RALEIGH – How do you tell a good teacher from a bad one?
My mom and dad used to explain that, well, they could just tell. My dad spent most of his career in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools managing teachers as a principal, much of it at North Carolina’s largest public elementary school. My mom was an art teacher, with much of her time spent as an itinerant staffer deployed at multiple schools over the course of a year. She had occasion, in other words, to interact with hundreds of teachers.
So, how could they “just tell”? Personal style, high expectations, firm discipline, enthusiasm – there were many markers of excellence, according to my parents. This was mostly before the advent of state end-of-grade and the ABCs of Public Education program, so they did not associate excellence with demonstrable changes in test-score averages. Nor did they assume that teachers with more credentials or longer experience were necessarily better than teachers with less formal preparation (though my mother didn’t mind going back to college to get a master’s degree, so as to boost her annual pay – though its practical value in her classroom was nil).
If you believe that excellent teachers should be identified, cultivated, retained, and rewarded for taking on difficult educational challenges – and you should – then you have to exhibit confidence in some kind of merit-based compensation system. Unfortunately, far too many education officials and politicians express support in theory for rewarding teaching excellence and then refuse support for any practical means of doing it.
For example, teachers often resist the notion that principals should be able to use their judgment as managers to identify and reward excellent performance. These teachers argue that the discretion will inevitably be abused (which is true, but also true in every other professional setting) and that principals aren’t in a position to know enough about their classroom performance to make an informed judgment (which misses the point – or, more precisely, is the point).
Many of the same teachers, however, also resist the notion that their performance should be evaluated objectively, based on changes in standardized test scores for students in their charge. If you reject informed subjectivity by managers as well as objectivity by testing, you are left with uselessly mushy measurements of excellence (the term “portfolio” comes up quite a bit in this context) or none at all.
Employee assessment is inherently problematic and controversial. I won’t deny that some principals will do a horrible job as true personnel managers, and that test scores can be abused, mishandled, manipulated, or inapplicable to some situations (such as my mother’s elementary-arts curriculum, for example). But excellent schools will require excellent teachers, and teaching excellence has to be identified somehow, however inexactly or unfairly in some cases.
The available evidence casts doubt on the value of inputs as a marker for good teaching. That is, teachers who get master’s degrees, national board certification, or other credentials are not necessarily better at imparting knowledge and skills than are those who don’t. Traditional certification routes, via schools of education, are also no guarantors of better teaching. Two recent studies of teachers in the New York City system have demonstrated that yet again. You can see the effects of excellent teaching in the data – in clusters of high-performing students, otherwise inexplicable except for the common denominator of particular teachers – but finding variables that reliably correlate with that excellent teaching is harder (though thorough knowledge of the subject matter is clearly important in fields such as math and science).
Unless, of course, you talk to my parents. They can just tell.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.