This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 5, 2011 - Everyone knows that teachers grade their students. But who should grade the teachers -- and how?
The question is at the heart of a lot of education talk these days, and not only in schools.
In Washington, Congress is continuing to struggle with what should follow the No Child Left Behind program, whose reliance on standardized exams has been debated almost from the day the first test answer was bubbled in. In Jefferson City, education officials are trying for the third time to come up with new standards to judge schools and districts across the state.
In all of these discussions, a key question is how to measure the progress that students have made, but a close corollary is figuring out the best way to judge the teachers whose job it is to make sure those students learn what they are supposed to learn.
Figuring out the best way to do that isn't easy.
"I'm not aware that there is one teacher evaluation system that is the gold standard," said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri at Columbia who has conducted research into teacher quality. "I don't think it exists, and I think it would be hard to come up with one. There are pieces you might use in different contexts, but we're not there yet. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be evaluating teachers. That's the important thing.
"Talk to the band teacher, and say how would I know if you are doing a good job. What are you trying to accomplish. What are indicators of being a good band teacher? Then you measure that stuff and keep track of it. I think schools are paying a lot more attention to it now.
"There is always a market in K-12 education for someone to come along and say this is it, this is THE teacher evaluation system. You've got to be skeptical. Good managers will roll up their sleeves and grow their own."
Growing its own is what Missouri education officials have tried to do with newly adopted standards that teachers are expected to meet. The list of nine standards, broken down into 36 separate indicators of teacher quality, have a lofty goal: to indicate that "effective teachers are caring, reflective practitioners and life-long learners who continuously acquire new knowledge and skills and are constantly seeking to improve their teaching practice to provide high academic achievement for all students."
But what does that mean to the women and men who stand in front of the classroom every day or the administrators who have to evaluate them or the students who have to learn from them or the parents and other taxpayers who want to make sure they are getting the most for their education dollar?
Does it mean using test scores to measure how well students have learned? Does it mean observing teachers in the classroom to see how well they get their lessons across? Does it mean asking students or parents or peers to get the opinions of the people who may know them best?
Not surprisingly, administrators, teachers, board members, lawmakers, education researchers and everyone else have different formulas for the best way to determine which teachers are making the grade -- and if they're not, how they can be helped to improve.
"Essentially," says Kelli Hopkins, who taught in several districts in southwest Missouri and is now associate executive director for board service at the Missouri School Boards Association, "what we want is for evaluations to be performance-based, standards-based -- national standards where available, local where we develop them -- and we want them to take place in such away that they will steer the teacher toward improvement.
"We want a very clear pathway to express what we want the teacher to do, and we want it to be measurable."
And most want to make sure that the decisions are made as close to the classroom as possible.
"Things are flowing downhill from Washington, and they should be going the other way," says Kent King, executive director of the Missouri State Teachers Association.
"When your kids were young and they were having problems in the fifth grade, did you call Washington to find out what was wrong? No. You called the teacher because that was the one who knew what was going on in the classroom."
Broad Categories, Detailed Reports
In most cases, the general outline of what teachers should be able to do and how they should be evaluated isn't much in dispute.
Helene Sherman, an education professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, outlined three broad categories:
- Instructional quality, or how a teachers prepares lessons, then carries them out
- A disposition to teaching, in the sense of caring for children and being able to adapt to students' various needs and abilities
- Student achievement, measured in small chunks in ways appropriate to the content being taught.
She adds that assessments must be appropriate to the circumstances of any particular district, so that factors that influence any particular community are taken into account. It's not a question of dumbing down, she quickly added, just a recognition of the obstacles some students have to overcome before they can reach the point at which many other students start every day.
"All children can learn and all children can succeed," Sherman said, "but all children need equal opportunity if we are going to give them equal tests. We want to adjust assessment schedules to the needs of the community and the realities of the community.
"Assessments have to be realistic in terms of a community's needs and lifestyles, because if we don't do it that way, and base things just on a yearly test, you're never going to get people to teach in districts like Riverview Gardens."
The new Missouri teacher standards parse things differently. Its nine categories look at elements ranging from teachers' knowledge of the subject matter at hand to encouraging student growth and development to fostering critical thinking to using data to modify instruction to collaborating with their peers.
