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I’m married into a teaching family. My wife took up teaching as a second career, and has spent the last decade teaching in various New York City and Westchester County middle and high schools of widely different conditions of wealth, quality and ambition. Two of her uncles were teachers, two of her cousins are school superintendents, and and at least three other cousins are or were teachers. When Chris Christie and his ilk start blaming teachers for the inadequacies of the educational system and start looking for ways to cut their pay, you can guess our response.
But you might be surprised. My wife comes home with stories of her colleagues’ inadequacies. She works with one man, comfortably tenured, who weekly offers some statement of scientific principle that shows that he really doesn’t know how the world works. She works with another, fresh from the Teach for America program, who has such a wilting classroom presence that he cannot hold his students’ attention. The older man probably get paid $70,000 a year or so, and could probably be whipped into shape by a motivated administration. The younger man should probably earns $30,000 or less, and would have been sent packing long ago if he didn’t carry such a light price tag. My wife would show no regret if under some grading system these two were sent packing.
But there are two problems. First, any system based on student performance is apt to also claim good teachers, because, let’s face it, in a lot of schools, the kids are not destined for success. They are not prepared, they don’t do homework, they do not have proper parental support. Second, school administrations are highly political bodies, and are often quite happy to shirk the dirty work and shift blame onto teachers. At one suburban school, for example, my wife confiscated a phone from a student who was playing with it in class. She put it in a drawer, from which it was subsequently stolen. The student’s mother, a power in the Booster Club, complained to the principal, who ordered my wife to pay for a new phone. When my wife, through her union, refused, the school promptly gave her two surprise classroom observations, on which basis they declared her performance substandard, and dismissed her. A year later, the school was ruled to be in violation of the union contract, but that’s not the point. Schools are political environments, and teachers need protection from the failures and foibles of administrators and parents.
Here’s an idea. Before my wife worked in education, she worked in health care. It is her observation that when patients have bad outcomes–that is, die–hospitals are very serious about rooting out why. When patients die, especially patients who were not admitted in dire condition, the hospital convenes a Mortality Panel to investigate what happened, with an aim to fixing the problem. Sometimes they find shortcomings by a doctor or a nurse or someone else on the staff, and take steps to address it. But often they find that the outcome wasn’t always within their control. Patients drink, smoke, take drugs, have poor diets, have underlying conditions, suffer environmental insults, and so on. Here’s the idea: if you want to hold teachers responsible for student performance, make the teachers’ performance part of a total evaluation. By all means, examine whether the teacher was up to the job. But other questions should also be asked. Did the student do his homework? Did the student come to class? Does the student possess a learning disability, or an underlying medical or psychological condition that affects performance, and does the school address those issues? Does the student have a parent at home? Did he have breakfast? Did he have a place to sleep? Is the student a discipline problem? What has the school done to address this kid’s challenges? If not, is it because of a funding issue?
By all means, hold teachers accountable. Better yet, hold everybody accountable.
[Cross-posted at JamieMalanowski.com]
nitpicker on January 30, 2012 3:19 PM:
I think a testing regime would work still, as long as it tracked students' long-term achievement as well as teachers'. The test that only looks at a single year would, as you say, hurt good teachers because it wouldn't take into account the students who are being taught. Students are, after all, not just the product of education, but also the raw material with which teachers must work. A test that showed whether a group of students' performance under a teacher was better, the same or worse than that same group of students had done historically might actually help us find those teachers who were underserving their charges as well as those who were pushing them to greater achievement than before.
Elphage Wilbert on January 30, 2012 4:29 PM:
Picking some nits, you wrote:
"The older man probably get paid $70,000 a year or so,..."
But seriously, why not just have principals evaluate teachers, regularly supervise them and operate like most other work places.
Crissa on January 30, 2012 5:30 PM:
...Because, Wilbert, the next paragraph you neglected to mention. And those salaries are often being earned with six-year degrees from a university.
Fired over a tiff with a parent over a phone? Think about it, conservatives, were teachers in your day ever scared to take away a toy in class? Why should they now?
POed Lib on January 30, 2012 7:57 PM:
I am a statistician in a medical environment.
The idea of adding explanatory variables is good, but will not work. There is a simple reason why - there are many many many many many explanatory variables, but there is only one outcome, which is student achievement. How can you determine which of the factors are important? Answer: they are all important to one degree or another.
It's like losing weight - when you go on a diet, what is the factor that sabotages the diet? You ate the one extra cheese stick, you exercized for 25 not 30 minutes, and did not lose weight.
As the great-grandson, grandson, grandson, son, brother, and husband of teachers, I resent the implications made over and over that the teachers are at fault. There are many factors.
What we can do, and what is often missing, is process. How does the teacher give homework? Organized or not? How does she grade it? How are the students engaged? An emphasis on process will often produce results. Process is also objective.
R on January 30, 2012 9:19 PM:
Our society's insistence on doing education on the cheap (at least for kids in low- and middle-income school districts) means that we jump at a "testing regime" to evaluate teachers without really asking about where those tests come from and what, exactly, they measure. For such a "regime" to work, we'd first have to agree on what we want kids to learn. For example, do we want them to be able to spout out math facts, or do we want them to analyze complex multi-step problems? If the latter, then be prepared for a test that's more expensive to write and to score.
Who makes all these tests, anyway? Hint: start with the giant textbook companies, whose motives may include more than measuring student learning. Even the College Board, a so-called "non-profit," seems more interested in enlarging its influence than anything else.
But what really burns me about all this is that we're ignoring what we already know: the best predictor of student test scores is socioeconomic status. So how do we help the poorest kids? By sending them 22-year-old TFA recruits, who may have no training in child development, no experience in front of classrooms, and at most a couple of weeks of teacher training. Would we send a pre-med to perform a difficult surgery? I don't blame the TFA recruits, even if they are just looking for two years of a resume-padding exercise. As you say, blame us all. A kid who has no books at home, whose parents didn't succeed in school and are in no position to help with homework, starts way behind and will only slip further behind. Please don't suggest "value-added" testing -- such a kid will learn at a slower pace, not at an equivalent pace only farther behind.
Bottom line: we don't want to address the most important problem: income inequality. In fact some would prefer that the majority not have the quantitative skills to notice that they're being had.