SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Who will bell the cat?

Although everybody knows that good teachers matter, most educational administrators profess helplessness when it comes to identifying who they are. The Blob (a newly-coined name for the thousands of institutions, boards, companies, federations, alliances, departments, faculties, councils, commissions, panels, offices, and colleges that control public education) resists the use of test scores to separate the sheep from the goats, and somehow they just can’t seem to come up with any other way to identify good teachers.

It shouldn’t be this hard! After all, private enterprises (including private schools) routinely identify and reward good employees.

Be that as it may, here’s a modest proposal, recently published in the New York Times, for an objective way to assess teacher performance. The author cites research showing that the amount of time teachers spend delivering relevant instruction is strongly correlated with how much students learn, and suggests that we evaluate teachers on the basis of how much relevant instruction they deliver.

But how can we find out how much time teachers are spending on relevant instruction you ask. The author proposes that administrators simply videotape a few minutes of instruction a day and evaluate the results. 

Surely the Blob could have no possible objection to this notion!