The Silver Bullet

I like catching up on education news on the Schools Matter blog (http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com). Yesterday, they posted an article about how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is planning to put half a billion dollars into a project to research teacher effectiveness. The project will gather data about what makes a quality teacher and test methods of hiring, evaluating, and firing teachers. Several school districts across the nation submitted proposals of their effective teaching plans for a share of the money. The districts' ideas included teacher training, tenure and monetary incentives, and coaching and mentorship for teachers. The deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation called their new goal for having effective teachers in front of every student the "silver bullet" to educational reform.

I'm going to ignore the "silver bullet" comment for the sake of avoiding a rant. I could go on about how the obsession over silver bullets has undermined any progress on holistic public policy change in the field of education. But I won't.

I don't know the specifics about the project, but I do have several points of concern about this new focus on teacher effectiveness. First, I don't think we can go about asking what makes an effective teacher if we don't come to a conclusion on what it means to be effective. In other words, I'm assuming that effective means "resulting in higher test scores" in this case. We are looking for a reason why so many of our students do poorly on a flawed test, so let's focus on how "effective" teachers teach to the test. I guess it would be relatively easy, then, to come up with a formula for good teaching that completely obliterates teacher individuality and who the students are in front of them.

But if by effective we mean the complex set of skills, knowledge of their students, environmental factors, personality, ability to adapt, leadership, creativity, motivation, and other subjective (gasp) aspects of teaching that are used to reach and push students toward relevant goals; then we are talking about something that cannot be easily measured. Ironically, we already implicitly know what makes an effective teacher in this sense. The thought of putting this into some sort of formula is also scary.

My last concern is that, once again, we teachers are having studies and assessments done to us (and against us.) You don't need billions of dollars to tell you why some of us teach - a hint: it's not always about the money. You don't need a study to tell you what makes us good teachers or need to use test scores to bully us into teaching a certain way. We teachers need to lead the discussion on what changes need to be made and how we want to be treated.

Are we going to have outside "experts" tell us exactly what to do or should we take it upon ourselves to open our classrooms and share or critique our practice with each other? Are we going to be at the mercy of "objective" evaluations, or should we evaluate ourselves and each other on the values and skills we need as we grow as teachers? We know what works and what's wrong in our schools. We know the kids. We know what it means to be an effective teacher. And if some of us take a good, long look at ourselves and realize that we are failing at our job and are unwilling to do anything about it - then maybe we shouldn't be in this profession.