Evaluation Of A Teacher On Student Performance

Should we grade teachers on their performance? A recent cartoon in the Wall Street Journal pretty much says it all: a young student presents his failing report card to his teacher and opines, "Ah, Miss Brimsley, I ask you: Which one of us has truly failed?" This cartoon is illustrating a student who had failed and is asking the teacher whether or not he failed, or was she failing to teach him.  The question of how to make a great teacher had been around and there is actually no straight direct answer, but there is a general agreement to some of the prerequisites. One is an unshakeable belief in children's capacity to learn. Using test results to judge a teacher's performance is much trickier than it sounds. Students test scores are influenced by all sorts of things that are beyond a teachers' control. The most well known approach has been crafted by William Sanders. This is called the "Value-Added Assessment System."  The Sanders model ranked teachers according to how much more, or less, growth their students have made compared with the average teacher; "effective" teachers are those who students made above the average growth. He claims that this removes socioeconomic factors that play an important role in student achievement, such as family and home environment, and that the results can help in improving teaching performance. A weakness that people state that this had is that it does not adequately account for numerous student-background, classroom, and school factors that play a role in classroom achievement.  There are different variations of this added model but there is really no set way to grade a teacher on performance. This topic is very interesting and I wonder if there will ever be a way, but I personally think not.