who observe in the classroom, look at recorded grades/test scores, maybe look at the kids' overall GPA's or prior performance to get a handle on whether we're dealing with a group of achievers vs. a group of strugglers or apathetic students. It isn't fair to blame teachers for having to teach students who have zero ambition to learn, or who have overwhelming problems outside of school. But there has to be some way of measuring whether the teacher's methods are working.

decades but nothing changes for the better. I don't see how it could be changed unless the good teachers are willing to police their own ranks. Just like doctors, I saw figures for malpractice suits in WV a few years ago and there was just a small number of doctors that have repeated claims against them. The doctors complain about the premiums they have to pay for malpractice insurance but they won't police their own profession.

Hint: They didn't teach to tests back then.

They were doing college level work in HS.

I've been on numerous committees over the last several years that attempt to assess educational outcomes, and two things in particular are apparent to me.

1) We want an easy to measure metric of student success and teacher skill, but that has proven to be very elusive. Part of the problem is that the real personal gains from education are lifelong, not immediate, so immediate measures are not useful, and long term monitoring is just too impractical. Not to mention WAY too complex. But most metrics of student success currently in use are either mismeasurements, or they fail to take into account...

2) ...the role of student engagement and commitment to learning, which is at LEAST as important in determining the outcome of education as teacher skill and ability. Teaching and learning in formal settings is a contract of sorts between teachers and students, and BOTH parties must be willing to dedicate similar amounts of time and effort in the process for it to be most effective. Students have to be ready to learn, and eager to participate in structured learning processes. No amount of teaching, no matter how good, can make up for disinterested, disengaged students, and teachers rarely have effective tools for countering that apathy. Frankly, having tried LOTS of pedagogies over the years, I've come to think that student attitudes toward learning, challenge, and effort are more important than anything teachers bring to the classroom. Curious, motivated students almost don't need teachers except as guides, while incurious, disengaged, unmotivated students cannot be effectively taught by ANYONE, regardless of skill.

Education outcomes assessment is a mirage, a fine idea in abstract, but exceedingly difficult to perform accurately in the real world. We've convinced ourselves that we have to, however, so we use ineffective measures of student success and teacher quality. I think we'd be better off dropping the whole idea until we can articulate a clear set of RELEVANT objectives and the means to assess them. We have neither, today, yet we're driving this train full speed ahead anyway. That's what happens when corporate management mentality prevails in a field that does not work like a business. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.

Figure out in Pre-K which kids are at risk, and focus on them intensively until they are reading at a certain level and capable of certain math skills. It's be a very hard program to enact - no one wants to be told they don't know how to raise their kid! An end run around this via clever marketing (Head Start) can result in panic among the middle class parents who respond by demanding even more programs for their kids.

All in all, it's a lot easier to blame the teachers than to blame the parents!

Schools can't just assign kids to special ed. There's a rigorous qualification procedure regulated by state and federal guidelines.

This nonsense of every kid having to go to college is unrealistic. How about bringing back vocational ed programs?

It's also silly to compare teachers. What do we gain by doing that? How about we find a way to measure achievement reliably and look at that rather than arbitrary standards assigned to teachers?

Which often doesn't happen, which is why teachers need strong unions.

It's too easy for dishonest or politically motivated administrators to make good teachers look bad.

Teaching is also an impossible job in some places. The schools simply don't have the resources to keep the peace, let alone prepare kids who live in impoverished communities for college.

The teachers who burn out (myself included) far outnumber those who are "just marking the days until retirement."

When the schools have the resources they need to do a good job, matched to the communities they serve, that's when you can start "rating teachers and schools."

Schools that serve impoverished unstable communities will naturally require many more resources than schools that serve affluent communities.

if any politicians are ready to tackle. Here in New York, the state gives extra money to poor districts. the problem is, the state also gives money to the wealthiest districts!

