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Test Questioner TEA executive director Al Mance
Gov. Phil Bredesen says he wants to focus on the performance of teachers as the best way to improve public education, and his ideas already are causing discomfort within the state’s teachers’ union.
In two recent speeches on education, Bredesen has been touting the state’s 15 years of student testing as the richest data in the country on whether teachers are doing their jobs well. He says the so-called value-added tests, which supposedly measure the gain in knowledge over a year, show that a “startling” two-thirds of the difference in student performance is explained by the quality of the teacher.
“Let me be very clear,” the governor says, “I am not saying race, ethnicity and poverty do not matter in education. They matter a great deal. I am saying that there is great optimism and hope in our data that shows that no matter who you are or where you have come from, if a child is in front of an excellent teacher, and more importantly, a series of excellent teachers, he will make progress and perform well.... Teachers are the core in the system, in the school, in the classroom. They are the nucleus that holds it all together. Everything else is held in orbit by their gravity.”
Of teachers who perform poorly in their first two years, two-thirds still aren’t doing good jobs five years later, according to the data. The reverse is true of good teachers. This means “...you can tell a lot from how someone does in the first year or two,” Bredesen explains in his speeches.
The governor hasn’t made any specific proposals yet, but he says school administrators should rely more on these student test scores to determine whether to grant teachers tenure or fire them after their three-year probationary periods. Tenure decisions may have to be postponed for some teachers—as Bredesen puts it, “reject the worst and find a way to delay the decision on the marginal.”
That would require changes in state law, and it’s clearly the most controversial of the reforms the governor is proposing. The Tennessee Education Association (TEA), which represents the state’s teachers, is opposed to any lengthening of the probationary period or over-reliance on test scores to decide which teachers keep their jobs.
To do what Bredesen is suggesting would force teachers to “teach to the test”—that is, restrict instruction to the subject matter that’s going to be tested at the expense of all the other things that students need to know, TEA executive director Al Mance says.
“Most teachers just don’t believe that test scores are an accurate reflection of their performance,” Mance says, directly disputing the governor’s assessment of the data. “There are many other things that go into effective teaching, and standardized tests tend to cause teachers to participate in fairly narrow behaviors. If you’re going to be evaluated on your student’s performance on a test, you’d be fairly unintelligent if you didn’t teach to the test. And we don’t want to encourage that. There are so many other things that boys and girls need to learn.”
As for extending probation for some teachers, Mance says, “That opens teachers to a much longer period of being subject to nepotism in school systems.”
Bredesen’s other ideas are getting a chilly reception from the teachers’ union too. The governor says he wants to expand the pool of teachers by “revolutionizing our thinking as to who a teacher is.” The state has a three-year-old program called Teach Tennessee in which mid-career professionals are trained quickly and put into classrooms to teach. Bredesen wants to broaden that program and also attract younger people “who didn’t study education specifically in college, but who are bright and well-educated and might find a career of a few years in the field rewarding if we had a realistic way to accredit them.”
The governor also favors “tightening up the initial selection process” for teachers. He wants to change the curriculum in education colleges to “make them less of an academic discipline in a university and more of a professional school, like a law school or a medical school.”
“At the end of the day,” he says, “I’m not so much concerned that a teacher has taken courses in classroom management or the history of education. But I do want to know that he’s prepared in his subject matter and how to best present it to his students. I do want to know that he has command of the tools of the trade, like reading and understanding and using test scores.”
But the TEA’s Mance says many mid-career professionals who enter the Teach Tennessee program aren’t qualified to teach precisely because they haven’t graduated from an education school. And the education college curriculum is fine the way it is, he says.
“The governor has heard many of the things that a lot of laypeople have heard about teacher education,” Mance says. “There’s the myth of them taking basket-weaving and things like that. If he takes a close look at it, he’ll find that the curriculum is quite different and, in fact, those teachers who are most successful have been to schools with strong teacher education programs.”
Both the union and the governor are saying they’ll work together in the upcoming legislative session to improve classroom teaching, but at this point, there doesn’t seem to be much common ground. Bredesen says he disagrees with cynics who say, “with tenure and teachers’ unions and all, you can’t move the system.” Mance says Bredesen has a few things to learn about teaching.
“What I take from his emphasis is that he’s really interested in strengthening our public education and, of course, we’re all for that,” Mance says. “But in order for us to get there, we’re probably going to have to go through a process of the governor’s advisers learning more about what’s really going on in the production of successful and effective teachers. Teaching is much more complex than laypersons understand.”
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