Good Teaching Matters

Kati Haycock

Kati Haycock is director of the Education Trust, an organization created to promote high achievement for all students at all levels. It particularly works to improve educational opportunities for low-achieving populations, including low-income students and disadvantaged minority groups. Its publications and newsletters are available on the Internet at www.edtrust.org

In Summer, 1998, the Education Trust published a summary of the growing body of research that says that the differences between teachers do matter—and matter a lot. Students who have several effective teachers in a row make dramatic gains in achievement, while those who have even two ineffective teachers in a row lose significant ground which they may never recover. Indeed, students who achieve at similar levels in the third grade may be separated by as many as 50 percentile points three years later depending on the quality of the teachers to whom they were assigned!

The response to "Good Teaching Matters," and to the many presentations we have made on its central findings, has taught us a lot. We've learned, for example, that while some teachers are overjoyed to have clear, uncontrovertible evidence that what they do matters to their students, other teachers are angered. The same is true of teacher educators: some seem thrilled to be reminded that what they do makes a difference, others seem to want only to find a flaw in the evidence.

Even school principals, who have long asserted that their teachers are a rather uneven lot, seem stunned by proof that they've been more right than perhaps they had ever believed. Indeed, in Tennessee—where all principals now have robust teacher-by-teacher data—and in some of the other districts that produce similar analyses, principals seem reluctant to use these new tools as a basis for their improvement efforts.

It turns out that old notions about the causes of underachievement have a very long half-life. It makes us wonder, in fact, how much higher the pile of evidence will have to grow before we concede in our professional lives what we certainly know in our roles as parents...and knew as students, as well. Teachers matter a lot.

Questions

1. Why might some teachers be angered by evidence that some teachers bring about higher achievement than others?
2. Why might some teacher educators want to find flaws in the evidence that teachers differ in producing student achievement?
3. Did you know, as a high school student, that teachers "matter" in producing achievement? How? Did your friends know this?
4. Why might principals be reluctant to use data on differential achievement of teachers' students as a basis for improvement? What might they, and what should they, do?
5. What might be the "causes of underachievement" that Haycock refers to?

Source: Thinking K–16, (Spring 2000), p. 304. Reprinted by permission of the Education Trust, Washington, D.C.