Teach Your Teachers Well
Trisha Matthews teaching fourth graders in Brooklyn. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
LAST month, at the urging of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s Board of Regents suspended the use of state tests to evaluate teachers. This is a wise first step, but it won’t improve our schools unless we go further and build a professionalized system of support that views teachers as learners and challenges them to improve their classroom practices.
The national push over the last decade to strengthen how we evaluate teachers was rooted in studies that suggested that consecutive years with an ineffective teacher did lasting damage to a child’s life chances. In response, many teachers’ evaluations have been tied to how their students perform on state tests.
In 2010, New York began to develop a new teacher evaluation system, new tests and curriculums aligned with the Common Core standards. Most teachers agree that the standards are a step forward, because they ask students to think critically, write persuasively and solve real-world problems creatively. But New York’s tests are still dominated by multiple-choice questions that don’t measure this deeper learning. In many parts of the state, teachers did not have time to adapt their curriculums before new tests were used to evaluate them.
This created a crisis of confidence for parents, teachers and principals. Last year, an astonishing 20 percent of families opted out of the state exams. Parents worry that pressure to raise test scores makes school boring and stressful for their children. In many schools, there is still too much time spent on test prep, too much focus on students’ weaknesses and not enough time for the in-depth learning the Common Core standards were meant to inspire.
Teachers don’t trust the data being used to evaluate them. The evaluation system relies on tests designed for one task (measuring student learning) and uses them for another (measuring each teacher’s impact). Good data is important but we have to use it for what it can actually tell us, not for what we wish it could tell us. Teachers regularly see margins of error of 25 points in the scores they receive based on their students’ test results.
Even more troubling, the evaluation system has sent the message to principals that we don’t trust their judgment. Principals are now required to follow a complex formula embedded in state law to arrive at teachers’ ratings. If neither principals nor teachers trust the data in front of them, the process becomes a joke. In a system that was supposed to be more rigorous, fewer than 1 percent of teachers were rated ineffective last year.
In schools, the way adults learn always defines the way the students learn. Evaluations should have teeth, but that’s not the mechanism that will put a strong teacher in every classroom. Schools need to nurture our students and our teachers.
How do we do this? We need to invest in teacher preparation and development. We hire thousands of new teachers every year, but many spend less than six weeks practicing as a student teacher and are never mentored by a strong educator before they start teaching.
High quality training for aspiring teachers would combine mastery of content and child development with a one-year residency alongside a master teacher. High-performing countries provide public funding to address this need. We need to make the same investment here.Teach Your Teachers Well - The New York Times:
