Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I suggest a method of measuring teacher effectiveness.  The vast majority of methods for measuring teachers rests on a simple question: do we trust students?

Bill Gates and his wife have been working towards improving education in America. I applaud their efforts as they could be using their billions of dollars to do things that are much easier. One of their recent efforts is to find a measure of effectiveness for teachers. After all, businesses can find ways to measure the effectiveness of employees. Why is it that education is the only endeavor that cannot measure worker effectiveness?

Here is a measure that I propose:

Does the teacher make you less interested in the subject?

This is a paraphrase of something that writer and consultant Jerry Weinberg has mentioned to me on several occasions.

Consider some examples. I had some good teachers when I was in school. What made them good teachers? It is difficult to remember and describe. What I can write is that I enjoyed going to their classes. That is it, but that is significant. If a person dreads being in the room with the “teacher,” little learning will occur.

A friend of my family has a daughter who is a senior in high school. The teacher in one of her classes is just plain mean. The teacher berates students daily. The young lady we know is disturbed by all this meanness and hatred. Her nerves are frazzled and, predictably, she isn’t learning anything. The mean teacher makes her less interested in the subject. (Please don’t write in about how this teacher should be removed and their are set processes in place to remove the teacher and all that. Yes, those procedures exist and, if followed, would result in the teacher not being hired again next academic year. That does my friend’s daughter and her classmates little good.)

So perhaps, the Gates should ask this question of students. Yes, there is plenty of room for abuse here in that some students are vindictive and will realize the power given them with such a question.

And now we have reached the crux of measuring teacher performance. Almost everything people have considered gives the power of the measure to the students.

Do we trust children to judge teachers?