Teachers are not widgets

Over on The Widget Effect, billed as “our national failure to acknowledge and act on differences in teacher effectiveness,” one can learn about an effort to alter the assessment of teachers. The project published report in 2009 about a study of teacher evaluation that people associated with the project conducted. That report describes the ways in which teachers are evaluated in four different U.S. states as well as the views of several professional (teacher or administrator) organziations.

The perspective taken in the report is captured in the following excerpt:

If teachers are so important, why do we treat them like widgets?

Effective teachers are the key to student success. Yet our school systems treat all teachers as interchangeable parts, not professionals. Excellence goes unrecognized and poor performance goes unaddressed. This indifference to performance disrespects teachers and gambles with students’ lives.

The report ends with four summary recommendations:

1. Adopt a comprehensive performance evaluation and development system that fairly, accurately and credibly differentiates teachers based on their effectiveness in promoting student achievement and provides targeted professional development to help them improve.
2. Train administrators and other evaluators in the teacher performance evaluation system and hold them accountable for using it effectively.
3. Use performance evaluations to inform key decisions such as teacher assignment, professional development, compensation, retention and dismissal.
4. Adopt dismissal policies that provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit the district and a system of due process that is fair but streamlined and efficient.

Don’t expect to encounter research in the sense that I usually use the word here; this is about what people say and the policies that guide employment decisions. To be sure, although I would quibble with the focus (which appears to be mostly on the teacher as variable, rather than the teaching), the effort is laudable. Recommended reading: The Widget Effect.