Executive director's message: Since when are teachers the problem?
The concept of "teacher bashing" is not a new one. The first time I heard the term, and was informed that blaming the teacher is a relatively normal part of education reform cycles, was in the 1980s, during the time period in which House Bill 72 and the TECAT (also known as the teacher competency exam) were among the manifestations.
In hindsight, though, those were kinder, gentler times. The suggestion that perhaps all teachers weren’t sufficiently well-informed to teach was only inferred by the passage of a law requiring all currently certified teachers to pass an examination in order to retain their certification. There were no overt suggestions that if your child isn’t learning, it may well be his teacher’s fault, or wholesale cries to fire the bad teachers. Teachers were not, by and large, identified as the problem to be fixed to improve our education system.
Teacher quality is latest target
As we find ourselves in the maelstrom of the latest round of teacher bashing, the rhetoric is much less polite and the accusations more pointed. Having seemingly exhausted all other avenues to “fix” public education over the past few decades, from curriculum to testing to school size to graduation requirements, the quality of teaching seems to be among the last major targets. Interestingly, the previous rounds of reform were not particularly successful, nor does the research suggest that the current emphasis on ferreting out and firing “bad teachers” will be either.
When you read through this issue, you may well feel at times that you’ve mistakenly picked up a research journal. But since context is everything, we wanted to provide you with some background, some projections, and a sense of the larger picture in preparing to fend off further attacks that may be coming.
Are there teachers out there who aren’t strong performers, and some who might even be called bad? Sure. Just like there are bad lawyers, bad journalists, bad doctors, bad administrators, bad politicians and bad parents. But there is no research to suggest that bad teachers are somehow legion, and little to suggest that the influence a teacher has over a student’s learning can be effectively isolated from other factors outside of the school setting.
Number of factors influence school performance
It has surely come to most everyone’s attention at this point that the ratings for Texas schools could largely have been projected based on the demographic characteristics of the students who attend them; specifically, socioeconomic status. When a school performs better than expected given its student population, it’s worth a look – and its success is generally attributable to parents with high expectations, a supportive administration, and strong teaching staff. But the demographics can’t be discounted, and many of the hardest working, most talented teachers in the state are scrambling just to keep students coming to school and learning anything.
Performance pay based on student test scores was the first strong move into the area of treating standardized tests as though they have any validity in assessing teachers. TCTA objected strenuously to the program enacted at the state level, primarily on the basis that student tests are designed and validated to measure student, not teacher, performance. The current state of research simply does not support the assumption that the teacher’s influence can be isolated from other factors and judged based on student scores.
All of the analogies that have been drawn such as how unfair it would be to pay dentists based on the number of cavities their patients have, regardless of whether their patients brush and floss or eat candy all day, are valid. No exemptions from performance pay or accountability have been suggested for those teachers whose students don’t show up to class or who don’t do their homework. And at the federal level, it appears that we are now moving from the carrot of performance pay to the stick of employment consequences with no additional supporting research to suggest that this approach is grounded in reality or good policy.
It’s not hard to fire a bad teacher in Texas
Here in Texas, some of the accusations being hurled at the federal level are particularly galling. We don’t have tenure in Texas, or the equivalent of New York City’s “rubber room” where teachers who are supposedly too expensive to fire slump through their days. In the vast majority of Texas school districts, whether or not your district wants to continue to take advantage of your services is considered every year when districts decide whether there are contracts they wish to nonrenew. The process for nonrenewing a teacher contract at the end of a contractual year is surprisingly straightforward and easy; the district needs only to identify your shortcomings, write them down and give them to you, and provide you with a reasonable opportunity to correct them, in most cases.
The vast majority of nonrenewal cases end with the local school board; appeals to TEA haven’t exceeded 20 in the last several years. In fact, the process is so relatively easy (other than the gut-wrenching part that requires someone in management to be overtly critical of the shortcomings in another’s performance) that the vast majority of teachers whose contracts would have been nonrenewed are simply counseled out of their employment with the district and resign. Some would assert that this practice is “passing the trash,” though in our experience, the problem is usually just a bad fit between the district or campus and the teacher, just like it is in the private sector when an employment relationship doesn’t work out. Most often the teacher moves to another district and does well in a new setting with a new principal.
You’re doing a great job!
Most maddening of all is the fact that you really are doing a great job with a diverse and sometimes difficult student population. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for Texas students in all subgroups are among the best in the nation, despite the fact that we have the third highest percentage of students living in poverty.
It was most heartening at a recent meeting of the Commissioner’s Advisory Committee on Accountability to hear a recognized expert point out to critics that there is really no evidence that any other country is doing a better job of educating its students than the United States. He indicated that Asian students in the U.S. perform at about the same level as Asian students in Asia. A few years ago, the education system in Finland was all the rage for its apparent excellence. But guess what? The demographics of Finland are very similar to those of Minnesota, and so are the student test scores.
No doubt there is room for improvement in all schools, from the best to the worst. But you’ve been dancing as fast as you can for many years now, and are generating results that validate what you’re doing. I hope you’ll settle in and read this issue carefully so that the next time you hear or read what a miserable job the public schools are doing, you have both a context and some facts to refute the notion that our best efforts are failing or that teachers are the problem.
As the late Texas and U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn once famously said, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.” Take heart and keep building, while the critics kick.
