"In for a penny, in for a pound..."

During a recent weekend getaway with my wife and some new friends, I was reminded yet again that public perception of education and educators has not changed all that much.

The old saying is that those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach.

In the minds of many, those of us who work as teachers are still the people who get a full year pay for a nine month job. We are the workers who don't really work. We work from 8 till 3, monday through friday, get every holiday off, and take 2-hour delays or even whole days off when the weather is too bad.

And those are the less hostile perceptions.

The professional organizations that represent us as teachers do little to improve how the general public feels about us and our work. I think most people would say that the greatest deterrent to significant changes to public education in America is the teacher's union. We want better pay, we want smaller class sizes, but we don't want to stop doing things the way we've always done them, even though it is clear to the rest of the world that we are no longer living in the 1950's and 60's anymore.

Now please don't get me wrong. I love my profession and I have enormous respect for all the men and women who dedicate their lives to educating our young men and women. There are far more of us who are dedicated and passionate than there are those who are lazy and just getting by. As the decades have passed and times have changed, teachers have consistently been asked to become more and more things to the children who populate our classrooms. At the same time, federal and state initiatives have frequently done little more than add obstacles to the educational process.

But there is a way to change.

And it's going to take a buy in by all those involved in public education...including teachers.

It's long past time that we had a set of national standards for public education. It's never made any sense to me why each state needed their own set of standards for basic public education. The reality is that government, both State and Federal, pours enormous amounts of money into public education. Why then can we not all agree on what our students should be learning?

Well, it looks like this is finally changing. The Common Core State Standards Inititiative is a set of standards that are rapidly being adopted by states across the country. I believe there are nearly 40 states that have already adopted them, and others are following. This I believe is a step in the right direction.

But where the rubber meets the road in education is in the classroom. What takes place between teacher and students over the course of a year is what really matters, not what set of standards a school or state claims to hold themselves to. If teachers are not leading their students to knowledge in those standards, if teachers are not holding themselves accountable for faithfully fulfilling their role in guiding and inspiring students in their content areas, standards are just another document gathering dust on a shelf.

The question is, how do we make sure that teachers are effectively fulfilling their role?

And the answer is where we find out if teachers and their associations are truly ready to buy in.

Most teacher evaluation systems are ineffective and nothing more than paper pushing. There, I've said it. I've taught in four different school systems, mixture of private and public, middle school and high school, small and large. In some cases I taught under administrators who truly tried to evaluate effectively. In other cases I received paper evaluations even though I never saw an administrator in my classroom. In all cases, my evaluation was perfunctory. Yes I knew my content area, yes I seemed to be in control of my class, yes I was positive and encouraging with my students. I've found out that I had a good sense of humor, a fine rapport with young people, and that my manner of dress was considered professional and in good taste.

Never once, in nearly 15 years of teaching, has my evaluation ever addressed whether or not I was actually being successful in helping my students learn.

Tying teacher evaluations to student performance has long been anathema to teachers and teachers unions. But I'm telling you - it's time for that to change. If a salesman doesn't make sales, he is let go. If a hairdresser botches up haircuts consistently, he is let go. If the line manager at the factory cannot get his group to perform to standard, he is replaced.

Effectiveness is what evaluation is all about. It should be no different with educators.

For years I agreed with colleagues as we claimed to have no control over the quality of the young men and women who came to our classes. How could we be held accountable for the academic success of our students, when academic success was really up to what THEY were willing to do, we would ask. But that argument is disingenuous.

A true test of a teachers effectiveness is the difference that the teacher makes in the success of their students. Success is measured by progress, not necessarily by achieving the highest mark. No teacher worth their salt should ever have any problem with being held accountable for at least provoking improvement in their students. The truth is that we DO have some control over the children who spend at least an hour a day in our classes. In fact we will proudly point out to those who will listen those wonderful stories of students who share with us the profound difference we made in their lives. Teachers DO have influence on their students - in some cases incredible influence.

As we move towards adopting a set of national standards, I hope we will have the courage to go for the brass ring. Instead of just a nationally accepted paper document, how about we go so far as to implement a system that will allow us to assess our students on a regular basis as to how they are faring in accomplishing those standards? I'm no fan of high stakes standardized testing, but how nice would it be to have the ability to test our students at the START of the year, again at the END of the year, and even several times DURING the year to better understand what they are getting and what they are not getting?

Wouldn't it be nice if the federal government would create a national education testing system that would be accessible by all public schools? Wouldn't it be nice if we could give our kids a pre-test to see what they know at the beginning of a course, then turn around and give them a similar test after a marking period to see how much progress they have made? And wouldn't it be even cooler if these tests were done in such a way that the results could be known immediately, so we didn't have to wait for weeks and months for the valuable feedback?

In such a system, teachers would have an invaluable tool for discovering much about both their students and themselves. And inevitably, this type of system would provide a way for our administrators to say, "Hey, you're doing a great job with the kids!" or maybe "Hey, I can see you need some help!" In that way, maybe teacher evaluations would actually begin to mean something.

In that way, maybe those few bad apples in the field of education would get the message that they should move on to another career.

And in that way, maybe the general public would begin to have a little bit more faith and trust in those who have chosen to take part in this most noble profession.