Daily Kos: Rethinking Teacher Quality and Metrics-mania

Reforming the Pursuit of Teacher Quality: Rejecting Metrics

If teacher quality matters, and it does, and if all students regardless of their life circumstances deserve high-quality teachers (or at least should never be subjected to years of inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers, as high-poverty, minority, and ELL students currently experience), we must rethink how we determine teacher quality, specifically by rejecting our traditional mania with metrics. This rethinking must include the following:

? Reject the rising culture of high-stakes testing by embracing appropriate uses of test data, which include understanding what data can and cannot explain (test data is a pale metric of learning, but it isn't learning) and avoiding using test data for purposes other than what tests were designed to measure (don't use student test scores to identify teacher quality, for example). [See the work of Bracey and Popham.]

? Shift away from focusing on teacher quality's correlations with test scores, drop-out rates, lifetime earning, and other metrics, and toward teachers' use of authentic assessment and teacher feedback to support student learning and development of the whole child. Expand, then, the evidence of high-quality teaching to include a wide range of artifacts, and not mere quantitative data.

? Decrease and then eliminate credentialing, certification, and accreditation bureaucracy that dilutes the power inherent in education as a rich and vibrant field of study. As someone who certified to teach (and taught high school for 18 years) and now is a teacher educator, I firmly believe certification bureaucracy to be the weakest link in how we move students into the field of teaching. Teachers must first be engaged and challenged students who experience and examine the most effective teaching practices that combine content knowledge with pedagogy.

? While majoring in education must combine sophisticated examinations of content in the context of teaching that content as well as placing future teachers often in the field, the first few years of every teacher's career should be heavily mentored to insure that no students find themselves in classrooms with inexperienced teachers alone. Teaching must be supported as a communal profession, one in which all teachers support and share in the teaching of all children. Current moves to implement merit pay and other forms of competition among teachers destroys the essential need for experienced and high-quality teachers to mentor new and struggling teachers.

? Professional organizations must be allowed to assume their rightful role as organizations that provide professional support and resources for autonomous educators (and not be reduced to extensions of the bureaucracy of certification and accreditation).

? Teacher salaries, advancement, and accountability must be linked to only that which is within those teachers' ability to control: (1) the learning conditions provided by the teachers, (2) the teachers' content knowledge as that is couched in pedagogy, (3) teaching experience, (4) levels of education attained related to content and/or teaching, and (5) teachers' scholarship. Teachers being held accountable for student outcomes is not equitable accountability since student outcomes are not within the control of any teacher.

? The use of data as descriptive must be distinguished from the use of data as predictive. The former is often powerful, and the latter is of little value and often more harmful than helpful.

For over a century, measuring, labeling, and ranking students has been at the center of our education system. During the past three decades, that process has been intensified. We sit in 2012 knowing that these metrics-based paradigms have failed miserably.

Applying that same metrics-mania (within punitive and competition-based policies) to our pursuit of high-quality teachers is more insanity and the only outcome possible is predictable failure?most notably diluting the pool of people willing to teach, discouraging high-quality teachers from working with the students having the greatest needs, and reducing an honorable profession to a service industry.

Suggesting that we need better metrics for identifying high-quality teachers is the same mistake as suggesting we need better standards and better tests. U.S. public education is struggling under the weight of problems that have nothing to do with these seemingly common-sense arguments. There is nothing worse than continuing to seek this fruitless array of "better" that masks what we should be doing instead.

References

Bracey, G. W. (2006). Reading educational research: How to avoid getting statistically snookered. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Popham, W. J. (2003). Test better, teach better: The instructional role of assessment. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Popham, W. J. (2001a) Teaching to the Test? Educational Leadership, 58(6), 16?20.

Popham, W. J. (2001b). The Truth about testing: An educator?s call to action. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Popham, W. J. (1999) Why Standardized Tests Don?t Measure Educational Quality. Educational Leadership, 56(6), 8-15.

Sawchuk, S. (2011). EWA research brief: What studies say about teacher effectiveness. Washington DC: Education Writers Association. Retrieved 7 July 2011 from http://www.ewa.org/...

Related Reading

Thomas, P. L. (2012, January 30). Further confessions of an outlier. Daily Kos.

-----. (2012, January 15). Accountability without autonomy is tyranny. Daily Kos.

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/16/1065376/-Rethinking-Teacher-Quality-and-Metrics-mania

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