"Achievement"

Thanks Sarah for sharing this article on Bill Gates and his foundation's work on education reform.

Here, in this article, and in the op ed piece Gates wrote for the Washington Post, we are hearing a lot of the same talk in regards to teachers and student achievement.  Gates is making the argument that neither seniority nor advanced degrees warrant increases in teacher salary- rather, we should focus on finding successful teachers (and by his definition, this would be teachers of students who show the most "achievement"), see what they are doing right, give them "four or five more students", and reward them with merit based pay that will come as a result of eliminating unsuccessful teachers.  Done.  Problem solved.

I can only assume that student achievement in this sense is measurable achievement, a.k.a. good standardized test scores.  So the next obvious assumption, then, is good teachers help students achieve measurable success- high test scores.  So we should find the teachers that teach to the test the best, give them even more students, and get rid of the underperforming teachers.

At this point, I don't even know what to say about all this anymore.  Yes, there are bad teachers.  I have had some of them.  There are also teachers who are really good at taking a prepackaged curriculum and making students memorize a bunch of stuff and score really well on a test that only has meaning because someone else says it's important.  There are teachers who, despite the discourse that says what they do each day is an easy part-time job, despite a staggering lack of resources, actually try and teach something beyond filling in stupid answer bubbles.

Definitely check out the comments that follow the Washington Post piece-