I was at a meeting recently where it was communicated to me in no uncertain terms that the only thing that mattered for students at my school was whether they were above state average. I have no intention of discussing that further on a public location like a blog, but to my mind it does raise some interesting questions about where teachers should be directing their efforts. When I first started teaching, it was all very much about state average – how close you were to it, if you were below, or how far above it you were, if you were above. The measure of a good teacher was simply that – for his or her HSC classes, if they got them above that marker, then they were a good teacher.
Pretty simple, and there is virtue in simplicity, but not when it obscures the truth. The reality is that you can probably predict how class a class will be to state average in the HSC simply by looking at the demographic from which it draws its students. We all know that parental income, parental education level and class plays a huge role in the development of children, and so it should not be surprising to anyone that standardized testing like NAPLAN and the HSC can be used to identify who is upper middle class and who is not. Don’t take my word for it; there is a raft of data out there that confirms this bias.
in the late 90s and 2000s, then, in an effort to find a fairer approach, schools that I worked in (in Australia and the UK) started talking about valued-added. This was a measure of how much an individual child had grown over a standardized period of time – admittedly, it was still measured by standardized testing, but at least it was a personal measure, with clear starting points for each child. The test, then, became a measure of how teachers could significantly improve the learning gain or value added level of a child – and this was the measure of the particular skill of a teacher. Of course, while it’s probably a better measure than averages, it does ignore other factors, like the role of parents in a child’s development when it is used to measure the efficacy of particular teachers. Or the resources available to schools – clearly a class of 8 is going to have a significant advantage over a class of 50.
This then led (at least in England) to CVA, which takes into account the context of each child – their parents’ marital status, their postcode and so on.
I guess I’m curious -which of these measures are the most effective? Which should be used (if any) to judge teacher efficacy?