Spotting Teacher Talent

So I posted a recent New Yorker article over on my facebook page that I thought was quite excellent. I thought this because A) Malcolm Gladwell creatively and seamlessly connects two apparently unrelated topics, namely predicting the success of a college quarterback in the NFL and predicting the success of a classroom teacher and B) because I agree with his conclusions. Turns out this has generated much discussion! Four Five comments at last check! Exciting.

So a few quick comments about the article. One of the points Gladwell makes is that we don't know who a successful teacher will be until they are actually teaching in a classroom. Very much like trying to predict which college quarterbacks are going to be successful in the NFL, there simply is no clear set of predictors that allow us to say with confidence that a person will become a good teacher. The reason this is important is we often try to address teacher quality by doing things that sound like they should help teachers, but in fact have nothing to do with successful teaching.

Currently the only tangible rewards that we offer teachers are based on their experience and educational credits. A teacher gets paid more and moves up the seniority ranks by taking more courses and teaching more years. The problem with this is that research shows us it has absolutely nothing to do with what the teacher actually does in the classroom. A bad teacher with a masters degree is still a bad teacher. A great teacher with three years of experience and a lowly BA is still a great teacher. There is no correlation between asking teaching to take more classes and the results we will see in our schools. That was the point I was trying to make in my little facebook comment.

Michael read the quote (and likely the whole article) and said that, "It would be nice if there were some more reliable marker than just students' test scores." (In all honesty, I am not entirely sure if Michael was referring to the fact that it is too bad we don't have a better marker to indicate who will be a successful teacher OR if it's too bad that we determine a successful teacher mostly by test scores. I assume it was the latter.) Which opened up the conversation about testing. Let me say briefly that I understand the point that tests alone do not indicate teacher quality. To be sure, standardized tests are blunt instruments that tell us one piece of the puzzle. I would, however, argue that they represent a pretty big piece of the puzzle.

Researchers who study school test data can clearly identify the impact that teachers have on their students test results while controlling for race and poverty. Year after year we will see that certain teacher's students continue to improve at a faster rate than average and certain teacher's students fall behind. This should make sense, right? If we believe that teachers are important to the education a student receives (as nearly everyone says) than we would expect to see that better teachers create better results. I would argue that being a loving, caring supportive teacher should not overcome the fact that students are falling academically behind after spending a year in that teacher's classroom. It would be nice to have complete, holistic evaluations of teachers (and by the way, we do know how to do that; we haven't figured out the executional and political challenges of making it happen in most public school districts), but until we're there testing data seems a pretty objective, valuable tool to begin the conversation. Much more on testing in the months to come, I'm sure.