Karla Eslinger, assistant commissioner in the office of educator quality in Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the standards represent long hours of work with groups with a stake in their success. She also says the state wants to make sure that districts know the standards are there for them to adopt. But in the end, using them is a local decision.
"I feel very comfortable that we've turned over every rock and focused on what makes teachers do their job," she said.
"We all agree that student performance is a direction indication of the success of teachers. But we also agree that we need to consider many, many other things also. It's truly district-driven. It's not something we can do at the state level, but we want to make sure we have the data they can use."
Testing, Testing
Much of that data has to do with test scores. Since No Child Left Behind became law, the quality of individual schools and their districts has been judged primarily by how well students do on standardized exams -- tests that often matter more to the schools than to the students because they often mean little or nothing for final grades.
And since those tests are given in specific subjects -- fourth-grade math, say, or eighth-grade communication arts -- it can become pretty clear pretty quickly which classes and which teachers are doing well and which have students who are falling behind.
To state Sen. David Pearce, R-Warrensburg, who chairs the Missouri Senate education committee, that reliance on test scores is "very important because it's objective. It's a way to compare apples to apples."
But, says Pearce, who tried but failed in the last legislative session to establish a statewide commission on teacher compensation and effectiveness, the big challenge is to make sure that schools are not skewing their curriculum to the test, to artificially boost results.
He would like to see more frequent testing -- not just yearly, or one test at the start of school and another at the end to gauge progress, but monthly or even more often.
Joe Knodell, a former superintendent at two southeast Missouri school districts who is now with the Missouri Education Reform Council, agrees with the value of tests to show how well schools and teachers are doing.
"In a lot of other industries such as manufacturing," he said, "if you're making widgets, they evaluate you based on how good your widgets are. That needs to be part of a teacher's evaluation: What kinds of students are you graduating? Look at the pre-test and look at the post-test and see how students are doing at the end. But you also have to look at more than one year because one year you may have high-achieving students and the next year you may have lower-achieving students.
"Students aren't widgets. Each one is an individual. But we are putting out a product, and when you say I don't want to be judged by the product that is coming out of my classroom, that's really saying you don't want accountability, and accountability is a key word right now. If teachers really want to be professionals, they will say bring accountability on. I'm a darn good teacher, and you'll see when you test my kids."
Not everyone agrees with the value of the tests, at least not as the only or even the major factor in determining how well a teacher is doing. Eslinger, at DESE, says that "any time you use one number to determine someone's success, you're being a little shortsighted. You should be looking at all sorts of performance data."
And Dayle Burgdorf, the interim principal at University City High School who has served on the board of the Missouri Association of Secondary School Principals, says a reliance on such numbers falls far short of giving a true picture of how well a teacher is doing
"I look at test scores," she said. "That gives me an idea of what is getting through to the kids. But if you asked me to evaluate teachers solely on that, I would balk at that. You have to get in there to see them."
Visiting the Classroom
Such observations, Burgdorf added, should be conducted at least every other week, to make sure teachers are doing what they should. Some visits should be scheduled; others should be spontaneous. And, she added, the observer's attention shouldn't be focused only on what is going on in the front of the room.
"You come into the room," she said, "and you almost block the teacher out, to notice what the students are doing. Are their heads down? Is someone in the back filing her nails? It's very easy to tell when a student is disengaged. Either they're doing something they are not supposed to be doing, or they're doing nothing."
Catherine Lux, a kindergarten teacher in the Ferguson-Florissant school district -- a level where student testing obviously isn't a good way to rate a teacher -- welcomes such visits from an administrator.
"You can't judge somebody based on what the kids do because you don't know where the kids started, and you don't necessarily know how far they've come. You really need to have that observation aspect in there. They need to be able to see that the teacher knows her kids and knows the best way to reach them based on what she knows."
To Knodell, the way teachers find different ways to reach students is important.
"You should look at lesson plans," he said, "and make sure they are not just telling kids to turn to chapter 25 and let's read it together. They should make the lesson come alive and use the various instructional aids, whatever is available to get the lesson across, and not just the humdrum, same thing every day."
