Douglas wrote:
"Not only is it essentially impossible to rid schools of the
egregious teachers, few schools have systematic processes in place to
improve system performance. For example, few have a systematic process to
collect data on how parents, students and teachers perceive the school's
performance, let alone to act on that data."
And even fewer public school systems have systematic processes to
collect such data at the individual teacher level. At the end of the year
ask a teacher "Did your teaching improve this year?" And, "How do you
know?" While the better ones may be able to provide a coherent answer,
most of these will be in terms of what they did, rather than student
outcomes."
Adding my less expert comments to those of Phillip Capper.
Firstly, although students, parents and fellow professionals might have
conversations about who is a good school teacher, as the parent of young
children I have also overhead some pretty uninformed comments on teaching
staff strongly influenced by the teacher's race, sexual preference and
socio-economic status or perceived social class. Sure, often people do
know who the "good" and "bad" teachers are, but sometimes for the wrong
reasons.
Secondly, in the state of New South Wales, Australia, we have similar
programs in place to those Phillip Capper describes in New Zealand. Our
state school has an audited strategic plan, a School Council chaired by a
parent, must conduct a parent and community survey every year and has to
include in their strategic plan reviews their response to the school's
scores on universal basic skills tests.
All in all, feedback on performance from a range of sources.
We are very happy with the staff, leadership and community involvement of
our little state school (160 children) even though in New South Wales we
have very strong teachers Unions also!!
Philip Pogson
Training and Development Manager
SAS Institute Australia
Ph: +61 2 9428 0585
Fax: + 61 2 9418 7211
"There is only one point on which economists and I are in agreement: I
am not an economist."
- Peter Drucker
--Philip Pogson <Philip_Pogson@oz.sas.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>