Lessons to learn

LITTLE ROCK — The recent Chicago teachers’ strike implicitly raised a question that should be addressed in discussions about teacherevaluation systems: How can the education schools and professionaldevelopment providers that train a state’s teachers be held accountable?

Staggeringly low student performance in our nation’s cities has sparked most of the attention to teacher evaluation. One purpose for rethinking what teachers are to be evaluated for is to introduce some objective measure of students’ academic performance as a component of their evaluation.

A fair teacher-evaluation system, however, should also hold those who prepared the teachers to teach, and those who have been mandated and paid to provide professional development to them equally responsible for student achievement.

Elementary teachers in particular tend to teach as they were trained. And their master’s degree programs in education, as well as their professional-development programs, are usually no different from their training in a professionalpreparation program. Their evaluations should include their trainers because whatever they have learned has not seemed to help them increase student achievement to a point where it finally shows academically—in the secondary grades.

Scores on the 2011 writing tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress are a recent case in point. Only 27 percent of eighth-graders and 12th-graders scored at proficient or above. Boys performed far worse than girls. And we know from education research that writing skills are very much dependent on reading skills and what one has read.

The good news is that major reports are beginning to tell us more precisely what the problems in our education schools are: low admission standards, incoherent pedagogical coursework, and low academic requirements.

In several studies he conducted in the 2000s, Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, sought to spark national discussions institutions—education schools—that “suffer from low admission and graduation standards” and a “curriculum in disarray.” And he made it clear in a talk to the trustees of Indiana University this August that reform needed to go beyond teacher preparation, noting that “programs to produce principals and superintendents are worse.”

The nationwide deficiencies in the training of prospective elementary teachers have been specifically documented in two reports by the National Council on Teacher Quality: “What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching about Reading—and What Elementary Teachers Aren’t Learning” (released in May of 2006), and “No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America’s Education Schools,” released in June of 2008. As the council found, prospective elementary teachers are not apt to be taught the science-based readinginstructional knowledge they need for effective teaching of reading. Nor are they expected to learn enough mathematics for effective teaching of mathematics in K-8.

Moreover, prospective elementary teachers of mathematics are often taught to use specific strategies like “real-world problem-solving” or are encouraged to give “student-centered” instruction—practices with little evidence of effectiveness in helping children understand math, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel found.

The panel also found little evidence that professional-development programs for teachers increase students’ mathematics achievement, whether or not they increase teachers’ knowledge of mathematics itself. That is why prospective elementary and special education teachers need to show they have acquired the mathematics knowledge needed for teaching math before they begin to teach.

Many states are looking for objective ways to evaluate teachers at all levels. They also want to develop an appropriate professional way to determine which teachers are ineffective—a reasonable goal. So yes, teachers should be held accountable by a variety of measures, including objective tests, for student achievement. But it doesn’t seem right to hold only teachers’ feet to the fire on student achievement in reading and mathematics and leave their training and professional-development programs completely out of the picture.

In Arkansas, the Department of Education should partner with all state education schools, major professionaldevelopment providers, and the agency that accredits education schools to devise a teacher-evaluation plan that assigns some responsibility to all parties, regardless of the evaluation measures used. Weights could be changed when the accrediting agency determines that prospective and practicing teachers are being taught what is supported by research-based evidence.

This is the only way we can begin to get needed changes in what and how our teachers teach—which should be the ultimate goal of an effective teacher-evaluation plan.

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Sandra Stotsky is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and former senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education.