Perhaps it might be worth examining one metric: IMPACT--championed by Rhee in Washington DC public schools and also used by the LA times to judge teachers pub

Perhaps it might be worth examining one metric: IMPACT--championed by Rhee in Washington DC public schools and also used by the LA times to judge teachers publicly. Here's the basic idea--one should try to determine the "value added" of a teacher. It's not fair to look at a teacher teaching the gifted class and the teacher teaching a remedial class and look at their absolute results. However, one could look at the test scores of students before they come into a class and after they leave a class and compare. If the teacher adds value, then one would expect the scores to go up. Because an individual student may have a bad day, you average the incremental gains across multiple students. What are the problems with this? It seems rather fair right? A few problems: 1) The teacher in the previous year cheated on the test results (or the test changed), so that the students scored unnaturally high in the previous years 2) Gains may be unevenly distributed--is it as easy to move a student from 90% to 95% as it is to move a student from 20% to 40%? 3) Stability of the measure--if you look at this metric over say 5-10 years, is it consistent for a given teacher, or does it fluctuate? 4) If you run the metric backwards in time, is it still predictive? That is, if we look at this year's results, can we predict what the student would have achieved in the past? 5) What about background issues? This in some sense assumes that the background of student achievement is flat in the absence of a teacher--but middle class parents will spend a lot of time working with their kids, that poorer parents (on average) do not. This means that even if the teacher does nothing, the middle class students will likely still perform better. If these students are not equally distributed (which they won't be), this will also effect the metric. I could go on, but my point is that this is one of the more objective methods of valuing student performance and it fails--I think there are several problems with schools--I think that professionalizing the teaching profession would go a long way in predominately middle class districts--for example, requiring teachers to obtain a masters, offering higher salaries to recruit more talented teachers into the field, requiring subject matter competency (my family has a friend who's background is teaching middle school math who got drafted into teaching geography! With relatively little time given in advance to prep.), etc. I think setting curriculum standards and tests that reflect them and allowing the teachers autonomy in how they teach the required subjects would be useful. Generally, promoting more understanding and less drill and kill--but just saying, "throw the whole thing out" is not terribly useful. There's a fun read called "Surpassing Shanghai" which offers a brief review of education systems in other countries that is worth reading...