Jeremy Glazer argues veteran teachers have value that extends beyond year-to-year test results.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
A student went home to complain to her mom about Mattie Williams, her social studies teacher. The mother went straight out to the school for a conference.
To the mother’s surprise, she found herself sitting face-to-face with her own former teacher from a generation before at the same high school (Williams had since taken on a married last name).
Whatever she was now called, Williams remained a teacher who demanded respect.
“The mom told me that she went home and told her daughter: ‘You’d better do everything that teacher tells you to do,’” Williams told me, laughing.
Teachers not only “add value” to individuals students, they add value to schools as well — especially when they remain a strong teacher in the same school for decades.
When people talk about a teacher being “an institution,” they are usually imagining someone like Mattie Williams who taught for 40 years in the same school.
“I stayed for more than just teaching,” she told me.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Ms. Roberts left teaching ten years ago, but she remembers very clearly a day in class that changed her and her students.
It was her first year and she was teaching English to over two hundred kids a day in Room 100, also known as “the Pit.” The name came from the fact that her class was where several other Language Arts teachers had transferred challenging students.
One of the most difficult parts of the first year is coming up with material and lesson ideas for each day, and Ms. Roberts was relying entirely on the Language Arts textbook she had been instructed to use.
malik ml williams / Flickr
A Toni Morrison novel was a sign to one classroom that their teacher believed in them.
A student of hers, Roland, who had become the fulcrum of his particular class. In a way, he was in charge each day. He had the power to determine which way the class would go.
Ms. Roberts said she never knew when he opened his mouth to talk if he was going to help her or sabotage her lesson. Either was as likely. She recognized Roland’s leadership ability and the tremendous influence he wielded over his classmates.
One day he asked Ms. Roberts a question during class.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
One of the first people I talked to about the different ways teachers add value to students’ lives was Mr. Bernard. He is now retired and he told me a story that had happened a few weeks before.
He was at a party when Mark, a former student from a few decades ago, came up to him.
Mark was excited to see Mr. Bernard, and he recounted that a week before, the pastor at Mark’s church had urged the congregation to think about those who’d had an impact on their lives and to reach out to them. Mark had thought of Mr. Bernard he and thought it incredible that they would run into each other so soon.
Mark then explained to Mr. Bernard the effect he had had on Mark’s life.
Mark had been trying to decide where to go to college. He played football and had some scholarship offers, but also had a chance to go to an Ivy League school with no chance of playing football.
Jeremy Glazer says teacher evaluations miss some of the most important work he does.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
One of the things I want to do through this series is to expand the discussion of a teacher’s value. We cannot let the worth of teachers be defined narrowly by the test scores of their students. We need to consider all of the different ways teachers have positive impacts on the lives of their students before we choose the criteria with which we judge who is doing a good job as a teacher and who is not.
One of the best ways to do this is to hear from teachers themselves.
I hope to put these stories in context. I will tell you about teachers I’ve spoken to, and I will share with you their stories. I want to show the breadth of ways teachers affect their students.
I walked into a teacher’s classroom near the end of the year and saw him explaining bank fees and ATM charges to a senior who was about to graduate.
This teacher didn’t have any seniors in his classes. I knew it wasn’t a current student, but rather a past student who saw the teacher as someone he trusted. The interaction I was watching was definitely adding value to the student’s life in a way that has little to do with school curriculum, and definitely isn’t counted in FCAT scores or school grades.
Sanders-Clyde Elementary School in Charleston, S.C.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
There are some real perils to systems which try to reduce teacher performance to a single number, such as many of our new “value-added” formulas.
The first is that whatever you decide to measure — and, implicitly or explicitly reward — is what you are going to get.
Take a look back a few years at our mortgage crisis. One of the precipitating structural problems was that the system evolved so that there was an incentive to write more mortgages. No longer were people rewarded for responsible lending. They were rewarded for the amount of loans they produced. We all know what happened. More mortgages!
It didn’t matter that many properties and property owners were bad risks. The measurement drove the production. So you have to be very careful in deciding what to measure.
When we narrowly define increased test scores as the “value” teachers add to students, then that is what schools will work towards.
Miami-Dade high school advanced calculus teacher Orlando Sarduy writes out the formula that will grade and help determine the pay of Florida teachers.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
The new term of art within the educational conversation about how we sort the good teachers from the bad is “value added.”
We stole the phrase from economics. But in the educational context, it brings to mind the great George Orwell quote: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
We now throw this term around a lot. The mathematical formulas designed to identify the effect an individual teacher is having on an individual student are called “value-added” models. Administrators, researchers and policy-makers speak of the “value added” by a particular teacher — the difference in a student’s learning between excellent, good and poor teachers.
And, Orwell was right. It sure is making us foolish.
A teacher says test scores often don't reveal much about how well he does his job.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Let’s take a moment to look closely at test scores, which are the basis of our new “teacher accountability” system.
I just got back the test results for the students at the magnet school where I taught this year, and I honestly don’t think they tell you much of anything about my teaching.
This isn’t sour grapes; my students did well on the test. But that doesn’t surprise me because they are at a wonderfully designed small school full of the arts — an experience I think would benefit all students. So, of course their scores were high as a whole.
But when I looked closely at individual scores, I saw some results that made me wonder exactly what was being tested.
One student who did absolutely no homework and very little classwork, not only passed the FCAT, but his scores went up from last year. I’ll get credit for teaching him well even though he failed my class.
His foil, a student who did all her assignments while continuing to improve her writing and analytical skills, saw her test scores go down this year. She still earned the highest rating on the FCAT — a five — but her actual numerical score was slightly lower than last year.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Professionals should be responsible for their job performance and should be evaluated and retained accordingly.
Who doesn’t agree with that?
My problem isn’t with accountability or evaluating teachers. My problem is with the schemes I’ve encountered so far in my career that have been designed to hold teachers accountable.
I’ve been lucky enough to teach at a range of schools. And even though I’m the same teacher, I’ve been treated (and paid) differently in ways that had more to do with the kind of school in which I was working than with my performance in the classroom.
My first encounter with Florida’s school grading system and the accompanying bonuses for teachers happened when I was teaching in a large urban school in one of the poorer neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County. The system is designed to combine many pieces of data, such as student test scores or percentage of students taking advanced classes, and reduce it to a simple A through F letter grade.
My high school was graded an F. My colleagues and I not only suffered the shame of being publicly labeled failures, we were denied the bonus given to the “successful” teachers at higher-performing schools.
Three years later, I taught at one of those higher performing schools, located in an affluent suburban neighborhood. My school received an A grade and I got my accolades and my bonus.
Miami-Dade teacher Jeremy Glazer says all signs indicate a day without students is the most important day of the school year.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
A week ago Thursday — the end of the year for students — brought with it the usual catharsis of the last day.
There were hugs and tears as well as exchanges of notes and cards, gifts and promises, and words of wisdom and encouragement. I shared summer reading recommendations with students who reciprocated with book, movie, and music suggestions for me. That final day was a culmination of the relationships we’ve built and the work we’ve been doing together all year.
The next day, Friday, was the last day for teachers. It’s always the day when schools seem most empty. They feel like a hive once the bees have gone, a useless shell. Friday is the day we finish grading, clean out our classrooms, and take care of all the administrative trivia (book inventories, etc.) that keep schools going but aren’t the meat of what we do.
Thursday is the kind of day that makes me feel most like a teacher, and Friday the kind of day that makes me feel least like one.
But the State of Florida says I have it backwards. Friday, the day without children, was actually the most important day in the final judgment of how I and every other public school teacher in Florida, performed this year.
You see, that’s the day the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores came out.
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