Teacher Performance vs. Student Achievement

 A recent report out of the state of Florida indicated that there is great disconnect between teacher performance and student achievement. Florida had recently implemented a new formula for evaluation its teachers. Florida State Senate President Don Gaetz questioned “How can you have a C- or D- ranked school in which 85 percent or 90 percent of the teachers are classified as effective or highly effective?”

Changes in Florida law in 2011 changed the way teachers were evaluated and the way they could earn raises. The law also eliminated teacher tenure for newly hired teachers, an issue which is being challenged in court by the Florida teachers union.

Several questions persist. One central issue is whose teaching are you evaluating? If you are testing a student’s cumulative knowledge, then the current classroom teacher is not entirely responsible. What about those transient students who come and go from other districts or even from other states? How do you effectively evaluate the performance of teachers in that situation?  Yet another issue is students who have learning disabilities. If they have not been properly diagnosed and evaluated and their test performance is not disaggregated, they could be credited to a teacher’s performance.

We need to look at several issues and the solutions are complicated.

1.       We need to review and revise how teachers are trained.  There needs to be sufficient contact time in the classroom as well as an understanding of the content areas to be taught. How much theoretical knowledge of learning theory is necessary? I recently attended several lectures about the education system in Israel and learned quite a bit about their workings. The government encourages education and innovation. It provided funding for research and education. The teacher training program at the Technion, one of Israel’s premier universities, is quite rigorous, where candidates must get their degree in the content field first and then assist in the classroom befor getting a teaching assignment of their own. Teachers are not committed to a 35 year career in the classroom. Most Israeli teachers enter the classroom more mature than their American peers since they all have a military obligation that must be met before starting college.

2.       We need to decide what all America school children should know. Programs like the Core Knowledge Curriculum and the Great Books program are good, but they assume that students have a basic general fund of knowledge and many students do not. Unfortunately a great deal of this can be attributed to socio-economic differences. Additionally most American students are not proficient in a second language. These deficiencies keep American school children behind their European peers.

There are no easy answers but the hour is late and we cannot afford to have our children fall further behind. Nor can we afford to rubber stamp past pedagogical practices.

c. 2013 J.Margolis