Posted on 10/11/2013 5:20:40 AM PDT by MichCapCon
In Bridge Magazine, author Ron French argues that teacher certification requirements should be increased to keep ineffective teachers out of classrooms.
Hasn't Bridge heard? Apparently Michigan's teaching pool is doing quite well. After all, 99.6 percent of Michigan teachers were rated effective or better in 2012. Some school districts claim they don't have a single teacher who isn't doing his or her job.
All sarcasm aside, Bridge's point regarding public school quality in Michigan is valid. The state's public schools have mediocre graduation rates, and public school students post poor results on the NAEP, often called the nation's report card. Moreover, as Bridge notes, classroom teachers can have a large impact on student achievement. Any policy that attempts to grapple with Michigan's education woes needs to address improving teaching quality.
But simply adding more certification requirements will not bring better teachers to Michigan classrooms. Florida is a recent example of a state that has dramatically outpaced Michigan in educational outcomes. Instead of making its teacher certification more restrictive, Florida opened up its certification process and allowed more alternatives to becoming a teacher.
Decades of research show that the results of additional certification are mixed at best. Economist Eric Hanushek writes that, "...though certification requirements may prevent some poorly prepared teachers from entering the profession, they may also exclude others who would be quite effective in the classroom."
Additional certification requirements will not solve one of the central problems of education policy, namely, what makes a good teacher? If good teachers were simply those who were certified, or those with master's degrees, or those with the most experience, this important problem would be much easier to solve.
Though it may be difficult to predict who will be a good teacher, results are easier to measure. School leaders can look at classroom student gains and use in-class observations to gauge teacher quality. These are measures of quality in line with what the Michigan Council for Educator Effectiveness recommended earlier this year.
Though school leaders were previously hamstrung by collective bargaining agreements and state laws that severely limited the firing of ineffective teachers, Michigan legislators have provided a path forward.
In the coming years, it will be possible for teaching to be treated as a profession that rewards excellence instead of rewarding length of service and degrees. Teachers now can be rewarded with higher pay for doing a better job. Ineffective teachers can be fired. Tenure is no longer a guarantee of employment.
Teacher quality will not improve until local unions and administrators stop cooperating to avoid requirements intended to improve the teaching pool. In school districts such as Lansing, Saginaw and Waterford, administrators have chosen to rate every teacher as "effective." This is insulting to high-quality teachers, and will make it impossible to remove the worst teachers.
School leaders have the tools to remove ineffective teachers, or will soon, as new contracts become subject to recent legislative reforms. When school leaders begin to reward high-performing teachers and dismiss inadequate ones, teacher quality will begin to improve.
Instead of making entering the teaching profession more restrictive, holding teachers accountable to results will improve educational outcomes.
“After all, 99.6 percent of Michigan teachers were rated effective or better in 2012.”
All depends on who is doing the rating. What’s that famous line that ends with, “I just want to be the one counting the votes.”
I have no faith whatsoever in any system that involves teachers rating themselves.
Cue the Krazy Keyboard Kommandos in 5,4,3....
Or maybe they're that effective because the mission is to make mediocre-to-poor results.
If there’s a serious variance between “teacher effectiveness” ratings and student outcomes, then at least one of the measures is being, shall we say, jiggered.
I think we spend too much time focusing on the teachers and blaming them for students failing when the real cause is lack of families and our wretched youth culture. Granted, the unions make it much worse but putting that aside I feel bad for the decent mediocre teachers that we put under a microscope daily.
There are a lot of elements. However, if students aren’t learning, then the teachers are not “effective,” no matter how “good” they might be.
Unless, as someone mentioned above, the goal isn’t academic achievement, at all. This is a very reasonable possibility, in my opinion.
Teaching ia a notoriously difficult activity to rate. A couple of things to consider:
1. You are absolutely right about teachers rating themselves. It has zero credibility, especially when done in the same institution or Dept. The truth is the first casualty and it quickly becomes an exercise in “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. You need an objective, un-associated third party (who understands good teaching) to do it, but that is expensive. Administrators might be able to do this if they had the right training, but that would require more of them.
2. Relying on student ratings is EQUALLY problematic. Yes, they ARE the customer, but they are not being provided a traditional service. A few students will be honest, but most will give high ratings to teachers who are easy and/or hand out As like candy. This leads to grade inflation and generally dumbs down the learning process.
3. The other thing is that learning isn’t entirely under the control of the teacher. The students have to be able and motivated to learn. You can have the best teachers in the world, but if the culture and/or parents don’t value education & learning, it won’t matter. Ditto with facilities, equipment, class size, nutrition, etc.
4. You can look at general outcomes (e.g., test scores, employment rates, employer surveys, alumni progress, etc.). But, that mainly measures the overall success of the institution. It is hard to pin someone’s overall success or failure on one individual teacher.
To continue, despite what I said above, it typically NO secret who the good or bad teachers are. Everyone knows. They are the ones from who you will see consistent patterns of complaints from the students: not giving or grading homeworks, losing assignments, not updating lessons for years/decades, not answering emails, excessive absenteeism, failing to file routine reports or paperwork, submitting grades late, etc. They are also the ones railing the loudest against any effort to do assessment, standardized testing or evaluation. It is obvious as the nose on your face. But it is rare that someone actually DOES something about it.
BTW—I am a [retired-Military] university professor and I see it all the time.
You can compare 2 schools in the same town, one in a bad neighborhood and one in a good neighborhood. The Teachers in each school are both average.
Look at the test scores and the good neighborhood school will totally blow away the bad hood school 99% of the time. This is a fact proven over and over every day that shows how Teachers are a much smaller part of the problem than people think.
I’s not just the teachers, it’s what they are teaching. The problem is that teachers graduate out of the education departments of our leftest universities.
The truth is that teachers are largely facilitators. The good students practically teach themselves. The bad students won’t learn regardless. But there are a lot in the middle who need someone to push them to learn.
Maybe raising the Praxis scores for all the states would help weed out some marginal Teachers. I am no Einstein and am qualified to teach in every state due to my decent, but not great scores.
If being intelligent was important to our nation, wouldn’t we have professors and business owners visiting our high schools and student’s homes to recruit the smart kids like the coaches do to recruit the athletic kids? We don’t value intelligence.
I have an extended family member who is in her Senior year of a teaching program. She has relayed tales of dismay as to how many of her classmates are lazy, selfish, red-diaper doper Occupy types.
You set up a system whereby the companies contacted to provide school services are paid a bare minimum to provide the education, and a ROYALTY based on the students life time record of being able to support themselves without government support.
Of course this will never happen because it would result in:
1. A dramatic increase in the number of technical subjects taught.
2. A dramatic decrease in the number of lamebrain worthless liberal subjects taught.
3. The wholesale dismissal of a great percentage of the existing teachers.
It would of course eventually lower the cost of education by at least 50% and increase the effectiveness by 300%, but that has never been a concern of liberals.
It would of course eventually lower the cost of education by at least 50% and increase the effectiveness by 300%, but that has never been a concern of liberals.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.