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Teacher Power
by Bill Gerritz 17 April, 2007
The International Educator is a newspaper read widely in the international school community. The latest issue has an article I wrote.
Teacher Performance Counts
The International Educator
April 15, 2007
Bill Gerritz
As head of school at International School Bangkok for six years, I have offered the following speech at least 100 times to visiting parents and educators.
“When you tour ISB today you will walk away with the wrong impression. You will see lovely buildings and small classes with Smart Boards and laptop carts everywhere. You may even review our standards based curriculum and instructional materials. You will likely think all this is wonderful but you will have missed what is really important. What you will not see is what really matters, the thoughts and feelings of ISB teachers, which are behind 95 percent of our students’ learning. Frankly, the vast majority of our teachers are so passionate about children and so skilled at teaching, that great learning would go on if they had 40 students in a shack out in a swamp with nothing but a blackboard.”
I firmly believe that it is all about teachers. Until now, common sense and thousands of classroom visits over 25 years propelled my belief, not “scientific fact.” However, in the past few years compelling evidence has emerged about the degree of impact of teacher effectiveness on learning. Several independent studies have documented this impact. For me, the results of these studies are both exhilarating and frightening.
In the reports that I will cite below, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students were studied over at least 3 years. The investigators used a relatively new approach to teacher performance research. This “value added” assessment focuses on gains in academic achievement over a given year. The researchers used rather sophisticated multivariate statistical analysis to cancel out all the other factors that contribute to learning – individual student capacity, family backgrounds, school effects, and so on.
Rowan (2004), reports on work by Sitha Babu and Robert Mendro. When low achieving fourth graders had three effective teachers in a row, 90 percent of them passed a 7th grade state math assessment. With three ineffective teachers, only 42 percent passed.
Wright (1997) found that the most effective teachers produced gains of 53 percentage points in student achievement over one year. The least effective produced 14 percentage points. Students who had three less effective teachers in a row were unlikely to ever recover.
Figure 1 displays the findings reported by Rockoff (2003). A student, with a reading comprehension national percentile of 50% who consecutively had three top 10% effective teachers would on average test at the 78th percentile three years later. Similarly, a student with three consecutive top 25 % teachers would test at the 68th percentile. In contrast, the poor kid who got a teacher at the 10th percentile of effectiveness would have achieved only at the 22nd percentile.
I could cite a number of additional studies but I think the story is clear. The varying effectiveness of teachers has a huge impact on learning. Marzano (2003) in summarizing all available evidence suggests that the impact of individual classroom teachers has a greater influence on student achievement than all other factors. So what does all this mean for international school leaders?
The first question should be how can we identify low and high performing teachers. We certainly cannot pursue the complex approaches of the researchers. Also all the studies rely on
Work by Milanowski (2004) offers one way forward. He used data sets from some of the studies reported above. He investigated principals’ judgments about teacher performance using the kind of standards based teacher evaluation approaches many of us are using, especially those based on the work of Danielson and McGreal. Milanowski reported a positive correlation. He wrote, “The empirical results show that evaluations produced by a relatively rigorous, standards based system are related to an accepted measure of student learning.” I know from experience that making judgments about teacher performance is complex and time consuming work. It is all too easy to get it wrong, for example, relying on insufficient information, resulting in false positive or false negative decisions. Nevertheless, properly implemented, Danielson style approaches can help identify high and low performing teachers.
However, understanding the meaning of these studies leads to broader issues. Many of us pursue similar school improvement agendas with efforts like curriculum development, professional learning communities, staff development, and strategic planning. I certainly think these are useful and deserve our support. However, perhaps we need to focus more attention as school leaders on the quality of our teachers. How often do we visit classrooms to witness learning? How often do we have professional conversations with teachers and students about their learning? When we identify exceptional teachers, how do support them and guide other teachers in learning from them? When we find an underperforming teacher, do we ignore the situation because it is too difficult and upsetting to take action?
I end with a worry. Perhaps you believe as I do that good schools focus single mindedly on learning, Perhaps you believe as I do that learning is all about the quality of our teachers. We all know that around the world the number of international schools is growing rapidly and the pool of available teachers is not. If we want to staff our schools with excellent teachers as we have in the past, how will we attract, develop, and support them?
Danielson,C., & McGreal, T.L. (2000). Teacher Evaluation to Enhance Professional Practice.
Marzano, R.J. (2003). What Works in Schools:Translating Research Into Action. Teacher Evaluation to Enhance Professional Practice,
Milanowski, A.T. (2004) The Relationship Between Teacher Performance Evaluation Scores and Student Achievement: Evidence from
Rockoff, J.E., (2003) The Evidence of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data. Report published by the Kennedy School of Government,
Rowan, B. (2004). Teachers Matter: Evidence from Value-Added Assessments. Essential Information for Education Policy, American Educational Research Association, Vol.2, Issue 2.
Wright, S.P., Horn, S.P. & Sanders, W.L. (1997), Teacher and Classroom Effects on Student Achievement: Implications for Teacher Evaluation, Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, Vol 11.
Read more post from the Head of School's BlogsAbout the Author
Bill received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He has written over 20 journal articles and has an abiding interest in learning improvement. Prior to ISB, Bill headed schools in Holland and South America. He and his wife Marcia have 3 sons.
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