Learning Is What Really Matters

Football coaches are adored when they win. They are cruelly second-guessed when they lose. Even scorned. Winning is demanded by the community, the trustees, the alumni and the student body. Coaches produce winners or they get fired.

The public should show the same passion when it comes to evaluating schoolteachers. Academic achievement is unquestionably as important as gridiron achievement. Teachers should be honored when they produce winners. But on the other hand, why subsidize failure?

The effectiveness of schoolteachers is determined most often by administrators during classroom observations.

Besides classroom observations, teachers also are evaluated based on their lesson plans, student grades, failure percentages, complaints, classroom disruptions that end up in the principal’s office and their ability to get along with administrators and fellow teachers. Plus other administrative quirks.

Teachers know that rocking the boat jeopardizes their jobs. Teachers are caught in a bind. On one side, administrators favor teachers who don’t make waves. On the opposite side, teacher unions value those same qualities. Get with the program. Immobilized between competing bureaucracies, individual creativity is stifled.

School officials in Dallas have proposed a new way to evaluate teachers. It’s based on whether the students learned their subject material during the school year.

Amazing. Why didn’t someone think of this before? The public has been lured into arcane discussions involving ideal student-teacher ratios, school prayer, open classrooms, site-based management, magnet schools, year-round schools, charter schools, breakfast programs, tracking, mainstreaming, streamlining, decentralizing, political correctness in “Huckleberry Finn” and on and on.

All of this is window dressing - colorful but inedible parsley - if schoolchildren do not learn what they need to know to progress from one grade to the next until they are graduated with a meaningful degree and with the solid education they need to succeed in life.

Schools are for learning. For students. They do not exist to provide jobs and retirement benefits for adults. Teachers and administrators should be graded based on whether their students are learning. Shiny programs and well-oiled bureaucracies don’t count. Learning counts.

The Dallas proposal would tie teacher evaluations to their students’ test scores. Teachers would receive the test scores of their students from the previous year. Students would be tested throughout the year to measure learning. Teachers also would be compared with other teachers with similar students from similar backgrounds.

There have been complaints about basing evaluations on tests. Nothing new here. But how else should learning be measured? Students are given material to be learned. They are given professional assistance. They are given assignments to demonstrate their learning. They are asked questions to measure how much they have learned.

Tests may not be perfect. And they should not be easy. But for all their faults, tests are the best system known to measure learning. And there’s no use having schools if we don’t produce learning.

Schools must have high learning standards at every grade level. Students must be held to those standards. There should be no social promotions. That’s unfair to students and to teachers who receive those students. There should be strict accountability based on student learning at every level.

The public should demand that their schools produce winners - winners in learning. And teachers and administrators who produce winners should be hailed as champions.

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