Who Are the Best Teachers?
Their principals know who they are. So says Marcus Winters– citing some pretty impressive studies– over at City Journal. This is a much bigger issue, though, than just seniority rules and giving principals some say in which teachers should be laid off and which should be kept when the budget gets tight.
Forty years or more of research has shown that the quality of the teacher is the most important school-level factor in student learning. More than one researcher has rhapsodized about the effect that three excellent teachers in a row could have on kids at the bottom side of the achievement gap.
What’s new here is a different take on the magic three-year marker. For many years, schools have offered tenure to teachers after three years, figuring that if the teacher were awful, the principal would notice before three years were up. Looking at it this way, it would seem that tenure after three years is a reasonable proposition.
But the research Winters cites indicates that while principals can easily identify their best and their worst teachers, it’s not so easy to pick out the mediocre ones. This makes tenure not reasonable at all. At least, it’s not reasonable if we care about student achievement.
