Want kids with great grades? Then grade their teachers

I believe in public education. I want our children to learn from one another and grow — together — in excellent public schools. I want our children to be well-prepared for college, work and citizenship. But this is a fantasy as we alternately ignore, decorate or hide one of our country's biggest obstacles to creating excellent public schools: ineffective teachers and leaders.

In a profession based on relationships and people performance, it's surprising that we've let this issue sit there, rather comfortably, for so long. Why? Because we have no system in place that evaluates effective teaching and leading.

Evaluating teachers on their primary responsibilities is surprisingly complex. For those who believe effective teaching is ultimately about increasing academic achievement, there is no routine practice connecting student academic achievement back to individual teachers. In other words, we don't measure it. The current teacher-evaluation process is akin to evaluating the plumber who comes to fix our sink on everything except whether or not the sink is fixed!

Effective teaching shouldn't be reduced to how well students perform on tests, some argue. Effective teachers open kids up to new ideas and inspire them beyond traditional academics — things you cannot really measure. Shouldn't these things be regarded on par with improving academics? Yes! In fact, this is the very foundation of effective teaching. But it would be irresponsible for a teacher to stop there. Would you keep a coach that "everyone loves" even when the team consistently loses and kids' skills do not improve?

As a former teacher, I realize how unpopular it is to attack the system from this angle. How we fund schools is a crime and most teachers are low-paid saints. Furthermore, the schoolhouse cannot adequately buffer against poverty and racism. But for the six hours we have students inside the school, we had better know what we're doing and why. As it stands now, public education runs on the fumes of a few individuals' altruism.

It's not for a lack of trying that we don't have better public schools. We've focused on curriculum alignment, small schools, reduced class sizes, culturally relevant materials — without closing the achievement gap. This is not to say that these things do not have merit. They absolutely do. But implemented without effective leaders and teachers, they have no teeth. Within our school system, we are focusing on the wrong things.

Schools with higher-income students ride on the coattails of effective parenting and extra resources. These students will "succeed" in the traditional sense, regardless of ineffective teachers sprinkled here and there. In fact, we've mythologized these teachers, calling them quirky, if inevitable, "rites of passage." Increasingly, however, well-educated parents navigate the system, advocating for their kids to be placed in the effective teachers' classrooms. This leaves lower-income students in (you guessed it!) the ineffective teachers' rooms. And the achievement gap grows.

Ineffective teachers are no laughing matter in a school with low-income students. Low-income students cannot afford to have even one ineffective teacher. These students typically enter kindergarten already well behind their counterparts and need to make more academic progress in one school year than their peers.

"Teachers, Schools and Academic Achievement," a recent study led by economist Eric Hanushek at Stanford University, found that teacher effectiveness outweighs any other factor, including socioeconomic status, in determining student academic success. The study asserts that children from low-income communities could overcome the academic achievement gap by having "outstanding" teachers for five consecutive years.

Before we face off with teachers' unions, there are wheels we can turn right now. We can focus on improving effective teaching with high-quality, focused professional development. We can link student-achievement results back to individual teachers. We can provide schools with objective evaluators, rather than overworked administrators. We can have students provide feedback to their teachers (like they do in college). We can actively recruit the best and brightest from colleges of education and alternative programs. We can reward teachers in high-poverty schools and those with National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification.

If we can reframe our "public education crisis" as one of "attracting and retaining effective teachers and principals and moving ineffective ones out," then we are finally getting somewhere.

Kimberly Lasher Mitchell is a former public-school teacher, assistant principal and principal. She is a parent and partner with EdAdvocates, a Seattle-based education consulting company.