That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [64]
We now have the data to identify teachers who are making three years of gains in the classroom in one year’s time. But we don’t have a pipeline—from college, to school placement, to teacher evaluation, to pay and promotion systems—that delivers anything like the number of good teachers that we need. The superb ones we have, says Johnston, “are more like flowers that have willed their way up through concrete,” rather than flowers grown in abundance in “hothouses” designed to produce them at that scale.
That is hardly surprising, he added, when you think of what we have asked teachers to do. “When I was twenty-one years old, I was a first-year high school teacher, and I taught six sections of Julius Caesar to ninth graders each day,” said Johnston. “In the room across the hall was a teacher who was sixty-two years old and she taught six sections of Julius Caesar each day. That was the career path that I was being offered. This is why we lose 50 percent of teachers in the first three to five years.”
Teachers come in loving the idea of sharing literature with young minds, said Johnston, and then they discover that there is no real potential for job growth unless they leave the classroom, very little ongoing professional development, inconsistent evaluation or feedback, and limited opportunities to interact with colleagues who are serious about reflecting on and improving their practice.
The same is true with principals. Other than the classroom teacher, the principal is the most important person in that school building. “What we see around the country,” said Johnston, “is that great principals attract and retain great teachers. Terrible principals drive out great teachers. What is amazing is that the system retains as many good teachers as it does,” given the uneven quality of principals.
“We are not focusing on teachers because teachers are the problem,” said Johnston. “It’s because they are the solution.” When you look at the data on the difference that great teachers can make “you realize that they are such high-leverage instruments that a small move of the lever produces exponential results in student achievement.” That means building systems that attract and retain more of the top teachers and improve or weed out more of the weaker teachers, which could thereby lead to a system-wide change in the quality of teaching. The Great Teachers and Leaders Bill, signed into law by Colorado governor Bill Ritter on May 20, 2010, aims to accomplish just that goal and is built on five principles.
First, explains Johnston, “we make 50 percent of every teacher’s and principal’s performance evaluation based on demonstrated student growth—and ‘growth’ is the key word. It doesn’t matter what level the kids start at on September 1, we want to see that they know substantially more when they walk out the door on May 30. We are now developing, in consultation with teachers and principals, the metrics for these assessments. This is not meant as ‘gotcha!’”
Indeed, it is vitally important to have a teacher-evaluation system, but also a system that teachers help to design and believe is fair. The Colorado evaluation process will include some combination of student survey data, principal reviews, and test results, and could include master-teacher reviews or peer-educator reviews, along with a chance for teachers to show themselves at their best—not just on surprise visits by inspectors.
Second, said Johnston, “we establish career ladders for teachers and principals who are identified as highly effective. We say to them, ‘We want to learn what you are doing, and we will pay you a stipend on top of your salary to document and share with other teachers what you are doing that is making you successful.’ So we might identify the twenty best math teachers in the state and would then pay them a stipend to video their classrooms when they are teaching a lesson and to upload their lesson plans onto a website. Then, if I am a new seventh-grade teacher, I can go on to the Web, click on ‘seventh-grade math,’ click on a specific