Measuring teacher’s effectiveness has been one of the most challenging, yet
important issue that governments, private and public schools across the world
is trying to tackle.
The Karnataka State’s department
of primary and secondary education has prepared personalized report cards for
teachers in government and aided schools based on the SSLC (Secondary School
Leaving Certificate or the 10th exams) that was conducted in May
2018. This report card is based on how the class fared in board exams and would
be given a score between 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest. They would also be
categorized into 4 slots: Very good, good, average & below average. This
evaluation measure also considers the number of students taught during the
year, the pass percentage & the average marks of the class. Now this opens
the room for a whole new debate – is this the right evaluation technique? Is correlating
the class of students’ performance in the final board exam to the teachers’ effectiveness
the right approach?
Graduating from “Access to Education” to “Access to Quality Education”
Without digressing into how the
Indian Education system has been in shambles since 1947 and how the bad policies
are throttling the system year on year, we know that the general narrative has
now shifted to access to good education and not simply education anymore.
Indian families that send all their children to private schools spend over 4
percent of their total expenditure more on education than a similar household
which sends all its children on public school. It’s a 60% increase above the
average education expenditure and this is financed by a reduction of
expenditure on food, healthcare and entertainment among others.[1]
The rhetoric around education claims that it is the best human capital
investment individuals and government can make. Thus, it becomes important to
know what the return on education is, for the individuals to make better
informed choices, increasing the individual freedom and empowering them. Most
families believe that Private Schools have a better return on investment
(quality of education) compared to government schools.[2]
Teacher’s role in a student’s success
Studies have shown that teachers
matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling.[3]
While external factors like the family circumstances or personal
characteristics have higher impact on the student achievement, most policies
focus on improving teacher’s effectiveness since it’s easier to control.
Measuring teacher’s impact has been a bone of contention for several years
across education specialists, since measuring “impact” has been a tricky
business. Karnataka government’s plan to release a “Teacher Report Card” is yet
another attempt to jump into this business, but this method is utterly flawed.
Why? Well,
a) Students
start out at different levels, so growth in their scores over a period is a
better basis for judging teacher effectiveness.
b) Studies
have shown that external factors like health, neighborhood, family have between
4 to 8 times more influence on student’s scores.
c) If
a student had more than one teacher in a single subject that year, it would be
hard to zero in on the teacher’s contribution to the student’s learning.
d) Important
skills can be underrepresented in or excluded in board exams. Final board exams
do not fully assess the student’s grasp of higher order skills, interest in
subject, academic curiosity which are essential components that decide the fate
of the student’s academic path.
e) Unintended
consequence: This would not reflect the actual ground impact and could demoralize
the teachers, creating more harm than good.
There are several other
techniques such as Value-Added Model, Student Growth Percentile techniques used
to measure the impact. They’re highly data driven methods and though not
perfect, they pave way to better understanding the role of the teacher in the
student’s learning outcome.
Value Added Modeling:
VAMs capture the teacher’s
effectiveness over a period, thus holding the teacher accountable for
consistent performance. This means focusing not on how students
test at a single point in time but rather on how much improvement they make
from one testing period to the next.
The model works as follows:
If a teacher A teaches grade 6
math, statisticians obtain grade 4 & 5 test scores of all her
students, as well as background information. Using this historical data,
prediction of grade 6 math scores will be made for each of the student. If
student A, scores 5 points more than the predicted score and student B, scores 2
points below the predicted score, Teacher A’s value-added estimate will be average
of the difference between the actual & predicted score of the students.
Since VAMs consider the previous
test scores and the background of the student, one teacher’s value-added
estimate can be compared to another and be ranked accordingly. (teachers
teaching the same subject, same grade).This method is largely used by
several states in the US and is also actively being adopted by states during
recent times.[4]
Conclusion:
Teaching is a complex activity
and cannot have just a single method used to measure the effectiveness. Using multiple
measures to assess the many aspects of teaching effectiveness as completely as
possible and providing teachers with detailed information to help them
understand their strengths and weaknesses would help in building knowledge
about best practices across the teaching community. Karnataka state department’s
decision at building a teacher’s report card to build a culture of sharing best
practices among teachers is a welcome move, but the means to develop such a
report card must be rethought and carefully analyzed.
[4]https://www.rand.org/education-and-labor/projects/measuring-teacher-effectiveness/value-added-modeling.html
