From Open Education today…
In a major speech to the members of the National Education Association today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan insisted it was time to not only rethink teacher seniority and tenure, it was time to tie those elements and pay to teacher performance.
Whether you’re on this side or not. We can all agree that the move is bold, but all the pieces have not been created yet. Most importantly, in my opinion, is that lack of a clear definition or method for measuring “teacher performance”. It’s ironic, because the legislation we’re moving away from had a clear objective (student performance) as measured by the standardized testing through NCLB. Unfortunately, after the hoopla of small class size, rural vs. urban schools, placement programs, magnets, etc. etc. we’re down from a meta analysis of data to 1 metric: Great teachers means students learn and succeed. John Dewey probably could have told you that. Looking back at my own education I could probably tell you which teachers were great and which were not, but that’s not very much use now (except for the fact that many of my teachers are still employed at the same schools I went to…so maybe I’m actually on to something…).
We (the USA) need to really buckle down on what teacher perfomance is, how it’s measured and what level of performance should our current and future teachers be working to achieve? One of the only details to date is that teacher bonuses are offered for teachers that have a National
Board Certification.
This is an interesting piece of information which plays well into the overall goal (if I’ve read the news correctly) of aligning the teacher performance question with that of a unified teacher certification for all states. As a short sighted solution, this could very quickly improve teachers in many of the lower performing states over the next 5 years. However in the long term significant research will be needed to address what teacher performance really means (or even the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards might struggle to answer).