But King, at the Missouri State Teachers Association, cautions that under some circumstances, observation and evaluation by an administrator can turn into an adversarial proceeding, not one designed to see how well a teacher is doing.
"An administrator comes in," he says, "and his job is to evaluate. So basically they are going to hire or fire based on a thermometer reading of the patient, and you don't always know everything that is going on with the patient.
"If you have a loved one who is in the hospital, and they can't figure out what is wrong even though they do a bunch of tests, nobody fires the doctor. Nobody fires the nurse."
Ideally, says Sherman at UMSL, the observations will be conducted not by just one person but by a team -- a principal, an instructional coordinator, maybe someone from another school in the district and a peer teacher.
And, she added, they will be trained in what they should be looking for -- training that requires resources that school districts don't always have.
"You want assessments that really mean something in improving student achievement and teacher quality," Sherman said, "so you have to invest in it, with both time and money, to prepare people to assess this way."
King, at the teachers union, says that too often, principals have been forced out of their role as instructional leaders because of all of the other issues they must deal with, so they can't spend as much time in the classroom as they should. He would like to see more evaluations done by teachers' peers.
"You can identify the right ones easily," he said. "It's not rocket science. Go to the teachers' lounge and you'll find out who the teachers admire. Make them mentors, pay them a little extra and make them a coach."
But, says Sen. Pearce, peer evaluations may not always reflect reality.
"We have to be very careful that we don't put too much stock in that," he said. "You may have a popular peer who gets good grades, but some others may be making tough, bold decisions that would not necessarily make them popular with their peers."
Burgdorf, at U. City, admits that time is too often in short supply for administrators. But she thinks that observing teachers should be by far the biggest factor in their evaluations.
"To me," she said, "observations and conversations in the hallway between classes and meetings on other things is probably 95 percent of how we should evaluate teachers. Test scores can be about 2 percent, and there is some other stuff in there as well. You really can't have one without the other.
"If we are evaluating teachers appropriately and correctly, and we have the time and resources to do that, student test scores are going to do nothing but go up. That's the way I look at bridging that."
Students and Parents
While tests and observation may be the two most common ways of evaluating teachers, other factors come into play. In some places, student opinions are added into the equation, a situation that gets mixed reviews.
"My son could say the teacher really knows me, really understands me and gets how I learn," says Lux, the kindergarten teacher in Ferguson-Florissant whose son is in high school. "Or he could say the opposite, that this teacher doesn't really seem to know me and doesn't get how I learn."
Hopkins, at the school boards association, says student evaluations may not be scientific, but when she was in the classroom, they told her things she wanted to know.
"I would not tell a school board you must go out and survey students unless you have worked with teachers to determine that it would be useful and what kind of information would be useful," she said. "The last thing you want to do is ask 'Do you think so and so is a good teacher?'"
That kind of question worries Sen. Pearce.
"We need to be careful going down that road," he said. "It's very possible that a teacher is popular with students, but the teacher may not be teaching and the students may not be learning."
Adds King, at the teachers union:
"Students can tell you if they like teachers or don't like them, and if they feel like they're being taught. But you're going to get some students who won't like any teacher. It's all a bias. You can be a pal and not be a good teacher. You can be a good teacher and tough, and some students don't like that because you're making them do things they don't want to do."
If students may not be the best judge of teachers, how about parents? That idea appeals to Jeff Brown, the husband of a fourth-grade teacher and the parent of four children who attend private school.
"Some type of parental input is important," he said. "I think it's critically important for parents to have an ownership stake in their children's education. As a parent, I don't just think I'm turning my kids over to the school, and whatever education they get, they get. I think I should have a voice in what happens in the school."
And that voice should go beyond the typical parent-teacher conference, Brown added.
"I'd like to be able to say here is what I saw," he said. "Here is a specific instance where a teacher did a great job in this lesson or that one, did a great job in communicating with our student. Here are our concerns after this year.
"I don't want it to be informal or a one-off situation that may get followed up on and may not, but something more structured, so that the school has an opportunity to follow up on all of them. You may have some parents who are unhappy, but if you have a large enough group of parents doing it, you would have a better idea of how teachers are affecting that community."