Rating our teachers
Business think-tank wants judgment to rest on student data
Teachers could be rated based on how much they lift student success, if a business think-tank has its way. The New Zealand Initiative, which says the combined revenue of its 54 member companies represents a quarter of the NZ economy, calls in a new report for better data to measure how good teachers are.
It also wants to revive controversial moves to bulk-fund schools and to let “superstar schools” take over “failing schools”.
Education Minister Nikki Kaye says she is “very interested in looking at what can be done to more accurately reflect the impact that schools are having on their students, which means being able to better measure the growth that students are making”.
But she said school principals did not see a need for bulk-funding. The law allowed for two school boards to combine, but she did not expect that option to be used often.
The think-tank argues that schools are failing too many children, especially Maori and Pacific students, because of poor information about school and teacher quality, state control of school spending, zoning rules which restrict parents’ choice of schools, and weak incentives for schools to improve.
“Parents deserve transparent information about the quality of schools, and schools need better comparative data to support their improvement strategies,” it says.
But the report does not take the next step, which teacher unions have feared, of linking teachers’ performance directly to their pay.
“I don’t say anything about what is happening to the teacher who is not performing well,” said the report’s author, Martine Udahemuka.
“First and foremost, it’s to provide them with the support they need to become good teachers.”
She proposes that the Government should use the same data on students’ families that it already plans to use to determine school funding, such as the parents’ criminal records, how long they have been on welfare, and the mother’s education and age when she had her children.
Schools would have to tell the Ministry of Education which students are in, say, Mrs Smith’s class, and the ministry would use the data about each student to predict how many would achieve the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) in Mrs Smith’s subject.
If the students’ actual pass rate was higher than predicted, Mrs Smith would be rated a good teacher.
If the pass rate was lower than predicted, Mrs Smith might be offered extra training and mentoring.
Alternatively, the data might show Mrs Smith is an effective teacher for some students and not others.
“A teacher may be highly effective with native English speakers but not students with English as a second language,” the report says.
“Imagine if a principal could know that . . . the teacher in Room 12 was fantastic with Pasifika students but
needs help teaching her Asian students.”
The data might show that some teachers in better-off areas are not doing well even if their students are passing NCEA.
“If a school was expected to have 98 per cent NCEA 2 graduates, with 40 per cent gaining ‘Excellences’, then a 100 per cent graduation outcome with 10 per cent Excellences means the school is not stretching its students to their potential — or is coasting,” the report says.
The report says using the data should be voluntary for most schools, but it suggests making it compulsory for schools found by the Education Review Office to be failing once, or underperforming twice in a row.
It says principals recruited to turn around failing schools should be given full control of their budgets, including the money the ministry now pays directly for teacher salaries.
Other schools would also be able to “opt in” to such bulk funding.
It also suggests that failing schools should be paired with “superstar” or “exemplar” schools, either to work together or ultimately to be taken over by the better schools.
But School Trustees Association president Lorraine Kerr said every student came with unique issues that would not all show up in the data, and it would be unfair to blame individual teachers for their performance.
Post Primary Teachers Association president Jack Boyle said it was also unfair to rate teachers based solely on NCEA pass rates when the goals of education were much wider.
Labour’s Chris Hipkins said he was “absolutely opposed to the idea that we should use student achievement data benchmarked against some sort of ‘ Big Brother’ predictive model” to judge teachers’ performance.