Getting the "Teacher Quality" Talk Right

In this article, President and CEO of SCORE (Tennessee's Statewide Collaborative on Reforming Education) Jamie Woodson says, "The number one factor of a student's success is effective teaching in the classroom."

This is the claim made by lots of education reformers these days. The same reformers go on to tell us we need to better evaluate teachers and that means evaluating them using student test scores. Doing so, they argue, will help us identify ineffective teachers who can be fired. And because we'll be getting rid of the least effective (by their definition) teachers, teacher quality will improve and so will student performance.

Here's the problem: The data do NOT suggest that effective teaching is the number one factor of a student's success. At all.

Here's what research on this topic does say. A student's teacher is the most significant school-based factor in determining student achievement. The key word is school-based. Also, the same data suggests that the teacher accounts for up to 50% of a student's success among all school-based variables. The second most significant school-based variable is school leadership. Other factors play a role. The building, environment, peers, resources. All of those make up the remainder of the school-based variables.

Of course, the school-based variables are not the ONLY variables that impact student achievement. So, yes, it is important to have strong teachers.

But, the education and income levels of the student's parents remain the most significant overall predictor of student success. This has been true for some 40 years (probably more, but it's what the researchers have been showing us for at least 40 years).

If you have parents who didn't graduate from high school, it makes it much more likely you won't graduate from high school. If you come from a low-income family, you are much more likely to run into struggles that make focusing on school difficult.

So, sure, we should focus on teacher quality. Because, of all the school-based factors, it is the most significant. But we shouldn't lose sight of other school-based factors -- like prinicpal quality. Or buildings -- it's absolutely not okay to send kids to school in portable trailers. Our kids deserve adequate resources, too. That means the ability to take home text books --and access to texts that are not outdated.

And, we should also realize that there are larger, systemic problems (poverty, access to health care) that impact significantly student outcomes. Sure, this CAN be overcome in some cases, but usually not without a convergence of amazing interventions in a child's life. Perhaps the teacher with low "value-added" scores convinces her struggling student who lives in poverty to keep trying and to stay in school -- and so he becomes the first high school graduate in the family because someone believed in him.

Comprehensive education reform would 1) listen to teachers (they ARE the experts) 2) put in place the reforms teachers suggest 3) adequately fund schools so kids have clean, safe buildings and adequate resources and 4) address the ENTIRE school as well as community inputs.