To be completely honest, I love teachers. I wanted to be a teacher. I still want to be a teacher. I've had bad and good teachers. Just note that these statements likely motivate the following post. However, that doesn't make me wrong. Rather, just honest.
This week, a video of Matt Damon hit the internet. He, in a strained way, defended teachers. I won't go too deep into it because you can watch the clip and probably already have. His comments have motivated me to defendant teachers in hopefully a more coherent and fleshed out way than his one-minute video.
As long as I can remember, teachers have been under flak. Not just the normal flak, but the kind of flak that lays the blame of all society upon them. Budget problems? Well, it must be the teachers' union's fault. Achievement gap? Yeah, that's the teachers too. High unemployment? Damn it, teachers.
The basic assumption seems to be that when students perform badly, the teacher must be ineffective. Well, this is a logical fallacy. It sounds good, but it doesn't make sense. So, for your education, I want to hash this logical misstep out for you. Let's begin.
Take these two premises as the base for the situation.
A: An effective teacher instructs a student.
B: The student does well.
If an effective teacher instructs a student, then that student will do well.
If A, then B.
The logical fallacy is: If not B, then not A. Or, If the student does not do well, then the teacher was not effective.
However, reality actually looks like this: A is necessary for B to occur, but not sufficient for B to occur. You follow?
Explanation: We need teachers to teach a subject well. We NEED A for B to occur. However, even if a teacher does teach a subject well, that is not enough. Having a good teacher is not SUFFICIENT for a student to do well. Or, If A occurs, B does not necessarily occur. (If you're confused, read it again and again. That's how I got through my first year of law school.)
This is important because currently our teachers are judged via tests. Tests taken by students who either do well or don't do well. And, as I tried to explain earlier, while we need effective teachers for students to do well, an effective teacher isn't necessarily enough. Therefore, judging teachers solely by student performance only gives us a small piece of data regarding whether a teacher is effective or not. In other words, the tests tell us something, that something may be that a teacher is ineffective, but that something could very well be a different factor entirely. The tests are not designed to tell us that. They only tell us about the student. Nothing about the teacher.
In a more practical sense, maybe our country should look and see if there are any other red flags out there guiding student performance. Like poverty perhaps? Is it mere coincidence that students on free or reduced-cost lunch do worse than their peers? Is it mere coincidence that there is an achievement gap between white students and students of color WHEN there is also a wealth gap between whites and people of color? The answer is hell no. It's not a coincidence. We've known that for a while, but I don't hear any politicians seeking education reform on those grounds. Of course, it must be the teachers' fault.
I have a lot to say about teachers, but this was by far the most unflattering defense I could have made. That being said, this was a flat out rejection of the way we judge teachers. Student performance is hardly made or broken by teachers. An amalgamation of home, school, friends, family involvement, community support, and teachers dictate our students' performance. If a student isn't doing well, maybe he or she has a bad teacher. However, in the alternative it could be any of the other aforementioned factors. Ideally we'd find which, but tests aren't informing us of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment