Join the conversation

Well said. Very well said. A succinct summary that should become a standard reference when the "little research fragment" appears. Edu-bloggers, bookmark this link!

A couple of years ago, I was asked to sit on a panel on "teacher effectiveness" at a national conference. There was a Big Name from the US Dept of Ed on the panel as well.

Her opener: now that all teachers are highly qualified (!), our next goal is to make sure that they're highly effective. She used a variant on the "research-based" proposal Ravitch references--divide them into quartiles, based on student test scores, then lop off the bottom quartile.

I asked her to comment on what research indicated teachers could do to raise student achievement data--how could we make all teachers more effective? Her answer (and this is a quote): We're agnostic about how teachers get high test scores.

So there you have it. What matters is the scores, not the teaching that leads to better scores.

I love this line, Claus, "We simply believe that there is more to a good teacher than an Ivy-League degree and impressive genes." Amen and amen.

Great teachers are hard-working professionals, who hone our craft one-child at a time. I've seen wonderful teachers have a bad day, a bad year. I've seen so-called bad teachers be the one to make a difference in the life of one child no one else could reach. I knew a vocational teacher who helped raise middle-schoolers reading ability more than any boxed reading program the district ever imposed (yet she got no credit for this work). I've also seen more than one really good teacher make the move to administration and bomb miserably. Teaching and learning are complex, context specific, and poorly measured. We should be putting much greater energy and resources into the development of our teachers rather than the sorting of them.

I completely agree that fundamental to teacher success is "excellent professional development; sound content standards and curriculum; a safe and supportive working environment; consistent community support; etc." We are lucky in my school to have two of the most promising young teachers I've worked with in 24 years. Their instincts were strong, and they were effective from the first day. But as solid as they were then, through a combination of all of the above, they have grown incredibly, and now, in their fourth years of teaching, have evolved into teacher-leaders in our school.

I'm thankful for that information about how teachers rarely can stay in that "top 25%" for many consecutive years. I'm a high school English teacher. If anyone were to try evaluating my teaching skills based solely on annual changes on standardized test scores for my students, here are a few of the variables that could change each year that would be missing from the so-called analysis: different students, different parents, different teachers in other classes, different principal, different administrators and support staff, different technology, different school procedures, different school policies, different resources, different curriculum, different physical conditions of the school, different school culture, different daily schedule, different school-year schedule, different testing schedule, different tests, different testing procedures, differences in my schedule and assignment, differences in my health or my family's health. It should be so obvious. Ask any teacher. Those things all add up. Ask any researcher if they can design a method to control for those variables and still maintain a scale small enough to examine the work of one teacher. Hmmm....

I'm not suggesting abandoning tests, but they don't tell us what many folks out there would like them to tell us. Thanks for helping shed some light on the complexity of the matter.

I am a high school teacher in Georgia and I am disappointed to see so many arguing against the notion that excellent teachers can achieve tremendous results and that over time these tremendous results can eliminate the achievement gap.

Do we have the ability to measure the top 25% perfectly? No, but are best attempt at it will be far better than our current model of using years of experience as a proxy for educational quality.

Yes teachers have a bad day here and there. It seems like every day I come home and think about what I could have done to better serve my students. But, in my first year teaching, I was emergency certified teaching in a subject area I had last taken a course in as a sophomore in high school and I achieved more quantifiable gain than any teacher in the state of Georgia taking the pass rate on state tests at my high school from 38% to 80%. In my second year, teaching a different subject and in my content area, I took the pass rate at my high school from 43% to 95% with a 50% exceeds rate.

I am not perfect and I, like every teacher, has a lot of room to grow, but I am making a difference and I am eliminating the achievement gap. I don't think I am doing anything special, but I do consider myself better than the teachers around me. Why can I be so cocky you might ask? Well, I don't show up without alcohol on my breath and I don't show the movie titanic in class. I don't ignore students using their phones in class, and I also don't tell my students to "look busy". I don't give everyone a 90 because I don't do any grading and if I give a 90, no one will complain. These are all things that teachers around me do.

