Rating Teachers via Student Testing

I agree with Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia, that ideally teachers should be judged on the progress made by their students, rather than "input" or "process" indicators that are only suggestive of how well they might teach.

I also like the "value added" measurement approach, which judges teachers against the progress made by students in their care rather than the cumulative achievement made during the students life. Even the value added approach should recognize that the challenges faced by different teachers may be very different. A English teacher with a class of dyslexic children would face a different challenge than one with a class of normal children or one with a class of language-gifted children. Indeed an English teacher in a boys school might face different challenges than one in a girls school. The use of improvements in student achievement, when used to judge teacher performance, should recognize such differences.

A more important problem is that the tests we use don't work very well. Think about it. There are magnet schools for science and for the arts. There are secondary schools that teach for the Internatioanl baccalaureate. These schools have different objectives for their students. The objectives are in theory shared by parents, teachers, and their communities. The teachers performance, if judged by student progress, should in these schools clearly be judged against the specific objectives for the students in their individual schools. That should be more possible for administrators of the individual school than for administrators of school districts, or state boards.

While people are in principle willing to define the objectives for such specialized schools, I doubt that it is politically feasible to fully recognize that society does not really want all schools to offer the same opportunity for intellectual excellence to their students. A lot of kids are going to wind up in jobs relatively lacking in prestige but necessary for the operation of our economy. The public is willing to pay the cost of preparing these kids adequately for those jobs, and preparing them adequately for their other roles in society (citizen, parent, driver, etc.), but is probably unwilling to prepare all students for the best paid and most prestigious jobs. Indeed, it might well be unwise and unjust to prepare students for roles that they will never have the chance to fulfill. However, if we are unwilling to be publicly explicit about the objectives of a school, it is hard to see how we can fairly judge teachers by their performance in helping their students reach those objectives.

Perhaps more importantly, we really want teachers and schools to help their students as individuals to develop their own individual potentials. Among my closest school friends were people who later became a minister, a scientist, a consulting psychologist, a teacher, a peace activist, as I became a bureaucrat and consultant in the field of international development. Other members of our class became actors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and went into other fields. Our school and our teachers should be judged on how well they equipped us for those careers, and indeed on how well they prepared us to choose among and compete for the career opportunities available to us.

In my professional training in engineering school, there was an explicit effort to prepare students to act ethically as professional engineers. Clearly, if schools seek to produce graduates who will act ethically, then schools should be building character and not only teaching philosophy. Indeed, if a school wants to produce an engineer not only capable of producing excellent engineering designs but who does so consistently over a long period of time, it should both motivate that student towards professional excellence and toward a lifetime of self-study, learning, and professional development. These are but a couple of examples of objectives of schooling that are seldom if ever measured by tests. I think the problem is not that it is inherently impossible to measure character development or motivation, but that we simply do not seek their measurement in school systems.

So, while in principle it seems a good idea to evaluate students by measuring the accomplishments of students under their tutelage, since we don't use nor have tests that measure all of the aspects of student growth that are important to us, we must recognize that there are dangers in the approach. People will tend to produce more of that which we reward them to produce, and necessarily less of those services which are not rewarded. We have already produced far too many citizens who feel that their education ends with the end of schooling. I fear that too many teachers in too many schools fail to do enough in character building of their students.

I guess the point here is both that educational testing still needs to be improved, and that until we have adequate tests and testing we should use complementary indicators in evaluating and rewarding teachers.