Teachers study shows their worth | Chicago Tribune:
"In Illinois, that score was determined by five factors: the average college entrance exam score of all teachers in the school; results on the teacher licensing test of basic skills; a national ranking of college attended; years of experience; and number of teachers with provisional credentials. All of the state's 3,800 public schools were evaluated."
The study reported by the Tribune appears to make an assumption that teacher quality is related to:
- Teacher testing
- College attended
- Experience
- Schools where teachers are working with provisional certificates
It seems to me that none of these indicators actually relate to teacher quality directly. The assumption that teachers that do poorly on basic skills examinations are somehow deficient fails to account for the problem of bias in the test instruments. The college attended, based on national ranking, fails to account for the potential of teacher education responsibilities at the so-called "better" schools may be the responsibility of junior faculty or the responsibility of graduate students while the tenured professors are out "researching" better practice. Experience is a red herring. The fact that a teacher has many years of experience does not have anything to do with how well one teaches. Finally, teachers tend to work on provisional certificates in poorer urban schools during their early years in the classroom. Schools with higher poverty rates tend to have more teachers on provisional certificates.
Rather than looking at straw men and red herrings perhaps we should be looking at the underlying problems of school success--
- Poverty
- Cultural differences
- Resistance
Only when we stop blaming teachers, parents, and the students themselves will we ever get to the bottom of effective school change.
1 comment:
I think the best way to establish teacher quality is to simply ask students. Kids are much more astute on this topic than adults are willing to give them credit for. Every teacher with a closet full of teaching awards my kids ever had turned out to be among the worst teachers. I found this surprising until I realized that the awards come from other teachers, not the kids.
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