Why aren’t school teachers given a grade based on the average grade of their students?
Many years ago, I saw this question posed on Quora, a forum I write for occasionally. At first, my reaction was to laugh. Why would anyone think it's a good idea to do that?
Then I realized a lot of people apparently do. This attitude seems to be the culmination of years of frustration over the inability to control what goes on in classrooms. I mention this in the first chapter of Chaos in Our Schools ("The New Normal"). I can understand that frustration. The traditional classroom has for decades been a place that is sacrosanct to every teacher: it's her domain, her private realm, her throne room. She's in charge. If she chooses to push her students to the utmost of their capabilities, that's her business. If, on the other hand, she chooses to take a pass on providing rigor, for whatever reason, that's also her business.
In my first year of teaching, way back in 1988, I worked in a highly-impacted Title I school in Denver. There were three fourth grade teachers: a severe-looking woman next door who never spoke to me and kept her door shut, an old man down the hall who sat at his desk with a coffee cup and a newspaper, door continually open, and me, a 26-year old new hire straight from the Peace Corps, green around the gills and caught up in the thought that now I could start the exciting job of helping young people find their way in the world.
I don't remember a single professional development session. That's not because I was doing something else during training; it's because we never had them. We were given our textbooks and told to get busy. No one apparently cared what 'getting busy' meant. From the outside, it looked like teachers could do anything they wanted. It also looked like a lot of babysitting.
So I can see why external attitudes about teaching have undergone knee-jerk reactions. Chaos in Our Schools details the fall-out from that, however, which has been significant.
Back to the original question: Why don't we give teachers a grade based on the average grades of their students? It seems if we did that, teachers might take their job more seriously and actually try to teach. At least, that appears to be the rationale many in the power structure have adopted over the last 25 years.
Okay, let’s do that. And while we’re at it, let’s also grade these other workers in our society in a similar way:
Firemen, on an average of how many buildings they participated, actively, in saving;
Day care workers, on how many of their toddler-charges had an “accident” that day;
Policemen, on how many speeding tickets they wrote that did not get contested or ignored by the person receiving them;
Retail clerks, on how many people walked by their counter and bought vs. didn’t buy something;
Traffic crossing guards, on how many children stepped off the curb before being instructed to do so;
Grocery store stocking clerks, on how quickly the merchandise they put on the shelves gets taken by consumers. Conversely, don’t forget to dock the worker's pay if someone picks up an item from the shelf, looks at it, and then puts it back;
Public librarians, on how many people talked “loudly” in the library at any given time;
Airline pilots, on how many of their flights were delayed or cancelled, because this affects their on-time rating, which indicates just how good they are at flying an airplane;
Butchers, on how many cuts of meat were ordered by a customer and then abandoned when the customer saw the price tag on the final, cut piece of meat;
Civil engineers, on how many drivers run traffic lights;
Doctors, on an average of how many people suffer heart attacks due to poor diets, despite strong advice to change their eating habits;
Bus drivers, on how many people are waiting at each stop. Again, dock the driver if someone at a stop changes his mind and does not board the bus.
What you are asking, really, is why teachers aren’t graded using criteria that is, bottom-line-speaking, out of their control. Education is a tricky business — sure, teachers need to be “good at their job”, but what is the expectation for students? Do they also need to be “good at their job”?
One big adjustment in education since the late 90's is to require teachers to incorporate strategies that engage students' interest in learning. The rationale for this is that if children are "engaged", they will learn. But this is overly simplistic thinking. Being interested in something is a transitory thing. And it doesn't mean a child is going to want to make the effort necessary to learn deeply. Learning in a way that sticks is hard work, and many children decline to put forth the effort, when push comes to shove, because nothing is riding on the outcome of instruction for them.
Education involves much more than the activities of the teacher, but the onus for achievement shifted to become solely hers in the early 2000's. This pendulum swing was probably inevitable, frustrating as it is. Anyone with an ounce of sense should see the futility of reforming only one aspect of learning.
That said, I do understand the kneejerk reactions that caused it. Memories of an old man drinking coffee behind a newspaper while students sat in straight rows, staring numbly at worksheets, helped with that.
