Improve Teacher Quality
A Washington based watchdog group called Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights released a report entitled “Days of Reckoning: Are States and the Federal Government Up to the Challenge of Ensuring a Qualified Teacher for Every Student?“. The report blames the states for not following the law and the federal government for not enforcing the law. (Hat tip: Education Week) [Emphasis mine]
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“While inconsistent in depth, these site-visit reports found a broad span of problems with how states were implementing the teacher-quality and -equity provisions of the law,” authors Phyllis McClure and Dianne M. Piché write. “They found that teachers in many states were being classified as ‘highly qualified’ based on criteria that did not match what the federal law required. Longtime teachers were simply treated as ‘highly qualified’ because of their seniority. Veteran teachers were deemed ‘highly qualified’ based on insufficient evidence of subject-matter knowledge. States’ report cards did not include all required data about teachers.” |
This is something that should be obvious to anyone. It is the case in any job, that people who have been there longer are not always very good at their jobs. Longevity does not equal quality in any business.
Unfortunately, the AFT and NEA want to restrict the ability of schools to hire experts in specific subject matters because they don’t want to allow pay increases for specialties (#17). That is, unless the pay for every teacher is raised, including the bad teachers.
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“It’s obvious that a major cause of the student-achievement gap is the teacher-quality gap,” said Ms. Piché, the executive director of the commission. “We know that the major in-school or educational variable influencing student achievement has to do with the quality of teaching. Is it too much to ask that each child be provided with a teacher who can actually teach him or her to read and do math?” |
Teacher quality has been proven over and over again to be the best way to improve education, not class size or more money.
It also helps to have good curriculum instead of teaching Whole Language or Everyday Math.
States and Districts will eventually use this law to claim they have no choice but to raise taxes to meet another unfunded mandate. They will use this to raise all teachers pay whether they are qualified or not. This is just another example of how a law will be twisted and used to enhance the educratic bureaucracy.
I disagree with the NEA/AFT on this. If it takes extra money to get good teachers into the
schools that need them most, or to find math and science teachers, OK. Caveats abound:
1) If you’re going to pay more for a teacher, we should have evidence of effectiveness.
Giving an extra $5000 a year to Dr. X to teach physics is wasted money if Dr. X is a lousy teacher,
and many of your true wonks would be lousy teachers.
2) Pay differential just for teaching in a high-poverty school is wasted money if the results
don’t improve. A system of bonuses for making goals would be anathema to most teachers, but
such is life.
3) How would you suggest we evaluate whether veteran teachers are highly qualified? The
testing option is politically unviable, and degrees don’t really mean all that much.
The real problem is that we don’t yet have a truly valid way to measure teacher effectiveness
independent of the 1000 variables that make up a classroom.
1. Strengthen the review process.
2. Test kids upon arrival in the classroom and at the end of the year. Improvements should have taken place.
3. Test the teachers knowledge at regular intervals or when their subject matter/grade level assignment change.
It’s not just a “teacher differential.” Any industrial psychologist will tell you that salary is, in the end, simply a “hygiene factor,” and not a measure of motivation. Salary is an attractor to get the best people into the classroom. If salaries are not competitive with other jobs competing for the same teachers, then we won’t have the best teachers. Live with it. Legislators’ refusal to provide competitive pay is a conscious decision to work with less than the best.
TheRain, above, gets closer to the real issues in the note that we don’t have any real way of measuring teacher effectiveness independent of the other variables that go into a classroom. Competitive salaries won’t much improve the performance of kids jammed 25 to 40 in a classroom. Having come from companies that seriously applied W. Edwards Deming’s quality programs, I have been astounded at how little administrators do to try to assure kids get the best education. Good teachers are probably the single most important link; well-equipped classrooms are another linkthat is often neglected, with teachers scrambling for adequate bookshelf space, not-text books, globes, maps, projectors, screens, even chalk and whiteboard markers. Textbooks in several topics are compromises, intellectual pabulum; good video materials are not systematically provided. Computer access is hit and miss. Libraries are strapped. Photocopiers are often old and tired, inadequate to high-volume, sophisticated copy requirements — and paper is often restricted in a “cost-saving” measure. Teachers are expected to perform four to seven hours a day with an hour of “prep” time. No other performance job has so little down time. Consider that a rise up in teaching, say to a college professorship, includes dramatic reductions in time before a class. What do we do for the more important, primary and secondary teachers?
This just scratches the surface. Were we to sit down, seriously, and diagram out what we know goes into a successful classroom, we could come up with several dozen things, many of them relatively minor and very low-cost, that could improve the performance of the classroom (teacher included) — but which run counter to the budget priorities or other management demands of administrators.
Every day in my classroom is a struggle. The buses break down, and kids don’t arrive on time or at all. The thermostat hasn’t worked well, ever. Air filters for the HVAC are changed on a health-department-shocking four-month schedule (they should be changed monthly at least). A bad light may take three weeks to get “scheduled” to fix — and getting a shield to block the light right over the video screen requires an architect and weeks of planning. The industrial-strength, World War I surplus pencil sharpeners I remember from my youth have been replaced by lowest-possible-bid devices that are often improperly mounted on the wall, and which generally fail in normal use within a couple of months of installation (how can they mis-engineer a pencil sharpener?).
And then there’s the issue of actually getting ideas on the subject matter. The district is gung-ho about teachers getting continuing ed that can be “shared” with other teachers. So the math teacher has some difficulty getting approval for continuing ed in math, since he can’t share that with the history or English teachers . . .
The reality is that legislators and, too often, administrators, treat education as a “black box.” NCLB presumes, with some accuracy, that the teacher is the most important cog in that box — but then goes awry in assuming that the teacher controls all the other cogs in the box, and so holds the teacher accountable for all the possible administrative screwups that frustrate getting a good product delivered, a good year of learning specially tailored to each individual student.
For too many teachers, NCLB is the ultimate faith-based initiative. It makes every teacher start out the year with “God help us!” — even those who disbelieve. Nuts.