Teachers and their Student's Test Scores

[Texsox]

https://tcta.org/node/13678

 

I chose to teach in a district where there is a large migrant population, where there is a high level of poverty, where parents more often than not did not graduate from college. I am interested in how they will find a system that fairly allows my efforts to be compared to say Highland Park, Texas (which is similar to Highland Park, Illinois, if everyone in Highland Park, Illinois suddenly received large pay raises). Not only that, but I teach English Language Arts with a high percentage of English language learners. Perhaps that makes my job easier as gains are easiest to achieve with new motivated learners. Is it fair to use gains when a few times a year I receive students who are reading 7 grade levels below average versus other teachers who may receive mostly students reading above grade level.

 

I am glad I am not trying to devise the system.

 

I fear an unbalanced rating system will cause good teachers to flee these schools and head to where the going is easier. Which is about the opposite of what is necessary to keep the US competitive in a world economy that values intellectual skills over manual labor skills. Also we are taking away human judgement. Gone are the days where a supervisor evaluated the employees. We are trying to achieve an unbiased, numerical formula where one really doesn't exist.

 

 

[caulfield12]

https://tcta.org/node/13678

 

I chose to teach in a district where there is a large migrant population, where there is a high level of poverty, where parents more often than not did not graduate from college. I am interested in how they will find a system that fairly allows my efforts to be compared to say Highland Park, Texas (which is similar to Highland Park, Illinois, if everyone in Highland Park, Illinois suddenly received large pay raises). Not only that, but I teach English Language Arts with a high percentage of English language learners. Perhaps that makes my job easier as gains are easiest to achieve with new motivated learners. Is it fair to use gains when a few times a year I receive students who are reading 7 grade levels below average versus other teachers who may receive mostly students reading above grade level.

 

I am glad I am not trying to devise the system.

 

I fear an unbalanced rating system will cause good teachers to flee these schools and head to where the going is easier. Which is about the opposite of what is necessary to keep the US competitive in a world economy that values intellectual skills over manual labor skills. Also we are taking away human judgement. Gone are the days where a supervisor evaluated the employees. We are trying to achieve an unbiased, numerical formula where one really doesn't exist.

 

Depends on whether those teachers are more motivated by money/job security than they are the challenge and idealistic part of why they first got into teaching...

 

There's long been a theory that if you raised the pay of teachers by some random number, let's say 25%, it wouldn't dramatically increase teaching quality.

 

Of course, that's an argument usually made in public school districts where teachers' salaries are relatively high vis a vis "average" salaries in the surrounding metroplex and yet the schools are underperforming dramatically....say, for example, the St. Louis and Kansas City public school districts.

 

A lot of ESL students are more motivated by finding a job as quickly as possible that provides them tangible benefits and skills...so in that system, you'd much prefer to teach them, let's say, Business & Management compared to Economics, which is much more theoretical and esoteric for high school students.

 

I think there will always be a bigger problem evaluating great or above average "humanities" teachers (History, English/Rhetoric/Writing/Government/Philosophy or even Visual Arts or Debate) than, for example, Chemistry/Physics/Biology/Math...where standardized testing and the "universality of hard science" makes judging results more black and white.

 

And of course, universities and parents are making the argument that those humanities teachers are not "worth" as much to their universities...and that's a dangerous slope to be on, where you start eliminating history classes to fit in more math/science or "back to the basics" approach.

 

I taught in an IB international school in China the last couple of years and it was pretty easy to see which students scored the best...but proving a correlation with teaching "quality" versus class size versus natural ability/talent of those students, that's where everything becomes much more complicated. An evaluator might assume because we had two students with perfect 800 scores on the SAT and because the students are Chinese and "expected" to outperform in mathematics that their scores would be higher for HL Math than for HL English, but then if you look at the structure of IB grading, you'd realize you could be an average or below average English teacher and your students would still receive mostly 5's and 6's (out of 7) whereas a lot of the HL Math students might get 4's and 5's and have a MUCH better math teacher. Statistics can always be misleading, and always be twisted one way or another to protect/defend or attack a particular teacher's individual results.

 

 

Edited October 5, 2013 by caulfield12