Levelling up teachers’ status
When former UK prime minister Boris Johnson won the elections in 2019 with a landslide, he committed to levelling up the social status of millions of Britons struggling to prosper because of financial distress and inadequate educational achievement. Like most politicians, he knew that a critical success factor for personal and societal success in life is the quality of the educational system.
However, what makes an educational system effective remains debatable among educators, politicians and business leaders. As long as a country’s effort to improve the achievement level of its students remains nebulous, the chances of success in upgrading its educational system will be minimal.
There is no shortage of concrete initiatives educators and politicians take to improve the tools teachers need to deliver knowledge to their students. Well-maintained schools, modern IT equipment and investment in education through the stipend system are undoubtedly tools that help motivate both teachers and students to achieve better results. However, few argue the need to engage the teaching profession more effectively by making them accountable for their results.
Teachers are among the least appreciated professionals in most Western societies. They are often wrongly depicted as being pampered by perks not enjoyed by other professionals, like long holidays and short teaching hours. But this is just a caricature of reality. Job satisfaction
nd levels among the teaching profession remain low. The missing link in most educational systems in most countries is the ability to measure and reward teacher effectiveness.
One significant advantage of being a teacher is that you interact with your students most of the time. Your bosses and colleagues rarely take up more than a small fraction of your working time. This phenomenon gives teachers a degree of independence in carrying out their professional duties, but it could also lead to insufficient scrutiny of their effectiveness in the classroom.
Like every other professional, a teacher needs to be held accountable for the results of their work. The thorny dilemma is identifying the metrics that must be used to measure the results achieved by teachers.
So far, teachers have been judged by their academic achievements and experience, measured by years of service. Of course, none of these criteria tell us much about whether their students are learning anything. In many countries, teachers’ unions have resisted attempts to measure student achievement to indicate teachers’ effectiveness. This is now changing.
Experiments carried out in various US states have shown that when primary school pupils were assigned to better teachers, they achieved more educationally, often progressed with their studies to university, earned better salaries and ‘were less likely to be teenage mothers’. However, this is only one aspect of assessing a teacher’s effectiveness.
Translating these positive elements into a performancerelated pay policy nationally is much more difficult. The recruitment, promotion and sacking of teachers will always be a complex process that cannot be reduced to a subjective ticking of boxes in a teacher’s annual assessment report.
Educational leaders are unlikely to agree to some fuzzy metrics that become a mere formality to reward practically all teachers. In contrast, teachers’ unions will resist demanding standards that will reward only the high-flyers in the profession.
There is still no universally accepted definition of what constitutes good educational achievement. Employers, for instance, look for qualities like the ability to solve problems, creativity and strong work ethics in the students they want to employ.
Many educators expect their students to ‘be better citizens’ by understanding their societal role. Parents want their children to achieve high grades in their exams to give them a better and more financially rewarding job.
Some countries try to make teaching more accountable by insisting on better teacher training. The US-based National Council on Teacher Quality has described America’s teachertraining colleges as ‘an industry of mediocrity’. In most countries, teacher-training courses are often considered a soft option and are usually taken up by less talented or less ambitious students. This needs to change if we are to upgrade our educational system.
Finland provides a good case study on improving teacher effectiveness. A few decades ago, this country’s political and societal leaders realised that they needed to upgrade their economy from one based on basic primary industries like forestry to a modern technology-driven one.
The secret of Finland’s educational success was its policy of recruiting the best graduates, with the highest salaries paid by private industry, as teachers.
This is the way ahead for a more accountable teaching profession.
“The missing link in most educational systems in most countries is the ability to measure and reward teacher effectiveness