It wouldn’t matter if the first doctor made huge leaps with their patients, he or she could have even miraculously helped many patients survive when no one else thought it could happen and it would not matter. If we only judged a doctor by their mortality rates those triumphs wouldn’t matter because it would still seem that doctor was a failure.

We have to think of where we are starting from with children. Each of these children can make huge leaps each year and all of them are capable of great things, but looking at one score at the end of the year and using it to judge teachers and the students themselves is about as logical as the doctor scenario.

Teachers who choose to work at a struggling school do so because they want to help make a difference. We know going in that ,oftentimes, our students will be years behind, that we will have little to no parent support, that sometimes our children will come to school without the basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing, love). Teachers work with at risk students because they want to not because they get paid more or can’t get a job at a “good” school.

Most teachers I know work their butts off and so do most students. Students might make 2 years of progress, but still might be failing according to the standards of NCLB. And as a teacher, I think it is unfair to judge the students or the teachers in this way. I think it discourages great teachers from working in schools that are “struggling.”

If we really want to make sure students are learning what they should and that teachers are teaching the way they should, students’ end of year achievement levels should be judged against where they started at the beginning of the year (not from one year to another).

Less time and money should be spend on testing and “holding teachers accountable” and should be spent on lowering class sizes, starting early education programs for at risk children, providing mentors and tutors for students in need and enrichment for others.

Our focus should be on giving students the skills they need to be successful adults and future leaders of the world. We should be worried about making good students and good people, not good test takers. Our time and efforts should go toward providing authentic and engaging learning experiences. That gets really hard to do when the government and many non-teachers don’t see all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. All they see are test scores and rankings. What a shame.

To improve instruction, we would need to shift the way we talk about ed reform from “accountability” to “responsiblity”. That is: who is responsible for ensuring that each and every child receives a quality education?

If we insist that it is the individual teacher who is solely responsible then we need to give all teachers the freedom to teach as they see fit. We don’t. The feds have mandates. The states develop the tests and have other mandates. The district officials have mandates and contraints. And yet each of those bodies (district, state and fed) are not held accountable at all for the silly/nonproductive mandates that they impose upon the classroom. So given all the compliance issues that teachers face, where will they find the time to improve their teaching? How will they improve their teaching? How do they even know what good teaching is?

In quality successful school systems around the world, the reponsibility for ensuring that each and every child is not on the backs of the teachers alone. Those systems have checks and balances to ensure that the curricula works well, teachers have time/support for developing their craft and all the assessments are aligned with classroom instruction as well as their long term goals. The responsiblity is held at the national, regional or local level, but is never solely on the backs of the teacher.

To answer you last question: how do we get these guest bloggers to focus on real reforms that might actually improve our children’s education? Not easy. Presidential candidates are looking to get elected, not lead. Why would they ever go out on a limb and offer any real suggestions that might offend or bother voters?

But to move away from the status quo, real leadership is required. And so far, neither candidate has shown any leadership in suggesting real reforms that actually have some hope in improving education.

So, thanks for closing the loop on that!

So how do we get these guest bloggers to start focusing on that?

But insisting that teachers are to be punished when they “fail” does little to communicate *how* to encourage/develop better teaching.

Internationally, those school systems that enable quality learning have tremendous support mechanisms for teachers to learn from each other and develop new/better ways of connecting children with subject material. We have no support mechanisms in our schools whatsoever. (Most “teacher development” does not qualify as useful for improving one’s own practice.)

Improving classroom instruction needs a policy shift so that schools are invested in continual improvement of those 3 critical aspects of learning: teaching, curricula and assessments. The international evidence is clear, without all improvements in all 3, all ed reforms will fail to improve student learning.

Frankly though, I think there are already enough disincentives for teachers to teach in struggling schools. Blaming test-based accountability for pushing teachers out of these schools seems like beating a dead horse. What are the solutions for getting great teachers into these schools? And can — or should — we assess whether the students they teach are making academic progress? … Or succumbing to their cancers?

(And seriously, if we’re going to stick with medical metaphors, why can’t we start start pushing teachers in impoverished schools to think of themselves as skilled surgeons who excel in challenging situations? Those who aren’t up to that level of challenge can stick to the suburbs. Why the morbidity and defeatism?)

Also, if a doctor treated terminally ill patients and they all died quickly and in pain, we could safely say that the doctor was not engaging in high quality medical practice. If all of a cardiologist’s patients suffered multiple heart attacks, we might consider that the doctor was delivering high quality medical practice.

I am also disturbed by doctors who blame others for their own failure to practice high quality medicine.

So I cannot agree with you entirely.

There are aspects of teaching that can be improved. The actual work of teaching students in classrooms is not an art or craft, but is professional practice that requires continual reflection and study. Polocymakers need to begin to design policies that actually improve what goes on in classrooms, rather than simply increasing funds for education or tinkering with cut scores.

Again, I think placing all blame for students’ success or failure on the teacher is simplistic, given the complex array of factors that influence a student or teacher’s effectiveness.

As a teacher, my strengths were enthusiasm, intelligence, and content knowledge. My weaknesses were lesson planning (since I rarely taught the same subject twice), and classroom management. Depending on my placement, I was either a great, inspirational teacher, or an out-of-control ineffective teacher. It wasn’t me that changed – it was my environment.

Some teachers have great motivational skills, some have great classroom management skills, some have very strong content knowledge, some have mixtures of all the above.

My gripe with any teacher evaluation system is that it rarely takes into account the teacher’s placement and surroundings. I would have a difficult time labeling a teacher as a “failure” based on one classroom, in one school.

Nicely said.

If we paid doctors based on their patient outcomes, who would ever want to treat terminal patients?

Are we holding doctors “accountable” for the fact that too many patients die from cancer or heart attacks?

Why are we holding teachers solely “accountable” for student learning, when publishers, test makers, standards developers, state educational agencies, federal mandates, etc… also greatly affect student learning?