To get a better understanding of why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is so focused on teacher effectiveness and the role Memphis is playing in their project, here is a piece published in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend. At tonight's first regular meeting of a unified countywide 23-member Shelby County Board of Education, MCS Supt. Kriner Cash will give what is termed a "stocktake debrief" of the Foundation's Teacher Effectiveness Initiative in Memphis. Several representatives of the Gates Foundation have been in town evaluating the progress of their initiatives here.
The Journal piece lays out the Foundation's vision for the project:
Why focus on teacher effectiveness? They write:
The Journal piece lays out the Foundation's vision for the project:
For the last several years, our foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET. These teachers volunteered to have their classes videotaped and their lessons scored by experts, to have their students evaluate their teaching, to fill out surveys about the support they receive and to be assessed on their content knowledge.
The intermediate goal of MET is to discover what we are able to measure that is predictive of student success. The end goal is to have a better sense of what makes teaching work so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards.
In developing MET, we have worked closely with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and we have seen both the AFT and the National Education Association show a willingness to rethink evaluation systems. Given the scale and scope of the problem, there must be dialogue about solutions among unions, teachers and administrators.
Why focus on teacher effectiveness? They write:
It may surprise you--it was certainly surprising to us--but the field of education doesn't know very much at all about effective teaching. We have all known terrific teachers. You watch them at work for 10 minutes and you can tell how thoroughly they've mastered the craft. But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.The piece actually holds up Memphis and a teacher at Ridgeway Middle as an example of how the program can work to improve classroom performance:
This ignorance has serious ramifications. We can't give teachers the right kind of support because there's no way to distinguish the right kind from the wrong kind. We can't evaluate teaching because we are not consistent in what we're looking for. We can't spread best practices because we can't capture them in the first place.
Last year, we visited Ridgeway Middle School in Memphis and sat down with Mahalia Davis while she watched a videotape of herself teaching. Ms. Davis had many years of experience, and it was obvious to us that she was a standout. She watched her video because she wanted to get even better at something she already did well.
We were impressed by how much Ms. Davis enjoyed taking apart the craft of her own teaching. She leaned forward in her chair and said, "Look, I just lost that student." Then she said, "The class wasn't with me on that point. I need to teach that concept in a new way."
Like all people who are proud of the work they do, teachers want to improve, but they need the tools to do it. We are now compiling libraries of tens of thousands of videos, and we plan to use these videos to advance professional development for teachers.
I hate Gates. He doesn't know what he's talking about, but he wants teachers to be pestered beyond belief and then fired. Read the comments on that Wall Street Journal article. This is what his money and his ideas have created.