Who says test scores aren't meaningful? When unions fret about "high stakes testing," it isn't because the student will be judged.
June 21, 2008 - According to the Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach school principals dismissed 190 non-tenured teachers last year, four times as many as 2003. Last year, they dismissed 273 teachers by not renewing their contracts. One of the reasons?
Tracking test scores has become sophisticated, so a principal can compare the success of one teacher's students against another's in an instant, making it easier to tell which teachers are effective.Teachers don't believe the driving factor is their students' academic success because teachers were let go before they got state test score results.
"I was told I'm not a good match," said Gail O'Donnell, one of nine teachers from Park Vista High whose contract wasn't renewed. "If my kids have good scores, I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing."TT - Not exactly. In order to let a teacher go, the school has to give notice by a date specified in their contract. This may be as early as May, and in some districts earlier. So principals have to rely on earlier test scores and past performance.
Compounding the problem is that Florida colleges are, in the words of the reporter, "churning out" far fewer teachers than schools need. An increasing number of teachers do not study education in college.
In Florida, many professionals can enter teaching by passing a general knowledge test, which gives them a teaching certificate good for three years. Many career changers do well. Some do not. Replacing staff at struggling schools has proven successful in some instances, according to the article.
--------------------------------------
TT - Sad to say, "churning out" teachers is one of the major problems in classrooms. Colleges have done that for decades. Teaching, for them, is not a craft or a gift or a vocation. It's a civil service job and if they got to place people in a Department of Motor Vehicles job for the same amount of money, they would.
No one holds the colleges responsible for the high number of teachers who will never be certified because while the teacher gets a bachelor's degree and incurs tens of thousand of dollars in student loans, the teacher-wannabe can't pass basic reading, writing and math Praxis exams. Or competency exams in a core academic subject.
That is another reason why schools across the country are dismissing teachers early. No Child Left Behind requires teachers to be highly-qualified.
Highly qualified means 1) A bachelor's degree (at a minimum,) 2) full state credentialing - translation: many schools hire teachers new to the profession who are given a period of time to pass the PraxisI exams. (Reading, writing and math.) But NCLB doesn't allow them to stay in the classroom forever. They can only have waivers for three years. The last requirement is that 3) the teacher demonstrate competence in core academic subjects**. If you want to teach history, you have to demonstrate that knowledge in testing.
** Core academic subjects are English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography.
From the article:
Principals of low-performing schools are more likely to get rid of teachers because the stakes for not meeting academic goals are so high. Under No Child Left Behind, schools where a majority of students don't perform on grade level carries the stigma of a failing school that could be taken over by the state.That's incentive in a nutshell.
So when they tell you that they dismissed 200 non-tenured teachers, it doesn't tell you if it was because the teacher was unable to qualify to be a fully-certified teacher, or if performance problems and demonstrable unsuitability were deciding factors.
But if schools had that NCLB incentive twenty years ago to rid themselves of bad teachers before they got tenure, teacher quality and the quality of education colleges would be a lot higher than it is now.
