Teacher salaries and compensation trends

Teacher Evaluations

Discussion and Response: Teacher Performance or Effectiveness

What are the ramifications of the performance/effectiveness distinction for teacher evaluation?

The authors' deconstruction of the performance-effectiveness paradigm is useful on several fronts: It is imperative that policymakers clearly define the constructs they charge school districts with measuring, and it is crucial that educators understand the distinctions among the constructs. In the first case, it is incumbent upon policymakers to develop frameworks that can be articulated in praxis, particularly when the expenditure of funds to support the policy implementation is substantive. Policies that are grounded in some imagined reality are not only useless, they are harmful. Policy slippage is a known phenomenon -- policymakers understand how and why it happens. The less specificity in policy language, the greater the policy slippage. The greater the gap between necessary resources and actual allocations of resources, the greater the policy slippage. In the second case, discrete measures of performance and effectiveness are necessary to determine if teacher evaluations can reasonably be associated with student performance. There is evidence in the literature that teacher qualifications and experience are related to student performance (this data even holds up in the impoverished schools that Jonathan Kozol wrote about). Nevertheless, qualifications and experience are not performance and they are not effectiveness -- though they may contribute to or diminish both, as the case may be.

2. Discuss your experiences or feelings.

My intuitive sense tells me that there is a relationship between student learning and teaching. Everyone knows at least one good teacher -- someone who is obviously motivated to teach and prepared to teach. And, most likely, everyone can recall a teacher who was not motivated to teach or was woefully unprepared to teach the subject or the students in his/her class. If motivation is a key driver of performance, then society does not seem to be doing a very good job of increasing teachers' collective motivation to give teaching their all. The ranks of teachers are pretty regularly battered and they are not compensated sufficiently to withstand their beleaguered status. I believe that teaching is both an art and science. For students who come from a strong base, a scientific (method-based instruction) may be all that they need. But for other students, nothing short of relationship-based teacher will work. Sometimes we forget that art -- and artists -- can spark interest in learning and inspire resiliency in marginalized students. For those students, a sprinkling of fairy dust is required in every lesson on every day. Invariably, these magical teachers concoct their own recipes for engaging instruction that fosters exceptional learning. If we could package these attributes, we would. Instead, we must cultivate where they will grow, and pay well those teachers who possess the requisite skillset-personality-motivation-stamina packages.