My children had several teachers that were so over-the-top great (and effective, for all levels of students in their charge) that you wished you could clone them. They weren't always the most entertaining or fun teachers, but they always seemed to have the most interesting, clear, and deep approach to subject matter, put an obvious amount of work into planning projects and classes, and ... always, most of all, demanded that every kid put in just as hard work. And it always got results. They took no excuses from any kid and required each to do his or her best. I was a classroom volunteer for many many years, usually working with the kids who had more problems in classes, and so I saw how these teachers were able to get more out of these students than others. I also saw teachers who just ignored or gave up on some kids, and these always seemed to be the least effective teachers to me: the ones who didn't have a lot of patience.

I don't know how you create a formal evaluation system. Certainly, student achievement can only be a part of it (maybe 25% at most?). My experience (through my husband) is at the university level, where the evaluation through the tenure system is truly rigorous and at times brutal: it's a combination of inside and outside peer review, publication and research scrutiny, and effectiveness in the classroom as measured through peer consideration as well as student evaluations. It takes dozens of meetings over more than a year, and requires usually 7 years of evidence of a faculty member's performance.

On this last: let me say (as my thread title suggests) that parents and students are often the very best judges of good (and bad) teachers, on the whole, and I think that this kind of input could form another small part of the evaluation.

Peer evaluation is always the hardest. Unlike the university setting, where peers can be quite strict about evaluating their colleagues because the success of the whole department (and therefore their own careers) depends upon having the very highest level of colleagues. It must be really hard for elementary or high-school teachers to give a poor evaluation to a colleague, who they may eat lunch with every day. Somehow, it's the combination of rewarding strong schools that could make this evaluation more possible: if your school gets a bad rap because of a few ineffective or bad teachers, the others will have an incentive to evaluate them as objectively as possible.

One of the best things I ever observed about "good" teachers occurred at the 4-6 school my kids went to, which was organized into "units" that contained all these grade levels. The kids had a "home room" teacher for social studies, etc., but traveled from teacher to teacher depending on their math and reading levels, so that they usually had all four teachers in a unit over several years. I was there one day after school for something, and I passed by the teachers in my son's "Red" unit having their weekly meeting in the common space. I heard them discussing a particular student. One teacher described some problems she was having with him; another agreed seeing the same issues. A third teacher said: "He doesn't do that in my class: here's what I've done with him to try to correct that." The other teachers listened intently, and agreed this would be a good technique to try with this kid, and said they would try implementing it with him in their own class. I was so impressed at the level of detail these teachers were paying to each individual student--and how they were sharing their experiences to achieve more effective outcomes. This school was the model of great teaching. In the six combined years my kids spent there, I never ran across a "bad" teacher. And I think it was the collaborative model that really helped. Plus the fact that the kids were sharing a particular group of teachers for the three years they were at the school: it was enough time to really "work" on a kid, with consistency.

teachers have to be able to know their students. When students just shuffle from one class to another and a teacher sees 150 kids over the course of a day - then only the very worst and very best make any lind of meaningful contact!

By the same token - i think most schools are way too large!

Because of the influence children have on one another, a large part of being a good school is having good students. A child at a school where most of the other children are intelligent and motivated is likely to do well, even if the teachers and facilities are only mediocre, and conversely a child at a school where they aren't is less likely to do well, no matter how good the teaching.

So if what you're interested in is rating schools for the purpose of helping people decide which one to send their child to then testing children and publishing the results is a pretty good way of doing it.


But, for exactly the same reason - child performance depends heavily on peer pressure, and school test results depends heavily on intake - test results are a poor way of identifying good teachers.

So if what you're interested in is rating schools and/or teachers for the purpose of identifying the good and bad ones, rewarding the former, removing/improving the latter and motivating all of them to do well, there's probably no substitute for unannounced classroom inspections, preferably by other teachers.

This conversation has been going on for years between billionaires and other so-called education experts. They don't listen to educators or parents unless they are anti-union.

