Be Excellent

“Be excellent to each other” declares a smoothed skinned Abe Lincoln in the epic conclusion of one of my favorite childhood movies, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” The theme of excellence weaves itself throughout the film, as the Wyld Stallyns, Bill and Ted, learn what it means to be excellent. For two seniors on the verge of failing high school this means traveling in time, meeting some “most excellent” historical figures and acing their history final.

In current education debate, we’ve replaced the word excellent for effective. Bill Gates wants “teacher development to be revolutionized” through effective teaching and a majority of teacher effectiveness to be based on test scores. According to National Board standards, effective teachers must be committed to their students and their learning. In layman’s terms, an effective teacher communicates content and develops skills in such a culturally relevant way that a student embraces each learning experience with a desire to grow to exceed course standards. This effective teacher equips each student with career and college readiness skills, maintaining high expectations and instructional rigor, and effectively preparing them to excel at standardized measurements of learning. The effective teacher is a superior instructor. The effective teacher is excellent.

Yet conversations about excellent instruction are drowned out by raging debates about evaluations, contract language, seniority, value-added, and test scores. To be honest about excellent teaching to oneself or to an administrator takes a level of reflection and trust often absent from principal offices where this dialogue (or debate) occurs. However, once you’ve been in the game a while, you long for truth, whatever the cost. And this is where my dream of the perfect teacher evaluation system begins. My rubric would list mastery in the following categories–not at all excellent, approaching excellence, pretty excellent, and most excellent. In my perfect world of fair, meaningful evaluations, teachers and principals would converse openly and honestly about what is attempted, what is accomplished, and what needs to be improved in the classroom with students’ interests at the heart of the conversation.

I am a NBCT and teach in a low-income, high-needs school that reflects major issues in my transient community. We’ve piloted a four-tier evaluation systems for more than four years in my district. This year administration is receiving intense training on how to use the tool more effectively to individualize each staff member’s feedback, areas of improvement, and professional development. Despite this attempt at a meaningful evaluation process, the district has tied the hands of my building leaders, and they are unable to truly differentiate our building professional development by needs and abilities of each staff member. Instead they have to follow the lesson plans of someone in central administration who means well but doesn’t believe in ELL or Special Education needs. Based on the lesson plans he sends out, he thinks the teachers in his district are horrifically unexcellent and likely incompetent.

The bill proposed by Pettigrew and Litzow would support teachers and admin who seek to improve the teaching profession by honest feedback, and meaningful, relevant professional development. It would support removing those teachers (let’s be real, we all have them) in our building who refuse to use feedback and professional development to improve their profession. It could cultivate an environment of PAR (plan, act, reflect). It would promote excellence in our practice.

Some argue that this level of accountability would be detrimental to our current system. I’m quite certain the current system is imperfect and needs help. Others are concerned that an emphasis on testing or other measurements of student growth would paint an incomplete pictures of student achievement, dumping unreasonable responsibility on already slouching teacher shoulders. Perhaps. I agree that the development of a child’s learning is a continuous progress—when I get them at the high school level, the system has already helped or failed them. All I can do is move them further along the spectrum of knowledge, developing the skills they have and hopefully giving them more skills. Our system has already failed kids. I don’t think this bill hastens the destruction of current public education. Too many educators feel the looming dragon of blame breathing down our necks, looking for documentation to prove we have or have not performed our duties. In response, we (adults) become dragons, scorching our students with blaming fire for areas that the system failed them, instead of admitting the system failures, sucking in a breath of resolve and trying to move the child as far forward as possible in the course of a year (or in my district, a few months–high mobility).

I think this legislation holds the adults in the system more accountable to their students and their families. I do understand the concern about teaching to a test. I have teachers in my building who do that now. Additionally, I do not think this bill equates children with test scores. Any Nationally Board Certified Teacher understands the importance of external measurements of achievement. If I’m “that good,” a measly, poorly-designed test isn’t a big deal. This bill simply states that testing will be PART of the evaluation, not the whole thing, not a major part. It’s just a part. Why are we so afraid to face our successes and failures when it comes to educating children?

As it stands, I’m already held accountable for test scores. I adopt "best practices" by embedding the skills students need to pass state tests throughout my curriculum and focus on developing the skills they need to be career and college ready. I will be held accountable for their scores. Honestly, I should be. If I’m not preparing my kids to kick butt on state tests as a speed bump in their journey towards graduation and college, then what the heck am I doing? On the other hand, I'd better be teaching them more than what a test will assess. I know this thinking about test scores is scary—even for good teachers. That bring me back to my initial point--excellence. In my mind an excellent teaching will use the love of students and the fear of doing them a disservice to fuel their instruction to better meet students' needs, whatever those may be. Oddly enough, I find that the teachers who aren't doing their jobs and who are doing the same thing they’ve done for 20+ years aren't actually afraid of tying student data to instruction. Those teachers know they are protected by the union contracts, extensive admin paperwork and thus there is little impetus to improve. Fear only comes into play when they think someone may discover how unexcellent and ineffective they are.

I’ve heard some teachers argue against this bill saying that if this kind of legislation goes through then they might as well teach at easy, suburban schools where students have innate skills and familial support. I used to teach in a suburban school—those children deserve quality instruction as well. In many a prosperous neighborhood school, expectations are so skewed that these students are not getting the appropriate amount of rigor, scaffolding, and excellent instruction they deserve. Yes, they have less outside stress factors and sure, my job was a little easier there. But the teachers that were truly teaching their butts off were able to move students on a continuum of outside measures (common assessments, WASL, AP tests). The others, sat around, stoked that no one would ever call them out for their ineffectiveness. Moving to that type of school doesn’t solve the problem of failing schools.

Lastly, as someone who teaches controversial content (social justice, civil rights, revolution), I definitely don’t want a system that ignores due process or gives power to an administrator to dismiss me arbitrarily. I don’t believe this bill does that. Rather, I think Pettigrew, Litzow, and writing crew attempt to legislate teacher effectiveness which I truly hope leads to teacher excellence.

Be excellent to each other. Especially your students.