I'm sure my mother never read "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell's book about the reliability of snap judgments. But she made the same point the book makes when she told me that you can effectively evaluate a teacher in less than five minutes.
She illustrated her point with a story about a 6th-grade English teacher who wrote a sentence on her chalkboard and left out capitalization and punctuation so the students could make it right: the star-spangled banner is a song of celebration
The sixth-graders capitalized the first four words of the sentence and put a period at the end. The teacher nodded. They set off the first four words with quotation marks. The teacher approved that, too. A student then suggested that a comma be put between banner and the closing quotation mark. The teacher gave her blessing, and that caused my mother to frown.
She told her in a whisper the comma wasn't needed. The teacher's response? "But that's what the teacher's book says."
Here my mother paused. "Are you sure that's what the teacher's manual says?"
"Oh, yes, ma'am."
Regardless, my mother explained, that comma shouldn't be. "It's wrong," she said.
The young teacher got the message. The next morning she ran down my mother before she could even enter the school building. "Mrs. DeBerry! Mrs. DeBerry!" she said, "I figured out what happened!" Oh? "Somebody went through my teacher's book adding commas!"
I don't know which is worse: her fiction of a comma vandal on the loose or her tacit admission that she wouldn't recognize his crimes.
In a perfect world, my mother could have put her arm around the young woman's shoulders and walked her off the mound. The children at my hometown school need every advantage they can get, but an English teacher who can't properly punctuate a simple declarative sentence isn't helping. Mistakes are inevitable, but what she'd done was worse than mere error. She'd revealed an ignorance of her subject matter, a reflexive resistance to correction and a willingness to lie rather than admit a shortcoming.
I don't know what happened to that young teacher, but I doubt she was dismissed, for not knowing what the hell one is teaching isn't always enough to be yanked from the profession. Some teachers union leaders never admit that they accept dues from dum-dums. Until cancer overwhelmed her, my mother actively recruited for her union, the Mississippi Association of Educators, but she wouldn't have told me the above story if she was oblivious to the existence of bad teachers.
Here in Louisiana, many public school teachers are angry at lawmakers stripping them of their tenure and imposing new rules that judge teachers' performance in part on their students' performance on standardized tests. It's a so-called value-added model, which means part of a teacher's evaluation will be based on how much progress her students have made under her tutelage.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed this month two Stanford education professors insist that the value-added model is too unreliable to use for personnel decisions. Give the same teacher a high-achieving class and a low-achieving class, they say, and his value-added score will be higher with the first group. He can cover more ground -- i.e., add more value -- with speedier students. This shows, they say, that such models provide a better assessment of a classroom than its teacher.
So what might help us develop a better portrait of teachers? The two professors argue for rigorous evaluations and classroom observation. Student tests scores can play a part, they say, but only so much. In Louisiana, the value-added modeling will now account for fully half of a teacher's score with the traditional classroom observation component accounting for the other half. That means the value-added component is overemphasized, aggrieved Louisiana teachers say. A teacher deemed ineffective by either measure will be deemed ineffective over-all, and if that happens two consecutive years, he or she is tossed.
I don't know if Louisiana's new system is the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff. But chaff is definitely in the mix, and it's in not in students' interests to pretend that every teacher out there is good. Often enough one can be immediately struck by a teacher's ineptitude. But how do you create a methodical system to drive that chaff away?