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:

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:

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.