Very intersting topic (American in origin) from the New York Times.
"Building a Better Teacher" is about teacher quality and merit pay for teachers ...
"When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year."
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
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My first reaction was that this is something we would probably never see in BC (at least in the foreseeable future) due to the fact that our teachers are unionized.
ReplyDeletePart of me sees that the intent of merit based pay is good, however there are a lot of factors that go into a student's performance that perhaps a teacher has little control over.
If a student has no desire to do anything but graduate, the best teacher in the world can't make them perform well on testing.
I also believe that subjects like PE and Art can be quite difficult to measure on any sort standardized testing.
Thanks for your comment!
ReplyDeleteI would agree that this will not happen here quickly. In general, education is slow to change and remains rather conservative. However, I imagine that if this proves successful in the States, it may influence Canadian practice in the future.
With our current, non-union friendly government, and the ever present problem of declining enrollment, our system will eventually have to move toward some form of innovation. Considering the increasing use of both business models for funding formulas and the accumulating research which proves that teacher qualification ='s teacher effectiveness and quality of instruction, perhaps it is worth considering...
Agreed about the standardized testing, but that is its own whole 'can of worms' isn't it?