In the Houston Independent School District and many other districts nationwide, teachers are beginning to be graded based on their students’ scores on tests they provide. It seems rational to test the way teachers teach by evaluating their students on how well and how much they have learned in their class. The Los Angeles Times published an online database that pooled more than 6,000 elementary school students in a comparative way to see how well their students did on tests in the subjects they had been taught. This is basically a statistical method that people are using to compare the effectiveness of one teacher to another.
Effective teachers are hard to find today. Students have so many subjects to learn on a daily basis and it is important for the good of the student, so that ineffective teachers don’t waste time. An elementary, middle, and high school student has a brain that is ready to shape and absorb so much information, why would we want anything less than effective teachers for our youth? We know that the union protects ineffective teachers from being fired and this is a huge flaw. Unions protect these parasites in the education system and prevent schools from doing their best for the next generation. We need the bad teachers out and the best effective teacher in to teach our students. Isn’t the next generation the generation that will soon be running our country? We need a change and we need a change now.
With school grades, you get out of school subjects around test scores. Teachers have not been rated this way before. It seems practical to go to the source and find out exactly why students are not learning as they should, but comparing the test scores of some teachers and students will really determine if the teacher is an effective teacher. Maybe. Somehow, by running statistics on student test scores from teachers, the district will know if the student wants to get good grades. Half the battle for a teacher is getting her students excited about learning and really wanting to learn. The other half is the actual teaching. A student can absorb everything the teacher is teaching and learn a lot from the teacher, but if that student doesn’t care about their grades, what is the benefit of having statistics that are based on the test scores of the students who actually say about the teacher? That is to say that they cannot teach or that they cannot make the student want to do well in school.
By having a newspaper compile these ratings from 6,000 teachers based on their students’ online test scores, teachers could be given a much-needed wake-up call. If the call to action is to teach better, to learn a more effective way of teaching, or simply to get kids excited about getting good grades and excited about planning a life with extended education, then this way of qualifying teachers is work. Regardless, it’s getting teachers to step up their game and start making changes for the better.