How Should Teachers Be Judged If They Work in a Dysfunctional School?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the unfairness of evaluating teachers based on outcomes when the school system around them is broken.
Key Takeaways
- Context matters for evaluation - A great teacher in a dysfunctional school will produce different results than the same teacher in a well-run school
- Systems outweigh individuals - Teacher effectiveness is partly a product of the system they work in
- Evaluate what teachers can control - Focus on instructional quality and professional practice rather than outcome metrics that reflect systemic failures
Transcript
Comedian Devin Sebold asks, how do we judge the effectiveness of a teacher?
I think this is a good question because for too long, we've tried to judge teachers on the basis of results that they don't really control, right?
We try to hold teachers responsible for things that they don't have really enough influence on for that to be a fair thing to do.
For example, if you are in a dysfunctional school, if you're in an ineffective school environment, well, everything you do is going to be hampered by that.
So if you are judged based on the results that you get with students, well, we have to recognize that that's not entirely fair.
And of course, that applies to any form of measurement, whether we're talking about test scores or growth scores or anything like that.
The reality is that a lot of individual performance is a function of organizational conditions and leaders have to take responsibility for that.
So if I was designing a teacher evaluation framework, which is something I've thought about because I do a lot around teacher evaluation, I would probably focus on professional judgment.
That's kind of what we do for doctors, right?
You know, we don't fire the doctor if the patient dies because sometimes the patient dies.
What we focus on for doctors and judging their quality is did they make the right call?
Did they do the right thing given the circumstances?
We don't evaluate doctors just based on whether the patient ends up healthy or sick because that's somewhat beyond the doctor's control.
And we want our professionals to make good decisions, to make the right call, to do the right thing, and to do it well.
And I think that's what we should be evaluating teachers on.
Did they make the right call?
Did they do the right thing based on the conditions that they were dealing with?
Let me know what you think