9486 in the collection
Tell parents who good teachers are
Ohanian Comment: So the declaration here is to define "excellent teachers" by standardized test score results. There are several ugly little pieces to this "opinion," but it comes down to ranking teachers according to how children perform on McGraw-Hill Test questions. So the teachers who offer children a curriculum of test prep would deserve highest ratings in this opinionist's eyes.
By the way, the [unsigned] opinionist should check into the track record of Teach for America staff. How long do they stay in teaching? I'm not saying that longevity is a teacher's primary virtue, but dilletantes who decide to add a couple of years in the classroom to their resumes are not of much use to the profession--or to children.
Opinion
Monday, thousands of metro Atlanta parents will deliver their children into the hands of new teachers.
Many of those parents have no real idea of the teacher's capabilities. They won't know if the teacher has a track record of affecting student achievement. They don't have access to the standardized test scores of that teacher's former classes, and they don't know how the teacher has been rated on evaluations.
And that parental ignorance is deliberate.
Despite the rhetoric about the importance of improving schools in Georgia, no one in authority--not the governor, not the state school superintendent or local school boards � wants to acknowledge the elephant in the classroom, which is teacher quality.
The leadership remains silent for fear of being trampled by outraged teachers and education lobbies protesting that there's no fair way to measure teacher performance. The conspiracy of silence is abetted by the state's colleges of education, which deny any responsibility for the skill of their graduates and avoid any discussion of quality out of fear that they'll be implicated and their profitable franchise jeopardized.
After all, programs such as Teach for America have already demonstrated that bright college graduates can become excellent and effective teachers without ever stepping foot in a college of education.
In many cases, the mothers and fathers who attend PTA meetings and volunteer at the school do know the outstanding teachers; unofficial parent networks burble with advice on the best and worst teachers. (One reliable guidepost is to note the classrooms where the offspring of school board members and PTA presidents end up.)
Most metro Atlanta parents today are probably satisfied with their child's assigned teacher, some of them for good reason. Georgia schools have plenty of talented, dedicated and hard-working teachers. But it is equally true that some students today are walking into classrooms taught by ineffective teachers, and they will likely gain less this year than their peers down the hall blessed with the stronger teacher.
And the school's administrators know it.
Even in the better Georgia school systems, a surprising tolerance is extended to teachers who miss the mark. Often, administrators let lagging teachers slide because the teachers are "nice," or "they've been with the district for 15 years." If too many parents complain about a lackluster teacher, a transfer to a school across town is usually the response.
In theory, any parent should be able to log onto a Web site and pull up a data-rich profile of their children's new teachers. They should be able to see how former students of those teachers performed on the state Criterion-Referenced Competency Test. High school parents should be able to discern how students of a particular AP U.S. History teacher did on the AP exam, or how a math teacher's students fared on the state End of Course Test in algebra I.
Educators argue that parents will misuse the data to unfairly malign teachers who may have faced a daunting crop of students that year. Certainly, test scores have to be understood in context. The makeup of any individual class can influence scores, which is why parents ought to be able to review several years' worth of test data on a teacher. (Of course, the names of the students won't be listed, only the scores.)
But no matter the composition of the class, pretest and post-test scores can be used to measure growth and inform a parent whether a teacher was able to move a class at all.
School districts fear that such transparency would expose listless teaching and perhaps force action, and it would. That's exactly the point.
If parents discovered that fewer than 10 percent of a particular geometry teacher's students demonstrated proficiency on the End of Course Test for several years running, they might storm the principal's office and demand that the teacher either get professional help or get canned.
Such data would also prompt parents to demand that their children be placed in the classrooms of teachers with a verifiable history of boosting student achievement. And public education does not want parents choosing their children's teachers.
That's why schools resist giving parents a real voice in who teaches their child, even while superintendents gush about parents being partners in their child's education. What they want them to be is silent partners.
Sure, a parent can write a genial letter requesting a second-grade teacher who encourages hands-on learning, but if the parent dares to go so far as to specify Ms. Jones, he or she should be prepared to be pummeled with academic jargon about why such requests can't be honored. The unspoken reason, the real reason, is that schools fear a spotlight will be shone on the dreaded teacher that nobody wants.
Much of the education bureaucracy believes that marginal teachers have to be shielded, for the good of the overall profession. As a result, the habitual poor performance of their students is blamed on factors well out of control of the teacher. The children come to school hungry or tired; the parents never check their homework or show up for conferences; there are no books in the home.
Those obstacles are real, and they are difficult. But poor teachers compound those problems while good teachers overcome them. Until education leaders in Georgia are willing to acknowledge that reality and become open to solutions, education reform will remain more rhetoric than reality.
— Opinion
Atlanta Journal Constitution
2007-08-13
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/08/12/schooled_0813.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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