"Those schools" are still there because the economic conditions that perpetuate them has not changed, in fact it's gotten worse. There have been studies done that clearly show that you can move a good teacher from a "good school" into a "bad school" and he or she becomes a "bad teacher". How do you evaluate that? The person does everything the same in the new school but their scores go down anyway. So we fire that person for magically becoming a shitty teacher in a different environment? Or do we look at the whole structural problem and find solutions that are actually meaningful?

she went on about how impressed she was with them, how she misses them in her class, it isnt nearly as fun. how much they participated making class fun. she has a little one and wants another. she wanted to know how BOTH my boys ended up like that. why they are easy. respectful. ect....

i have always been impressed with almost ALL of the teachers. i can list a couple poor teachers. a couple teachers that were good but may not have like my child or their personality conflicted with my kids. not their fault. the education was still there.

i have teachers emailing me, heads up... this is happening. make sure your child....

i have teachers asking for kids to come into tutoring after school and surprised yet thrilled when i enthusiastically say thank you.

i have always insisted to kids adn told teachers i am ALWAYS on the teachers side, because i know they are fighting for the childs success and again, to be met with their surprise.

we have always gained the MOST the schools and teachers have offered, because i accept nothing less.

personally, i feel it is what you want out of the system, with what you get.

i have never met up against unreasonable.

sometimes the bad feelings generated from a single unreasonable event can travel down the generations - "grandpa hated school because ......, so he never encouraged dad at school, so dad tells today's kid that school is a waste of time."

Sometimes a teacher is fine for one kid, but rubs the next kid the wrong way. Four of my kids had the same math teacher, no complaints. Kid 5 just never liked her, but then Kid 6 had no complaints.

that just didnt not like my child (oldest is odd and i get the teacher that doesnt) and sometimes my son did not like the teacher, personality conflict. i acknowledge that. you know what i told my kids.....

tough shit.

find a way to be successful, regardless. as long as the education was offered, grab it and succeed. it was theirs to do. they had my support. and they are clever, they can figure it out. even if it is keeping their mouth shut.

Maybe start by recognizing teaching as a profession and then treating it that way. Look at how other countries who have the best edcutional results and see how they do it, there are plenty of models.

But the last thing that should ever have been done was to turn our educational system into a 'race to the top' (that phrase makes me shudder) for profit. First, end NCLB, then go from there.

something young women do to pick up pin money while waiting to get married. I hear people complaining about teachers being paid over $30,000 a year! Teachers are not babysitters! (and even babysitters deserve a living wage!)

Here in New York teachers are required to have a master's degree. Their pay is generally better than the national average, and guess what - we have no teacher shortage!

Of course there is no baseline society in this country. Even within a district, you'll have a school and teachers working with students and resources vastly different than a school just across town. It is about money. It is about opportunity. It is about parenting, students themselves, and yes, it is also about the quality of teachers.
There are almost as many anecdotal success stories (and failures) as there are students, but the only thing that remains statistically constant is that poor communities have poor schools, middle class communities have middle-of-the-road schools, and upper class communities have the "best" schools. A special teacher/administrator can of course make a difference (good or bad), but again this isn't statistically significant and insisting that all teachers/administrators need to be special-great isn't a serious idea.
More than any reform (and I work for a reform-oriented educational non-profit organization), what education needs is tons of money. Not just money for textbooks, desks, computers (all needed), but money for teachers so that it becomes a more respected and competitive career. More money for programs to ensure children have what they need, even beyond free breakfast/lunch. Schools should be awash in money for college prep and vocational curriculum. There needs to be money to ensure that no student has to even think about the economics of pursuing a college degree, attending a community college, or moving into a job training path when they graduate.
Money to make real the American fable that education is the key and path to becoming whatever you have the desire and aptitude to become. There are of course 100s, maybe 1000s of ideas for improving education, and many of them should be implemented once we've flooded our schools with cash. However, until we commit fiscally to making education better, results will be mixed at best.

Admitted, you don't want them in direct control, but you cannot have a good learning environment - teacher or school - that ignores student attitudes and observations. Happy students make a happy and efficient school.