The short, and the long answer to this is no.
Of course I framed the question using the phrase “the measure of teacher effectiveness.” Why do I bring this topic up for discussion on this blog. In America there is a lot of talk about educational reform, especially from President Obama and the new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (read Duncan’s comments given at the NSTA Conference). There is not only interest, but there is a lot of Federal money being directed toward the nation’s schools, and a good deal of the funding will be to focus on educational reform.
The U.S. Department of Education’s vision of educational reform is embedded in the No Child Left Behind Act, which has created an environment in which student test scores are used to measure teacher and school effectiveness. It seems perfectly reasonable to link how well students do on tests to the effectiveness of teachers and schools. But is really?
Many pundits (and many educators) like to infer that teaching and learning are are like any business, which that business is manufacturing and selling automobiles, selling antiques, making refrigerators, manufacturing matresses, selling paper clips, and I should add, selling securities such as stocks and mortgages. The basic idea is of course to reward the high performers (those with high sales records, or improvement from the last quarter) in these businesses with high pay, or some other measure of reward. In fact in today’s Atlanta Journal, Mr. Dean Alford, a former Georgia House member, vice chair of the State Board of the Technical College System of Georgia, and a business owner, believes that “paying teachers who show improved student achievement” will attract more dynamic individuals into teaching. It really galls me when I read a statement such as this.
These individuals really believe that there is a cause and effect relationship between teacher behavior (or teaching skill, if you wish), and how many questions students answer correctly on an end-of-the-year high stakes test. Further they believe that you can use test score change (improvement, hopefully) as a way to calculate teacher pay. It is very difficult to carry on a conversation with individuals like Alford because they honestly believe the work of a teacher in a classroom is very much like the work of the person trying to sell you a car, or a paperclip. These individuals are trapped in a 19th Century model of work, and learning. Most companies have multifaceted performance evaluations, and tend not to rely on one variable to make a decision on the worth of an individual to a company. This has to be true, otherwise how do you justify the enormous bonuses being given to AIG executives in departments that caused the company to tank.
Given this angst, I do want to say that there is research evidence to support the idea that effective teaching results in increased science achievement for all students. Johnson, Kahle, and Fargo in a study published in Science Education, report that effective teachers positively impact student learning. In fact, you will find a lot of supporting research in the journal Science Education related to teacher effectiveness. Follow this link, and you will find 152 studies that deal in some way with teacher effectiveness in science.
However, science achievement is not the measure of teacher effectiveness. There are wide variations in the way in which effective and outstanding teachers perform. To use a test score to validate teacher effectiveness is not only short-sighted, but not supportable in terms of research design. In order to tie student achievement to teacher performance we would need to be able to support the hypothesis experimentally that gains in students achievement are the result of teacher performance. This is an unreasonable request in that it would require assigning random groups of students to teachers, and then pre- and post-testing with experimental and control groups. Indeed, most studies attempting to tie student achievement and teacher performance use “quasi-experiental designs,” and in these studies there a many variables that could contribute to the “acheivement gains.”
The environment that will foster student learning is a humanistic learning environment. Its environment that encouages teachers to be creative and inventive in working with students, and designs a workspace in which risks can be taken. Students need to be challenged, but more importantly need to involved in making decisions about their own education. We know that learning science is NOT akin to passing out bricks, and then measuring how many bricks were attained be students in our classes. Humans construct knowlege, and learning environments that are contextual, relevant, and of value provide the setting for meaningful learning.
We need to support the notion that teaching is an art, and can not be reduced to a student achievement test score.
I was going to ask about research done to prove this question. I agree, the “quasi-experimental” design does not take into account hte many factors that determine how well a student does on test scores (studying, outside tutoring, home life, socieoeconomic status, education status of parents, extarcurricular responisbilities,etc.) I would agree that an effective teacher will have good test scores, but how do we know the “best fit” teacher, if youwill, is paired with the “best-fit’ students. I looked at some research projects middle and high school students had done regarding Gardner’s Mulitple Inteliigences and which ones students and techers posess or rather favor— the results were itneresting.
They found that honors or regents accelerated students are intrapersonal as are most teachers. One would conclude then, that having the same intelligence would yield better results than if paired with those that are not strong in that intelligence area. I think this is certainly something to think about when discussing effectiveness as we must teach and work with 100′s of students that, if they were adults, would not necessariily be the people we choose to surround ourselves with. We must teach the masses no matter what htey bring to the table. This definitely raises the question of how effective you can be in the face of certain disadvantages.
Diana, thank you for your comment, and especially your remarks regarding Howard Garnder’s “Multiple intelligences.” Teachers have always had a challenge working with diverse groups of students. I find that much of the qualitative research that is published in the journal “Science Education” and in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching offers insight into the work of teachers and their students. I think these kinds of studies provide the depth we need to understand the complexity of teaching, but many of these studies offer suggestions for what does work in the classroom, and to some degree we can take ideas from these studies and try and apply them in our own classrooms. I’ve found studies focusing on critical pedagogy, feminist perspectives, and multicultural perspectives extremely useful. Jack
I like the multiple intelligence ideas, and I think that teachers often teach as if they were teaching only to students like themselves. I will add another perspective on this topic:
The issue of paring teachers with students on a “best fit” basis, is a rather slippery one. The intuitive idea is to pair “like” teachers with “like” students–per what Diana has indicated–but the issue is: how do we define “likes”? Do we go by religion, gender, race, or creed? Although there are some basis for this notion (e.g., middle-class or wealthy people understand the traditions of likes, and mill or farm workers understand the traditions inherent in their work), but where do we actaully begin, not to mention that we do not have enough teachers to match all students?
At CMS (Charlotte, NC Schools), there have been attempts to move the “better-trained, and experienced) teachers to the urban, struggling schools. My problem with this proposition is that the cultural match or knowledge needed by the teachers may not be there. This observation is based on a previous experience (I observed) in one of the schools, where some “veteran” teachers tried to change a struggling urban school, but failed miserably. They tried to import and overlay a school tradition that was a misfit to the students.
My prescription is this: Teach the teachers to become better-fit for their posts. This must be done before they burn out or are run (scared) away by their own students. From my point of view, this is the true cause of teacher attrition: teacher-student mis-match that is not mitigated by proper training.
Cheers!
[...] use to determine if teachers are effective. Student achievement is only one such factor. In a March 22 post, I argued that student science achievement is only one measure of teacher [...]