May 13, 1999 Community Columnist Article

Tim Lynch, Ph.D.
Director
Center for Economic Forecasting and Analysis
Florida State University
850.644.7357
 

Master teachers might stay if we're willing to make key changes
 

Recently, two friends independently announced to surprised listeners that they are resigning from teaching in one of Leon County's highest-rated secondary programs. Each has decades of experience and high acclaim from both students and administrators. They are leaving because of the mounting teaching and non-teaching stresses they face daily — among them growing discipline problems, low pay and appreciation, and increased classroom focus on teaching students to pass standardized tests to the detriment of broader knowledge.

Although the horrific events in Littleton, CO, are rare, they graphically demonstrate the concern of rising school violence and unruly students as one source of teacher stress. However, violence and lack of student discipline are not the most important concerns. These issues are among a growing list of burdens we load on our teachers’ backs. We expect teachers to be disciplinarians, drug and sex counselors, civic cheerleaders, morals instructors, health care screeners, after-school baby sitters, school administrators and most importantly, standardized test instructors. We are asking our teachers to compensate for all of the historic social woes facing our youth. For these services, we annually pay our Florida public school teachers $6,000 less than the national average and $3,600 less than neighboring Georgia.
We cannot cure all teacher stresses. However, I believe we can take some steps to help reduce one of the increasing pressures teachers face by gauging student, teacher and school performance with measures beyond standardized tests. This task now dominates many classrooms and too often takes the joy out of teaching and learning.

With the new emphasis on school vouchers, incremental improvements on standardized tests have become the politically charged educational gold standard. Scores from these tests determine student progress, teacher raises and school funding. Unfortunately, many of the tests examine only one type of intelligence. Using standardized test scores as the primary measures of student and teacher success or failure ignores important factors contributing to student performance. These examples show how scores can be affected by circumstances:
 

• In a recent Democrat article (March 14), Professor Walter Tschinkel established that standardized test achievement scores for Leon County elementary schools are strongly associated with student demographics. Those elementary schools with large percentages of students from low-income families performed significantly below national averages, while schools dominated by students from middle-income families consistently performed above national averages. These low-income students often enter elementary school several years behind their middle-income peers in learning and attention skills and basic pre-K knowledge. They present teachers on the front lines with seemingly insurmountable problems to achieve even incremental academic improvements as called for in Governor Bush’s A+ Plan for Education.

• One influential $12-million Tennessee statewide study followed 12,000 randomly assigned K-3 students for five years. Researchers concluded that students attending classes with 13-17 students per class consistently out-performed their peers from larger classes. They typically stayed six to 13 months ahead of their larger class peers during grades four, six and eight in math, reading and science. In addition, poor students from inner-city schools tended to gain the most from smaller classes

• Other studies show that in-depth class projects, the kind increasingly sacrificed with the new emphasis on passing standard tests, result in lengthier academic gains not measured in standardized testing.

Evaluations of students, teachers and schools should be more comprehensive. We all believe those teaching our children should be capable, accountable professionals who are responsive to our children’s needs. Annual evaluation of teachers should be expanded to include administrator, peer and student evaluations (Isn’t this how we select teacher of the year?). Teachers should get weighted credits for teaching the most challenged students or larger class sizes as well as being rated by their students’ performance on subject matter competency testing. Evaluation of schools could also include parent, student and teacher satisfaction evaluations, complaint levels and other measures.

Standardized tests should continue to be used for their central purpose — a valuable guide for assessing individual students’ academic needs and a broad gauge of relative ranking. In addition, measuring student achievement should be expanded to include grade point averages, teachers' recommendations, writing performance evaluations, and other innovative measures. Another alternative gaining acceptance nationally might include achieving an agreed upon portfolio of work or completing computer based, at-your-own-pace testing for knowledge content.

We need to implement these or other stronger measures soon so that our most needed master teachers are not driven away from those students that need them the most.
 

Dr. Tim Lynch is Director of the Center for Economic Forecasting and Analysis at Florida State University and can be reached at lynch@cefa.fsu.edu