In a recent article in Dissent Magazine (6/29/11) “Firing Line: The Grand Coalition Against Teachers”, Joanne Barkan connects  various trends that link “educational decline” to “bad teachers.” If only they were fired in sufficient numbers, and “good teachers” were hired to replace them, or so the argument goes, the public schools would improve and almost everybody who went to school would get a college degree and have a “globally competitive” education.

            Barkan summarizes a number of the problems of using standardized test scores to determine a teacher’s competence and lists some of the studies that put into serious doubt the validity of this form of evaluation:

“The reformers’ plan to improve teaching hangs on the notion of annual teacher evaluations based heavily on student test scores. But if this process isn’t consistently accurate, it will hurt children as well as teachers: it will misidentify good and bad teachers (should “good” be defined as good at test prep in any case?), get the wrong ones fired, demoralize entire staffs, and discourage talented people from entering the profession.

“So far, the consensus judgment of the research community is not positive. Experts at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, RAND, and the Education Testing Service have repeatedly warned policy makers against using test scores to measure teacher effectiveness. The calculations require “value-added modeling” (VAM, complex mathematical models to control for in-school and outside factors that influence individual test scores over time so that teachers can be compared) and carefully calibrated tests.

         “In a 2009 Report to the Department of Education, the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council wrote, ‘Even in pilot projects, VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness that are based on data for a single class of students should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.’”

            I am not at all surprised at the attitude of  the “reformers,” a serious misnomer for “economic status quo-ers” since they do not consider significant changes in our economic system as one of the chief remedies for poor schooling. They ignore the findings of respected educational research reports and experts and relentlessly continue in a state-by-state trend, to increase the significance of test scores into determining teacher competence.

            Mayor Bloomberg has gone so far as to suggest that the “last in, first out” seniority rules for teachers is unfair to the “good, young teachers” who have recently entered the system rather than those “tired old timers” who have been “hanging around” for twenty or more years. In what other profession would one argue that less experience makes for better performance? Lawyers? Doctors? Airline pilots?  But since the real objective of these so-called reformers is to “dumb down” the next generation of our citizenry so they can be more easily manipulated, they are doing a very effective job of it most recently. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Tennessee and New Jersey within the last six months, collective bargaining rights for teachers have been seriously curtailed and test scores have become increasingly prominent in determining a school’s or teacher’s competence.

           Even in “progressive”  NYC (New York Times, June 26, 2011) 2600 teachers  will be retiring or quitting  including many veterans who might have otherwise been helpful as mentors for the less experienced ones but feel discouraged by the conditions under which they are being required to teach.  

            Now, after having taught and observed others teach for over 45 years, I must admit that there is no simple formula to what makes a “good” teacher. There was one semester, after thirty years of teaching, in which I had become so discouraged with a particular class that I was almost convinced that I had become a “bad teacher.” I was about to take early retirement but decided to stick it out for another year and discovered that I had become a “good teacher” again. But had I been observed and evaluated the previous semester, I am sure I would have gotten a negative report. As it happens, the “chemistry” that goes into successful teaching had left me for a while and having several disruptive students in the class did not help. But this sort of thing happens to many teachers sometime in their careers and those who do not get too discouraged can pull out of a “teaching slump.”

            I’ve asked a number of veteran teachers and principals what they looked for in good teaching and they had no magic formulas.  One mentioned that a “good teacher has to be a good listener” to students; another that the good teacher should be “well prepared in their subject” and have “a connection” with students so that they want to learn. But none I’ve spoken to have, when asked, said that standardized testing has ever proven to them who is a good teacher and who a bad one.

            It’s sometimes tricky to find analogies when it comes to teaching that will properly resonate with non-teachers but here is one that might. A good teacher is like a skillful gardener who can find a way to nurture the sickly plants as well as the healthy ones although not all will flourish and bear fruit. But it takes time for the seeds to germinate, grow and develop. The rewards for a teacher’s efforts might also take a great deal of time: a generation later a teacher might discover that one of her less promising students had become a success due to her encouragement as well as her instruction. “Good teachers” bear good fruit, but that cannot be measured in one week or month or year.

            There are many proven ways of determining a teacher’s value including careful observations by supervisors and “mentors,” student work such as portfolios and projects, and those intangibles that create a chemistry that makes an indifferent student into an enthusiastic learner. There is nothing “standardized” about the way in which young people learn and many ways of measuring the influence of a good teacher over the years, but the most meaningful is only revealed in the fullness of time.