintendent attended our back to school meeting and promised that we'd be receiving cash bonuses for our accomplishment. We were pleased but also baffled--no one could figure out what we had done the previous year that was in any way different from any other year. Reward us for our years of dedication--we wanted to say--for battling against the insult of our working conditions, for believing in the kids who had stopped believing in themselves and finding a way to engage students who'd always hated school, making them laugh enough to like learning--but don't make those stupid scores our great accomplishment.
Some of us were even a little incensed about the bonuses. We didn't trust them. They reflected an "improvement" that was really a comparison between different students from one year to the next. This seemed almost arbitrary--and could easily, the next year, produce unappealing results that would have little to do with our effectiveness either--a few of us got in an argument with that assistant superintendent, told him that at the very least he ought to be comparing to the scores the same students from one year to the next.
That wish has now been granted by the testing industry as what they call "value added measurement" and it is more honest than previous methods of numerically rating teachers, schools, districts, states, and nations against one another. If the students in my class score lower this year than those same students scored wherever they were last year then it has got to be my fault--unless the student was intoxicated during the test or clinically depressed all year or undernourished (and was not in that impaired condition last year).
Purging ineffective teachers isn't the only objective giving rise to this lust for objective numbers--but it seems right now to be the most urgent one. A good administrator knows who her really bad teachers are. Just about every conscious person in the school knows who they are. And if test data empowers administrators and districts to spare children--those too polite to drive a bad teacher from their midst--then it might be worth the millions we pay the testing industry to produce these scores.
But if districts and politicians want mathematical formulas to determine teacher tenure and pay, hiring and firing--and if they want to be accurate in these objective assessments--they might want to crunch a few additional numbers into their equations: class size (should a teacher whose classes average 35 or 40 have his students' scores compared to those of a teacher whose classes average 25?), room temperature (anything, say, below 50 or above 80 Fahrenheit), variety and condition of instructional materials--plus or minus the percentage of freeway exhaust fumes in the school air or railroad or airplane noise, plus or minus the number of times students have lockdowns because armed gang members invade the campus.
Those first year students of mine understood the challenges I faced with them in that standing-room-only dilapidated bungalow with those mangled desks and rusting shelves that held but a few recycled books. Those student evaluators are men and women now in their thirties and some of them still write to me and say that they are glad I'm still teaching there--and that is the strongest evaluation I think that a teacher can receive, though it isn't going to give me any job security or get me any merit pay.
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Grace Snodgrass: Teachers Want Evaluations
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Parents who do that are more likely to be involved and supportive.
But the real trick to a good education, end poverty.
Many of my students have not been well-fed or taken care of but with a supportive school environment and demanding teachers, they can one day provide a lot better for their children.
End poverty? Achieve economic justice? Sure--but in the meantime, we can do something about the poverty of desire. A real education teaches young people to differentiate between needs and wants and to analyze those wants. Don't get punked by Madison Avenue. Don't--as Willy Loman says in Miller's play written sixty years ago!--be in a race with the junkyard.
And you'll get no argument from me about turning desire, even though it's more than an uphill battle, and while I think one should ever give up, I don't understand and I can't get past this quote made more than 100 years ago: "The American People could have anything they want, trouble is, they don't want much of anything" - Eugene Debbs
A new nonprofit is helping. At http://ClassWish.org, teachers create Wish Lists of the items they need. Visitors see exactly what is needed and make tax-deductible contributions to help.
See how easy it is to help the schools, teachers and students you care about at http://ClassWish.org
http://www.cloudnet.com/~edrbsass/educationhistorytimeline.html
What we need to do is calm down and use this data to inform instruction. WHat we can learn from this data (test scores) is that you, for example may be a great English and History teacher, but your skills teaching math are poor. So, we can recommend you attend training and workshops and focus on improving as a math teacher. Of course, I'm talking about elementary teachers, but a High School Mathematics teacher could use the same stats to learn which math courses he or she does not teach effectively. And then train and take action and improve.
The end result of test scores is better information. We can use this information to improve if we don't either try to pay off or fire every teacher based upoin test scores. Testing a student tells you where they are weak on a subject. Teasting a teacher is the same thing. At that point you can just use additional instruction (in both cases) to improve for the next test.
