Are Good Teachers Really the Most Important Thing?

All the winds are blowing in one direction for the future of public teaching: teachers are going to be evaluated and paid according to their students' test scores. Arne Duncan has appointed at least three former Gates Foundation employees to top positions at the DoE, and we know how excited Gates is to identify "great teachers" with this method. Duncan has backed the idea himself more than once.

We've already discussed teacher evaluation on this space in an excellent comment thread, so I want to take a different tack by questioning the very assumption that "good teachers" are the most important element in education. That's the meme that has dominated the mainstream discourse on education for the past several months. And I'm sure I'll catch hell from many of you for this, but when I think back on my own learning, I just don't buy it.

Beyond learning how to read and do basic math in primary school, I give little credit to anybody but myself for what I've learned* [See update at bottom]. Teachers were responsible for this only to the degree that a few of them gave me a syllabus and things to read and think about that I liked - and the best teachers were simply the ones who took the trouble to encourage me to continue exploring and developing my skills.

I'm with Mark Twain: "I never let schooling get in the way of my education." My best teachers followed the SUMO method: "Shut Up and Move Over." They got out of my way and gave me time to learn, and again, most importantly, made me feel good about my efforts. Beyond that, I don't think back on my education and say, "I became what I am because of this or that great teacher." Do you?

CitySue at Edwize writes about NYTimes' David Brooks' recent editorial about Obama's education speech, and she does a good job of showing how nonsensical this talk of "good teachers" so often is:

So, one of the president’s proposals Brooks liked is the one for merit pay for good teachers, which he defines as “the ones who develop emotional bonds with students.”

And he is right. How many of us who have fond memories of teachers cherish the ones who raised our reading scores the most? No, we value the teachers who inspired us to reach higher, or instilled in us a curiosity about the world, or gave us confidence to persevere when we were convinced we’d never understand a difficult subject.

But how Brooks thinks we can identify those “good” teachers, the ones who connect to kids, so we can give them extra pay, he never tells us. Instead he goes on to talk about the importance of using data and assessments of how much teachers raise student test scores as a basis for rewarding “good” teachers with merit pay.

So which is it, Mr. Brooks? Which teachers get the merit pay? Only the ones whose influence can be traced directly to higher test scores? Or the ones who really make a difference in youngsters’ lives?

Because I know a lot of great teachers who refuse to spend hours teaching their students how to increase the odds of picking the right answers in a standardized multiple choice test. And I know a lot of mediocre teachers who accede to their principals’ demands to produce better test results and devote many precious hours of “instruction” drilling from lists of most tested vocabulary words or reviewing old exams.

Unfortunately, the latter are the ones who will earn the “merit” pay. But one has to wonder, if young Barry Obama’s teachers all had been motivated by merit pay for boosting their students’ test scores, would we be reading about his speeches in the Times today?

*Update: I was tired when I wrote this post - an occupational hazard I'm trying to remedy - and did a poor job by claiming credit for my learning was due to "nobody but myself."

What I should have said was that factors beyond the teacher, and even the classroom, were more instrumental. The reading that improved my literacy was mostly extra-curricular, and shared with friends for my whole k-12 experience and beyond. The conversations I had with my friends as a child were more provocative exercises in critical thinking than anything I can remember from classrooms.

As Lianne and others stated in the comments, it wasn't teaching that helped me grow, so much as teachers who simply provided the affective encouragement and nurturing that motivated me to continue writing and reading. That, and not any set of facts, is what they gave me that qualifies them, in my mind, as "good teachers."