The question that has plagued the American Education System and the Education Reformers, along with Legislators is about the impact of teachers on students. “Do good teachers lead to better students?”. Now there are two ambiguous elements in that question. First being the right teachers and the second is the good students. What is a good teacher? Can one measure the effectiveness of the teacher on the effect they have on their students? If yes, then what is the correct scale to measure the impact or success with a student?
Inefficiency in the Traditional Method
The method to measure the effectiveness of the teacher based on test scores of the students was hugely criticized because an ineffective teacher may get to teach geniuses and an influential teacher may very well get to teach a bunch of challenging and less academically inclined students. In such a scenario, the test scores by the students of the former teacher would be better than the students who were taught by the second teacher.
William S. Sanders and his contribution[1]
William Sanders, aka Bill Sanders, was a Tennessee born gentleman who had earned his doctorate in Statistics and Quantitative Genetics from the University of Tennessee. He was the pioneer in the ‘value add system’ to measure the quality of the teachers. He made people aware that just comparing the scores from last year was not the ideal method.
He gave the example of two students who have started a particular year at the same level in Mathematics. For quantification purposes, if they improve by 15%, and one student has been showing an improvement rate of 5% till the previous year, then a jump to 15% is a jump good enough. Nevertheless, if the other student has been showing an improvement rate of 30% annually, then a 15% improvement rate is just unacceptable. This is the basic concept of value gain. Bill Sanders included all the factors, be it inside or outside the school and used regression and other statistical techniques to calculate the value-added scores.
A Definitive Proof
Singapore was one of the success stories among Finland, Sweden, and a few others in the research[2] proposed by Eric Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik and Simon Wiederhold which proved the relation between good teachers leading to promising students. They suggested that increase one standard deviation in the skills mastered by the teacher leads to an improvement of 10-15% in the student. This hypothesis was supported by the triennial PISA test, a test where 15-year-old students are tested on maths, reading skills, and science. Students from Singapore have been among the top 3 for about a decade[3].
How have Singapore Schools been Successful?[4]
After gaining independence in 1965, Singapore was hard-pressed on the road to improvement. With the target to provide high-quality education to everyone, they proposed a systematic syllabus favouring holistic development aided by high-quality teachers. The quality of teachers has been improved over the years with these critical elements:
- Recruitment: Teachers are selected among the top one-third students from the high school passing out batch.
- Training & Compensation: The teachers are trained by master teachers who impart all their qualities and knowledge to the upcoming generation. The teachers are compensated according to similar level college graduates.
- Appraisal and Career Development: Every year, these teachers get appraised not only the test scores of their students but character development as well. There are immense opportunities for growth in teaching itself with the chance to grow in the position of assistant principal and principal.
