Get Better Teachers With One Weird Trick

When I was younger I was a sucker for those short cut programs you see advertised all over the place. Learn Chinese in three weeks! Lose ten pounds a week with this five minute workout! Earn thousands from home with this three step plan! Of course the only thing I really learned was I was going to lose some weight in my wallet and someone else was doing all the earning.

Eventually I figured out that if I wanted to take on a complicated task it meant investing real effort, paying attention to my results over a long period of time, perhaps the rest of my life, and adjusting my plan based on my changing goals. In other words, it had to become a part of the way I did things, not just something I paid attention to for a few weeks out of the year.

I mention this because when I look at the latest efforts of our educational betters to identify and measure teacher effectiveness I see the same sort of short cut thinking that used to drain my bank account. Need to determine if teachers are any good? Just give them this test before they graduate. No wait, give their students this test, then use it to evaluate the teachers. Want better schools? Give teachers the educational version of piecework. Hey, it works for manufacturing. The thinking that underlies these programs is the same as those that promise to reduce belly fat with “one weird trick” and that is, if we can just find that one test, or that one measure we can apply it to all teachers everywhere and forever, then all our problems will be solved.

I should mention here that I never learned Chinese, I could stand to lose a few pounds, and I’m not rich.

The National Education Writers Association has an interesting compilation of what current research in the measures du jour say about teacher effectiveness and they aren’t exactly what you might call a slam dunk. Value added your cup of tea?

Value-added models appear to pick up some differences in teacher quality, but they can be influenced by a number of factors, such as the statistical controls selected. They may also be affected by the characteristics of schools and peers. The impact of unmeasured factors in schools, such as principals and choice of curriculum, is less clear.

Not a rousing vote of confidence. What about testing for “content mastery,” or programs that provide “board certification?”

Characteristics such as board certification and content knowledge in math sometimes are linked with student achievement. Still, these factors don’t explain much of the differences in teacher effectiveness overall.

Everyone knows teachers go into the profession for the money, so what if we just paid them more to do a better job?

 In the United States, merit pay exclusively focused on rewarding teachers whose students produce gains has not been shown to improve student achievement…

Well, at least we know that it’s teachers who hold the key to student success or failure, right? That’s why we need all these measurements.

Research has shown that the variation in student achievement is predominantly a product of individual and family background characteristics. Of the school factors that have been isolated for study, teachers are probably the most important determinants of how students will perform on standardized tests.

OK, so if we want an educational system that values teachers who teach kids how to take standardized tests, it certainly looks like we’ve found our measures of “teacher effectiveness.” Trouble is, as Matthew Di Carlo, writing at Shankerblog points out:

"[O]nly about 25-40 percent of the top quintile (top 20%) teachers in one year were in the top quintile the next year, while between 20-30 percent of them ended up in the bottom 40%," of which volatility "a very large proportion was due to nothing more than random error."

“Volatility” and “random error.” To borrow a phrase from Prince Hamlet, “Ay, there’s the rub.” Education is a dynamic, complicated slippery little beastie and just when you think you’ve got a handle on her, she goes tumbling off in a wholly unexpected direction leaving you measuring smoke and thinking you know where the fire is. My own opinion is this is because human beings are dynamic, complicated slippery little beasties and when you factor in the type of human being education deals with, namely kids growing up, maturing and changing, well you’ve got basically a Rubic’s cube of “volatility” to solve before you can have any confidence in your measures.

This is why static, universal, external attempts at measurement have failed and will continue to fail. There are no short cuts. If you want effective teachers, you have to start by paying attention to those teachers. You have to support them by first of all listening to them and inviting them to participate in developing meaningful, flexible, appropriately focused measures. That’s hard work. It takes time, commitment and yes, money. Effort in other words, something we’re always telling students they need to have more of. Well, until they grow up and become teacher effectiveness experts at least.