Tests reveal much about teachers, too

Students aren't the only ones who feel the stress of a new school year. In a back-to-school ritual, parents often worry about their children's teacher assignments.

Why the high anxiety? Many parents believe that the success - or failure - of their child's entire school year will be determined by the quality of the classroom teacher.

Typically, school administrators discount the impact of spending one year with a bad teacher. But a growing body of research confirms that parents' concerns are valid.

Studies from school districts in Dallas, Boston and across Tennessee document that the most important factor determining student success on standardized tests is the teacher's ability to present the material.

"We found it outweighs anything else you can think of," said Robert Mendro, who directs research for the Dallas Independent School District. It is more important, even, than the school district or class size.

Moreover, students who are assigned an ineffective teacher aren't condemned to just one bad year. Research shows these students' test scores don't recover for at least three years, even if subsequent teachers are terrific.

How much difference can a good teacher make? Plenty. Among students with similar achievement levels, Tennessee researchers found that kids taught by effective teachers for three years outscored students taught by ineffective teachers by 54 percentage points on standardized math tests.

In the world of education, gaps of that magnitude can mean the difference between labeling students "gifted" and placing them in remedial classes.

The findings help explain why even good students in inner-city schools typically have lower scores on standardized tests when compared to their suburban counterparts. A report released this month by The Education Trust found that poor and minority students are most likely to be taught by ineffective teachers.

The ideal, of course, is to ensure that every student gets a good teacher. And a national movement is under way to upgrade the profession by holding universities responsible for the quality of their education graduates through retraining ineffective teachers and rewarding effective ones. All good ideas.

But school districts that have tracked the links between teacher quality and student performance are taking the next logical step - holding teachers responsible for their students' achievement on standardized tests.

In Dallas and across Tennessee, teachers' job evaluations can be based, in part, on their students' success on standardized tests. The good news: Researchers believe that once ineffective educators are identified, many can improve their teaching quickly by adding more rigorous course material.

The idea is to measure teachers by the same yardstick used for kids: student performance.

That's fair. Especially because the performance of students is directly influenced by the performance of their teachers.

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