Evaluating Teachers
I worked in public education for 40 some years both as a teacher
and as an administrator - I was Head of the Mathematics and Statistics
Department at Memorial for 6 years. Although my experience is at
the post-secondary level, I believe the following two statements
are true at every level:
- Every teacher is profoundly interested in seeing that their students
learn what is contained in the intended curriculum.
- In any sample of classes learning the same curriculum, there
will be different levels of acievement on the part of students.
Given that all teachers care and that some classes don't do well,
how do we decide when the cause of student failure is due to
problems with teachers?
To try to find an answer, let's change the question and ask:
- Why are some schools better than others?
This is the question posed and answered in:
"The Public School Advantage," C. A. Lubienski and S. T. Lubienski,
University of Chicago Press, 2014, 276pp. Available in paper from Amazon.
"The Public School Advantage" was written to address the argument
that because students in private schools do better on average
on standardized tests than students at public schools, therefore
all would be better served if private schools replaced public schools.
On the face of it, the argument sounds reasonable. It is totally
flawed, but to identify the flaws takes some serious work.
The reason the book appears in this list is that the same type of analysis
that is used by the Lubienskis is exactly what would have to be done before
one could reasonably draw a conclusion that the problem with student
performance in NL is due to poor teaching. Reading Chapters 4-6 explains
how the test data was analysed to understand cause and effect.
I recommend it to anyone seriously interested in drawing conclusions
about why ensembles of students perform poorly.