Gwen McCants-Allen is the mother of two boys attending metro Atlanta public schools. She has worked as a human resources manager for more than a decade, including in Gwinnett County Public Schools and another school district.
In this guest column, McCants-Allen responds to a blog post last week on the disappointing results of a six-year initiative by the Gates Foundation to raise student achievement by raising teacher effectiveness through improved performance reviews, reward and retention efforts.
Her view: We have to keep trying as teachers -- while not the sole influence on student achievement-- play a critical role.
At a cost of more than half a billion dollars shared by Gates and participating school sites, the initiative made headway in recognizing effective teaching but not in increasing it. An evaluation of the initiative commissioned by the Gates Foundation concluded: “Overall, the initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly low-income minority students.”
Here is the guest column:
By Gwen McCants-Allen
Pop quiz: When your project fails do you A. Give up or B. Try to find a better way?
Recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been getting some attention for publicly admitting that their multi-million dollar, multi-year effort to improve teaching through better teacher evaluations has failed.
So, the fundamental question is what do we do now?
For those who never liked the idea of “reforming” schools in the first place, and those who see this as a political victory, the answer will be to abandon ship. Stop trying and let it die.
But I suspect most people, including those generally against reform, still want to see students doing better in schools. Second only to Washington, D.C., Atlanta has the widest achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers in the country. And only 17 percent of black fourth graders in Atlanta are reading at or above grade level according to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, between known as the Nation's Report Card.
For those of us who put student needs at the forefront, the answer must be “find a better way.”
It’s still true that teachers have a bigger impact on student learning than anything else at school. That doesn’t mean we focus only on teachers—we should continue to care about high academic standards, high-quality teaching materials, leadership, school climate and school accountability, too—but teachers have got to be a big part of the solution.
The ultimate goal with teacher evaluations was never the evaluations themselves. It was to improve teaching. That goal shouldn’t change. Helping students succeed means, in large part, helping teachers succeed. The more we can help teachers raise the caliber of Atlanta’s teaching corps, the better.
We can probably all name a great teacher at the school we attended or the school our kids’ attend. It’s hard to create a teacher evaluation policy that will satisfy those judged by it, but most of us know good teaching when we see it. Do an informal poll at any teacher’s lounge and you’ll likely get good consensus on who the rock star teachers are. We should be striving to build up more teachers to that status.
The challenge, of course, is the how. Many professional development programs have also failed to move the needle. And despite the constant call for actionable feedback, most districts are struggling to do it well. I don't have all the answers, but a good place to start might be to look at the top-performing high-poverty schools in the state.
Some schools are taking students who face the daunting obstacles of high poverty and trauma and helping them succeed. If you look at the schools with 95-100 percent of students coming from economically disadvantaged homes, you’ll find 13 that are getting As in Georgia’s grading system. Carver Early College is the only one in Atlanta.
We should be looking at these schools to find out what they’re doing right. What is their school culture like? How are they applying the standards? And how are they supporting their teachers?
While the well-funded Gates effort to improve teaching through evaluations failed to get the desired results, the right answer will always be to keep trying to help the kids who need it most.
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