Actors do it. Professional athletes do
it. Now Bill Gates wants the country to spend $5 billion for every teacher in
every classroom in every district to be filmed in action so they can be
evaluated and, maybe, improve.
Among all his foundation's educational initiatives for things
like smaller schools and new technology, Gates has increasingly zeroed in on
effective teaching as the key lever to improve education, as he discusses in an exclusive
interview in Fast
Companythis month.
But how do you know effective teaching when you see it? Judging
teachers by their students' test scores is crude and incomplete. In a talk he
gave for a TED / PBS special to be aired May 7 (filmed at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music on April 4), Gates discussed the plan to tape teachers, its estimated
$5 billion price tag, and the pilot program he funded, the Measures of Effective Teaching, conducted with
3,000 teachers in seven districts. They reported three years of findings in
January on a teaching evaluation system that combines test scores, student
evaluations, and classroom assessments, where teachers are graded by impartial
observers.
The idea of reevaluating how we test teachers is spreading, but
remains controversial--even without the privacy issues involved in filming the
classroom. "I know some teachers aren’t immediately comfortable with a
camera in the classroom," Gates acknowledged, then said that could be
overcome by allowing teachers to pick which lessons they want filmed--which
would seem to undermine the validity of any findings.
States and districts have already spent millions of dollars
overhauling teacher evaluation systems, only to have districts rating 97,
98, or 100% of teachers as "satisfactory" or better.
In his talk, Gates emphasized the idea of using this feedback
system to help teachers do their job better.
"We need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the
best," he said. "Our teachers deserve better feedback." He
clearly wants to be seen as a friend, not an enemy, of teachers. However, the
MET project, at least, has done nothing to demonstrate that these evaluations
can actually help teachers improve--rather than just weed out the good from the
bad.
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