[quote=CA renter][quote=UCGal]I think we can all agree that some teachers are excellent – even life changing for their students. And that some teachers are suck-tastic. Driving the love of learning out of a student and making them hate school. This has nothing to do with tenure.
That said – experienced teachers tend to be better at classroom management (keeping control of the class and keeping them focused on learning.) This is because if they haven’t mastered classroom management by a few years in – they will be driven batty and be driven to quit, themselves.
I’d live to see ALL districts run a program like the Map tests. I know PUSD uses it – and San Diego unified does not. This is a test administered at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. It measures where a kid’s level is. And by comparing the end of the year to the beginning of the year you can tell if improvement was achieved.
This is important for kids who are not in the middle of the bell – you want your bright kids to improve – but they may be starting out ahead of their grade level… teaching them topics they already know won’t lead to improving… just stagnation. Conversely remedial students may be starting out behind grade level. It’s unreasonable to expect them to achieve the same end of year levels as someone who’s at grade level at the beginning of the year.
These tests could be used to show if a teacher is effective… Improvement for all kids assigned to that teacher.
It requires the teacher to differentiate more than the current system does… but that helps the students.
In SDUSD – there have been some high profile cases of principals being punished for taking on their bad teachers. Dr. O at Lincoln is a recent example. I’ve heard through the grapevine that the principal at CPMA middle might be in a similar situation.
Currently there is no recourse for principals to fire bad teachers in San Diego Unified. I don’t think it’s a union thing – I think it’s a structure thing in the district. I’d like to see teachers have a voice in any discipline – but I’d also like to see principals able to effectively run their schools.[/quote]
UCGal, I agree that we need to test for teacher accountability, but one of the greatest differences between a gifted vs non-gifted student is the ability to learn things quickly, and then to retain that information, and then to be able to apply that learning in a variety of ways and in different situations. Students in poor schools are less capable of this, generally, than students in the better-performing schools. This is because IQ is highly correlated with SES and both are highly correlated with how well a school performs. This is why “bad” schools tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, and “good” schools tend to be concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods.
In addition to this, a class in a high-performing school will remain rather stable throughout the year, while a class in a low-performing school is much more likely to turn over. You can easily see up to half of a class leave by the end of the year in a lower-performing school because these families tend to be much more transient than families in high-SES areas.
Then, there is the issue of assistance at home. How do we account for the difference between the resources coming from home in the high-SES vs low-SES students and schools?
This is the problem with accountability. The issues are a lot more complex than most people think. It’s not a matter of teacher quality so much as it’s the demographics, SES, IQ, and parental support for the the students in the different groups.[/quote]
I agree that students have different abilities to learn.
But with no metrics in place – teachers are not judged on whether the students learn anything. If there is a positive delta in what the student knows at the end of the year, vs what they knew at the beginning of the year – REGARDLESS of where they started – then the student made progress.
I have a friend with a child with significant learning disabilities. My friend has had to push hard to make sure that appropriate material is given to her son… Some of the teachers would just park him in a corner. My own experience is that a less than stellar teacher can stagnate the learning of a gifted student. Rather than giving more depth/breadth, or alternate material, to a student that has already mastered the grade level material – he was parked in the corner. My son ended up hating school because it was boring and unchallenging. (I changed schools after this. He totally changed his outlook after I got him out of that environment.)
If a program is developed where students are pushed to learn from where they are – to improve – then all students are learning. Right now the system is set to teach to the medium… and fails the kids at either end of the spectrum.
Obviously there could be factors put in for kids with 504s and/or IEPs so that the teacher is given a pass if the improvement is less for the kids with learning disabilities. But improvement and learning should absolutely be the end goal for every student. Not parking in a corner.
