The Aug. 28 article”Schools miss No Child goals” is critical of the No Child Left Behind standards and coincidentally mentions that Washington state lost its waiver as a result of refusing to take student performance into account when evaluating teachers. Consider the following information.
“After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10 percent in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10 percent. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.” (http://tinyurl.com/237nf9r).
“Work published in 2011, from Columbia and Harvard, showed that pupils assigned to better teachers are more likely to go to college and earn decent salaries, and less likely to be teenage mothers. …
“The countries where pupils do best, such as Singapore, Finland and South Korea, draw all their teachers from the top third of the academic pool. In America, three-quarters of teacher-training colleges accept students who graduate in the bottom half of their class. Until good teachers are recognized and rewarded, pupils will be stuck with the other sort.” (http://tinyurl.com/luy4378.)
