by Claire Ducker

Created on: March 14, 2009

Teacher accountability is a thorny issue that has increasingly come under discussion as student performance has declined relative both to the past and to the performance of students in other nations. It is opposed, understandably, by teacher unions, though not always by teachers themselves. Even among those who approve of accountability, the method for achieving it is not by any means clear.

Teacher performance is widely recognized as the single most important factor in student achievement, more important than class size, quality and availability of materials and resources, and physical plant. Yet standards of teacher performance are thought to be elusive or even nonexistent.
Scores on standardized tests are the only readily available means of assessing the effects of teaching on students, but these are subject to many variables outside the teacher's sphere of influence.

Teachers are in an unenviable position. They have large workloads with low pay. They must constantly juggle the competing demands of students, parents, and administration. They face an unending, but somehow always increasing, load of paperwork and extra duties.
It seems almost churlish to demand that their pay, or even their jobs, be made to depend on the performance of other people.

The fact is, though, that standardized achievement tests do provide a valid, if limited and imperfect, measure of student progress and, over time, of teacher effectiveness. Average teachers generally teach about a year's worth of academic progress in a school year. Really good teachers effect a year and a half or more of progress in their students. Poor teachers, on the other hand, teach only half a year or less of academic material.
These results can be demonstrated consistently over a three- or four-year period.

It is clear that the difference between excellent and poor teachers is enormous. It has been estimated that student performance could be enhanced significantly by getting rid of the poorest seven to ten percent of teachers, even if they could be replaced by merely mediocre ones. This could be done by measuring yearly student progress over a three-year period for every teacher.

This method would obviate the variability between different schools, classes, and grade levels, since students' progress would be measured only against their own yearly performance, not against that of other students. Measuring progress over several years would eliminate the possibility that poor student progress in a single year might

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