How to Test a Teacher: A Lesson from Tennessee for Ontario

The Harris government will attempt to improve teacher quality-- unquestionably a worthy goal-- through the testing of teachers. Starting this fall Ontario plans to test the competency of teachers through written exams administered to each teacher every five years. Those who fail could lose their teaching certificates.

The testing program is a brave move on the government’’s part. More precisely, it’’s brave and foolhardy. It is brave to attempt, in the face of vitriolic opposition from the teachers’’ unions, to ascertain which teachers are competent, and to de-certify them if they are not. It is, however, foolhardy to go head to head with the teachers unions over a policy that is unlikely to succeed in its mission, worthy though that mission may be. At the end of the day, the exercise is likely to be costly to government goodwill, to taxpayers footing the bill, and also to the already low morale of the teachers in this province.

None of us likes to be tested, and tests are valuable only if they measure skills accurately. Ontario’’s written test for teachers cannot guarantee teaching quality because it aims to measure that skill through something other than teaching. A written test can test what teachers know, but not how well they teach. It therefore cannot guarantee that good teachers will pass and bad teachers will fail.

All teachers should have a firm command of the material they teach, certainly, but they should be tested on this before they are ever allowed at the front of a classroom, not repeatedly through their careers. Subject tests have been absent for too long from our faculties of education and that is the place to reinstate them. Once certified, teachers should be tested not on what they know but on how well they convey their knowledge to students.

Indeed, Ontario would do better to test not what teachers know but how much their students learn. Tennessee has developed a system to do just this. The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) calculates the value added by a teacher over the course of a school year to a student’’s work. It tests students at the beginning of the year and again at the end, and teachers are graded based on the progress their students make in between.

TVAAS was developed by Prof. William Sanders, the director of the University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center. Using TVAAS data, collected annually by the state from every elementary classroom in Tennessee since 1992, Prof. Sanders has calculated the impact that effective and ineffective teachers have on their students. He has found that teacher effectiveness is 10 to 20 times as significant as other things including--to the surprise of many--family background.

TVAAS is fair to teachers because it minimizes the influence of all pre-existing differences among students, including race, socio-economic background, intelligence and previous learning. In doing so, it removes the objection put forward so often against standardized tests: that they do not account for the student’’s background. Teachers get no credit for having a classroom full of well-prepared students and are not penalized for children who start the school year below average. What counts is how much teachers improve their students’’ skills in the course of the school year.

Tennessee tests all elementary students and reports each teacher’’s performance to the district, the school, and the teacher. School districts can use the information as they see fit. Those that have chosen to ignore the information have stagnant or declining results while those that use it to work with teachers and schools are showing measurable progress.

Though the teachers unions would certainly fight value-added assessment, privately, I suspect, many teachers would recognize its value. Good teachers could receive a deserved pat on the back and weaker teachers could be helped to improve. As a result, morale would improve for the whole teaching profession, something that has not happened for a long time in Ontario.

As students go back to their books this month, so should government policy makers. While a fair test of professional competence, such as value-added assessment, would give teachers good reason to work for an A, an unfair one may provoke teachers to cut class altogether.