The point is that if you really care about supporting students (and not just say you do, but dedicate your life to helping students be successful), you can achieve enormous gain and if we all did that, we could eliminate the achievement gap. That could be the top 25% of teachers or hopefully 100% of teachers, but today, I would say less than 25% of teachers are doing what it takes to be a good teacher. It is not my Ivy League education that makes me good, it is not my certification, it is not years of experience or being new. It is about being passionate about student gains and relentless in this pursuit.

And I would hope that those coming to this website would look to challenge themselves to be a teacher that truly is working to eliminate the achievement gap rather than complaining about someone who is trying to focus on teacher quality and say that it matters because it does.

Sorry, I don't believe Graham. He sounds like a Teach for America troll, with all his talk about how he's closing the "achievement gap" by basically not being a bad teacher. He's making the TFA classic argument of, "Fire all the current (bad)teachers and hire energetic young (good) teachers in their stead." I wouldn't be surprised to hear he's making a commission for every comment like this that he posts on an education blog - and that he gets a bonus if anyone falls for his rap.

The teachers he compares himself to are bad - very bad -- and I hope he's making them up, because if not, the administration at his school is not doing its job.

Just being better than ne'er-do-wells doesn't make anyone a good teacher and doesn't "close the achievement gap."

Sure sounds good, though.

In response to Ellen…I was a Teach For America corps member. I currently work for the Learning First Alliance, which maintains this website. And I get offended with language like “Teach For America troll” and a description of the TFA “classic” argument. Teach For America is a large organization with thousands of corps members and alumni, each with his or her own independent view on education reform. For example, many TFA corps members and alums support charter schools as an educational reform; many others believe they exacerbate inequalities in the current educational system. Many TFAers support the use of standardized tests as a measure of teacher quality; many others believe that as currently designed these tests cause teachers to focus on basic skills to the detriment higher-order thinking. Performance pay, the role of teacher unions, voucher programs…TFAers fall on both sides of the debate, and sometimes in the middle.

Yet despite the divergent views held by members of the organization, my experience tells me that very few (if any) TFAers would support the idea to “Fire all the current (bad) teachers and hire energetic young (good) teachers in their stead.” While teaching, I had some truly excellent colleagues. Some were TFA corps members, others were 15 and 20 year teaching veterans. We were united in our cause: Provide the best possible education for a group of disadvantaged youth. And we worked together and learned from each other to improve student outcomes.

I do believe, though, that most (if not all) TFAers would support the idea of getting ineffective teachers out of the classroom and replacing them with effective teachers. Which, I might add, is a view also supported by many in the traditional educational system. Of course, then you have to define what an effective teacher is…

To Graham…Like you, I had some colleagues who would show irrelevant movies in class every week. I might consider them bad teachers, and many would agree with me, as I doubt they significantly improved the standardized test scores of their students. I also had colleagues who would have students sit silently and complete drill and kill worksheets every day, all period, in preparation for standardized assessments and to the exclusion of developing their students’ higher-order thinking skills (note: the high school math and science standardized tests in the state where I taught were, in my opinion, truly ineffective at measuring student achievement in any area of value). I might consider them bad teachers, but many would disagree with me, since they had great success at raising student standardized test scores. But in talking with their high-scoring students, and in teaching those students and evaluating their work, I have no doubt that those students were unprepared for an elite college education. I would encourage you to truly reflect on whether you believe that your students are prepared for the elite education that you were so fortunate to receive. And if you cannot honestly answer that they are ready to succeed in such an environment, perhaps you should re-evaluate your definition of the achievement gap.

i m glad i found ur blog.Not everyone can provide information with proper flow. Good post. I am going to save the URL and will definitely visit again. Keep it up.thesis help

I don't agree with the column on the theory that our schools shoudl rely on miracle teachers. At least the education of a normal teacher should give them enough material to work with pupils. Of course I am not talking about experience and patience (you have to learn both by yourself). But there is no need for a league of teachers to save schools.Browsergames