Any teacher that isn't willing to train and improve their skill is too arrogant to be a success in teaching or anything. Almost ALL will want training to get better. We all take pride in our work!
The differences in teachers would have to be huge to prove by testing that one teacher is better or worse than another. That would be obvious to an evaluator long before you could prove it with statistics. The enormous differences in students and situations would swamp any such comparison.
In the last several years, I've taught something like ten different English and ESL courses. Many of them had not existed before we started teaching them. The testing for them hasn't even been invented yet. In the classes I'm teaching this year, the curriculum was re-written during the summer. We're making up the units and the curriculum map as we go, and the tests from district were a disaster.
By the time they're fixed, the courses will have changed again. We'll need new tests, and re-norming.
Impossible. Can't happen. But we'll hurt a lot of people pretending that it can.
Now, correctly, it is more complex to define why that is, and I've seen it be for a lot of reasons, so careful study needs to be made as to why your students consistently, across all classes and abilities lose ground against other students in math (as an example.)
But if you look at Teacher A over a 5 year period and study the students as they entered and left that teachers class, you can learn about that teachers strengths and weaknesses in instruction.
That is what makes the job worth it, but when I'm evaluated this year to see whether or not I get to keep teaching at this school next year, the only thing they're worried about is how they do on the tests. There is no number that indicates whether or not I've made them life-long learners of History.
That will not be on a test anytime soon.
America did not collapse in the past 200 years because of these weak links in our education system; the failure to support and value teachers and adequately finance education throughout the country is more likely the roots of our education problem. The current cries of a "crisis" are coming from corporate America who wants a piece of the education money pie. Interestingly as the wealth disparity grows, the success of poor schools within overwhelming social environments continues to falter.
the teachers are about to experience what most of america has experience the last 40 years or so.
merit pay based on an average line drawn down the center of a normal curve of distribution of data and that data is usually very suspect.
those below that line are told to shape up, most of those above that line are told to improve, and the top ten per cent are told you get the bonus.
trying to get everyone above that line is impossible but that does not stop americans. in their ignorance they are trying to do the impossible and demoralizing the entire organization.
the problem becomes due to systemic variation from year to year most teachers will be told to improve or else. but not all teachers, there is only one tool known that can find these special causes of poor performing teachers and outstanding teachers.
few very few americans know that tool and it was created in 1924. hint shewhart. and he sure screwed up the name of it.
the interesting part of all of this is that most americans accept the reality that those below average need to be replaced without realizing that always half of the teachers will be below that line.
few americans understand variation very few. every university teachs pay for performance based on that average line is proof they lack understanding of variation.
While the general sentiment is that standardized tests are ineffective ways to measure both the students' and the teachers' capabilities, there must be some ways to quantify performance objectively. For educators, without these measurements you will never know what process would have improved quality of education or not. For students, without objective measurements are less incentives to say, get better grades (unless you are fortunate enough to be in a classroom with a fantastic teacher). If factors such as students/teacher ratio and students family income are significant metrics to measure education quality, then maybe these should be added as other dimensions to measure performance.
Why? Because Bill Gates, the Waltons, the Broads, Duncan, and the other market-based "reformers" have no use for critical thinkers, artists, historians, musicians, or those who are likely to engage in activism. They know that largely because of their market-based policies, there are fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs in the U.S. (along with teaching, these are the jobs of the middle class). In WfS, Gates even stated that these reforms are about keeping the U.S. economically competitive (not about providing a well-rounded education for all children).
Effectively, they would like to have an education system that produces a handful of corporate CEOs (those who do well on the subjects measured on standardized tests) and a whole bunch of workers in the service sector to clean their houses, sweep their floors, etc. Its the latest assault on the middle class to promote economic/education disparity and maintain control.
But you're right about the objectives of some of these reformers. The debate needs to be about that vision before it is about anything else.
If you are going to be measuring students, why not find out how motivated they are, if they respect their teacher, if they feel like they are learning something?
Teachers don't beat knowledge into the heads of stubborn children. Teachers lead them down a path of serendipity and respect for life.
Well said.
--Pro athletes, by the way, who are often under-educated and consequently don't even benefit in the long run from those salaries: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1153364/index.htm