Report cards on teachers needed

About all I can tell you so far about my children’s teachers are their names. The teachers are too new to the system for the informal parent grapevine to offer much guidance, and my brief interactions with them during the first week of classes provided few insights.

Even if the teachers had been teaching for a while, parents familiar with them could only tell me how their child fared. What those parents can’t tell me — and the schools won’t tell me — is how well those teachers have succeeded in raising student achievement in the past.

The most reliable measure of whether teachers will succeed with a class is whether they have succeeded before, but the relevant data are treated as top secret by most districts. While a parent can find out how third-graders at their school fared on the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests last year, they can’t tease out how Ms. Brown’s third-grade class, or Mr. Smith’s, performed.

Virtually all data about individual teacher performance disappear into some black hole. If you pull up the latest state Department of Education Report Card for Gwinnett’s Brookwood High School, for example, you can find out that 45 percent of algebra students exceeded standards, 36 percent met, and 18 percent failed.

But there’s no way Brookwood parents can discern whether any corollary exists between student pass rates and specific math teachers. Nor can you match Advanced Placement scores to teachers — unless there’s only one person teaching an AP course that year.

True, test results for a single year won’t tell parents much; it could be that a teacher walked into a class of slow learners one year and a class of Einsteins the next.

However, it would be helpful and fair to examine a teacher’s performance over several years. If Brookwood parents discovered that the students of one algebra teacher consistently surpassed standards and students of another repeatedly failed, they’d push hard to get their kid in the former’s class.

And that’s why the information is kept from parents. So parents are left crossing their fingers each August that their child gets stronger teachers. Despite the Lake Wobegon view of many principals, not all teachers are above average. (As the mother of twins in different classes each year, I have been struck by the differences in ambition, talent and enthusiasm of teachers.)

Mostly, I’ve been impressed with my four children’s teachers, although my oldest suffered under the tutelage of three teachers in elementary school who were either let go or transferred at the end of the year.

Even when a teacher proved a bad match for my child, I’ve never sought a switch to another class, believing that learning to cope and come to terms with incompatible personalities is a necessary life skill.

But I think schools ought to adopt a more customer-friendly approach toward informing parents about teachers.

Why not send out short biographies of teachers before the start of classes so parents have some idea of the teacher’s background?

My system used to wait until the day before school resumed to post class lists and teacher assignments, probably to fend off dissatisfied parents lobbying for changes.

Schools are in the information business; it doesn’t make sense that they avoid giving out information about the most critical component of their industry, their teachers.

Learning Curve is a new weekly column on education. Please send suggestions for topics or feedback to mdowney@ajc.com.