Back in mid-March, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, hosted the third International Summit on the Teaching Profession. This particular summit focused on teacher quality, including professional standards and teacher appraisal. The past two took place in New York City at the invitation of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) composed a summary of his thoughts on the event. About the purpose of the event, he said, “The aim was to provide a venue in which the top officials involved in making policy for teachers and teaching in their countries could, aided by analyses provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Education International (EI), compare notes on strategy and implementation, and by so doing, further improve their own education systems. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.”
Despite not having attended himself, his comments reflect conversations with several attendees. His goal in the comments was to address some of the differing opinions of those who attended.
It was broadly agreed that teacher evaluation and appraisal is very important and that it could be effective only in systems also designed to:
- Make teaching an attractive profession,
- Provide very high-quality initial teacher education,
- Create a school management system in which teachers could act as autonomous professionals within a collaborative culture, and
- Engage teachers in developing the evaluation system.
And that was frame with which OECD and EI opened the third summit.
This is a very sensible approach. It could potentially provide a roadmap leading to sound policy that would also provide an opportunity for all parties to claim victory, but it would have been too much to expect that it would relieve all the tensions with which the second summit ended.
In the eyes of several observers, no one at the table at the third summit was advocating that teacher evaluation and appraisal be used to weed out bad teachers. And everyone agreed that teachers both needed and wanted feedback. But, with that off the table, there was still tension between those who are most comfortable with the use of evaluation for professional growth and development, on the one hand, and those who see it as a vital tool in the design and implementation of tough-minded accountability systems on the other. And, in the middle were those who were naturally inclined to the position apparently so well articulated by Andreas Schleicher at the meeting, namely that teacher evaluation is best thought of as an important component of a much larger system built around a conception of teachers as highly capable professionals, not as cogs in a Tayloristic management design.
That vision assumes that the criteria against which teachers are being judged is not limited to student performance on basic skills in a narrow range of subjects but on their ability to help students succeed against the full range of outcomes now widely referred to as 21st century skills, many of which are difficult if not impossible to measure. In Tayloristic systems, everyone assumes that management will assess the workers in any way they see fit, usually according to fairly simplistic criteria; in professional environments, the direction of accountability is at least as much to one’s colleagues as to one’s superiors in the organizational structure. So who is to devise the criteria for judging teachers and who is to decide whether an individual teacher meets them? In blue collar environments, all workers are regarded as equal, if not interchangeable. But, in a professional environment, the professionals acquire increasing responsibility, authority and compensation as they demonstrate increasing competence and skill. Perhaps, as nations move toward conceptions of teachers and teaching grounded in the idea of teacher as professional, the idea of teacher evaluation and appraisal should be inextricably connected to the development of formalized career ladders for teachers.
The third summit did indeed address these and other issues. This made for some tough conversations. It became very clear that it was going to be hard to resolve these issues without some real trust among the parties, both at this table, and, by implication, within the countries represented.
For Tucker’s full comments, see: http://www.ncee.org/2013/04/tuckers-lens-the-2013-international-summit-on-the-teaching-profession/
For the summit website, see: http://www.teachersummit2013.org/
Following is a link to a blog post about the summit from the Education Department’s website: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2013/03/third-international-summit-on-the-teaching-profession-sitting-at-our-table/
