Sep 8, 2008 Posted | 0 comments

American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence on Fixing Teacher Quality

Liam Goldrick at the Education Optimists gave the education portion of John McCain’s speech a yawn. After McCain said, to paraphrase, that we should encourage easier routes for talented professionals to enter teaching - and make that route out for bad teachers more quickly and easily navigated, too - Goldrick wrote:

“The education portion of McCain’s speech served up the same boring, rehashed Republicanism as the rest of his speech. Basically, it’s all about choice and competition-and firing bad teachers. You always need an enemy.”

Yes, yes, we’re all belligerent warmongers, we stomp on the throats of the poor [how do you think they get downtrodden?], etc. etc. I sense a little bias, but I digress.

He’s right that this is “rehashed,” though I didn’t consider it boring. We have to rehash problems when we’ve failed to implement effective solutions. I considered all the 25th anniversary of A Nation at Risk hoopla to be rehashing as well because we still face many of the same issues and we’ve failed to implement properly many potential fixes.

So, I like reading solid analyses/solutions for some of the problems with our teacher corps. Enter ABCTE’s Dave Saba with a post today called “Fixing Teacher Quality”:

“There are 3.2 million teachers. Jack Welch, the brilliant CEO of GE, made his managers rank all staff so that they knew the top 20%, middle 70% and the bottom 10%. The top 20% were fast tracked into leadership positions and the bottom 10% got fired.

We would have to fire 320,000 teachers per year. That would double the number of teachers we need to hire each year and since we can’t find enough to fill our positions now, we will never have enough if we start to really push an aggressive approach towards eliminating mediocre teaching.”

Common sense stuff. Whereas it would be nice to cull the herd and instantly improve quality, it just isn’t realistic. What can we do, then?

To solve teacher quality we need to do the following:

1. Fix recruitment – have enough candidates for each position so that the principal can hire the right teacher for his/her students – we need more routes to the classroom to increase the numbers
2. Be Selective - less than 40% of our ABCTE candidates make it through the program and we are starting to see great results from our teachers
3. Train principals in hiring – ensure they know how to match the teacher to the students
4. Develop great performance evaluations for teachers – outcomes and observations based and ensure the evaluation is more than once a year
5. Train principals on evaluations – ensure they know how to develop teachers
6. Develop truly great professional development for teachers – develop efficacy measure for the professional development to ensure it meets minimum standards
7. Train principals on how to assign prescriptive professional development from performance evaluations

Once that is in place, then you can start to move teachers who do not succeed with students out of the classroom. But we have a lot of work to do learning to walk before we can start running.

I’d add two more to that list:

8. Encourage the most talented high school and undergraduate students to enter teaching. Right now, they just aren’t interested.

9. Increase standards for content knowledge in education schools. We need our teachers to know math and English, at the very least, to a reasonably high degree.

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