Teachers Have The Greatest Influence On Student Achievement

As American educators continue to disagree on the “best practices” for educating students, we are experiencing difficulty retaining effective teachers in high school classrooms. The failure to retain effective high school teachers contributes to the poor performance of American schools. As a result, high school students trail behind foreign students academically in Korea, China, and Finland. Retaining effective high school teachers should improve the academic performance of students and prepare them for success beyond high school.

It is suggested by data from NAEP testing that school absences is one of the factors that has a negative impact on student learning and therefore on overall grade point average and test scores. In a table that shows the coloration of school days missed with the percent of student with a 3.0 of higher grade point average, in the Sioux Falls school district in South Dakota, data suggests that as

Over the course of the last 35 years, traditional public school student achievement in the United States has been stagnant, despite the reform efforts and the doubling

Just like in any other profession or aspect of life, there are many myths that threaten education in public schools. Many people believe that teachers are the most important influence in a student’s academic achievement. In reality, educators have a very little influence in student achievement compared to other influences in the students’ lives that is out of the teachers control. It has been proposed that teachers don’t need to go to school to learn how to educate, they just need knowledge of the subject matter. This could be extremely destructive to student learning because they would not have the proper skills to instruct a classroom. Another common misconception is that instructors in

The United States of America has placed low on the educational ladder throughout the years. The cause of such a low ranking is due to such heavy emphasis on standardized testing and not individual student achievement. Although the United States uses standardized testing as a crutch, it is not an effective measure of a student’s ability, a teacher’s competency, or a school’s proficiency.

After reading the report, one could characterize current teacher evaluation practices as little more than missed opportunities to increase the effectiveness of teachers and assure that the best teachers stayed in front of students. Practitioners generally agreed with the premise of the critique, and confirmed the identified evaluation weaknesses as both common and wide-spread among school districts. Using teacher effect research and the validity of value-added measures as a platform, and armed with the belief that the sample practices were representative of those in districts across the country, the authors of The Widget Effect urged educational leaders and policy makers to implement specific teacher evaluation reforms, many of which informed (or mirrored) those becoming increasingly prevalent in federal and state

In order to ensure that students have the greatest chance for achievement, it is vital that school communities know that they have high quality teachers in place. To accomplish this task, systems have developed that integrate set measures aligning what teachers do and what happens as a result. These may include evidence of student work and learning, as well as, evidence of teacher practices derived from observations, reflection, recordings, artifacts, and various forms of feedback. Educational experts such as Marzano, Danielson, Stronge and others have published examples of evaluation models. While they vary in emphasis and design, they are similar in that they attempt to provide a framework for measuring the impact of a teacher on a student’s learning. Clearly, this is a daunting and challenging task and there is a risk involved in attempting to make something

A school system that is entirely based on test scores rather than critical thinking, life skills, and knowledge shouldn’t be considered a school system at all. Being a teacher in America means being forced to follow scripted test prep courses, being criticized by a considerable amount of politicians, blamed for each student whose grades don’t reach unattainable standards, and receiving a mere $39,000 salary compared to a plumber’s salary of $49,140. It’s really no wonder why it is extremely rare to come across a genuinely sophisticated teacher who has a passion for their job and doesn’t continually complain about how they didn’t know what to do with their degree and just needed a steady job. The effect that these futile teachers have on high school students is profound. “I don’t think there was ever a test I didn’t cheat on,” says Winter Park

It is a well-known fact that Americans, in comparison to other developed nations worldwide, lags in academic achievement as evidenced by various international assessments. The results of such assessments have led many to question the reasons behind it—is the American education system faulty, is the population simply too large to fully educate, or is it the lack of motivation in all parties involved? Though these aspects are all likely to have played a role in the educational lag, the underlying reason for America’s lagging academic achievement may well lie in its highly diverse population and social culture within the schools, which may not particularly foster the kind of social support necessary for success in an academic setting. While this

Herbert bravely sets his sights upon the sacred cow of the educational system, teacher quality. By boldly holding teachers accountable for the outcomes of their students, Herbert describes the road map needed for improvement. Describing how high performing teachers had astonishing results with under-performing students provided the reader with a concrete example of the changes that he believes are needed. Providing the reader with current practices of school districts, these being a focus on credentials of the teacher’s, rather than on their quality inside the classroom. Job performance must be assessed within a classroom in order to prepare the students for the future. “Studies have clearly shown that the good teachers and the not-so-good ones can actually be identified, if they are carefully observed in

A school district’s ability to prepare students to be college and career ready is evaluated based upon standardized testing (William, 2010). Even as standardized testing has been the focus of a great deal of discussion and controversy in recent years regarding the validity of using standardized test scores to determine student proficiency, such tests have become more important as mandates such as No Child Left Behind required the use of standardized tests to determine if school districts are adequately educating their students (Kim & Sunderman, 2005). Researchers have noted that the reliance on standardized testing as a measure of how well school districts and their teachers are educating students has resulted in administrators and teachers changing their practices in order to achieve higher test scores (Supovitz, 2009). School administrators and teachers have placed much more focus on the actions that they can take in order to increase standardized test scores (Sink, 2003).

teachers are referred to as “nation builders.”22 Also, in Finland, “both men and women name teaching as among the top three most desirable professions for a spouse.”23 The old American saw “those who can’t do, teach”, continues to reverberate, reflecting elite condescension toward career educators.24 Randolf states that “educational testing has become the chief indicator of how well schools are doing, educators are being judged by these tests about which, frankly, they don't know all that much.” 25 Goldstein suggest that “testing is a part of any functional education system, but in recent years it has often seemed like the horse of school improvement has been driven by the cart of collecting student data to be used in teacher evaluation.”26

“Our educational goal [is] the production of caring, competent, loving, lovable people” . The students found in the schools across the United State are the future of America. They are the doctors, teachers, business people, lawyers and many other roles, that will be out in the workforce in the years to come. What they learn in school will impact them immensely; it is the responsibility of a teacher to give students the best education in order to ensure the common good of the future. It is essential for students to not only learn content matter, but also the skills to enable them to participate in a democracy. Due to standardized testing, the emphasis of education has become on score and rankings rather than learning. A standardized test does not look at the whole student, the scores provided are on a very narrow aspect of education. In the classroom, there are countless ways for teachers to assess the student as a whole person not as just a score. Standardized tests scores should not be the sole criteria for determining a student’s academic achievement.

Teaching is a very rewarding career if you learn and understand how to work with the diversity of the classrooms we teach in. As teachers, we need to be more vigilant of where are students come from. Before we can teach we need to know who we are teaching and what background, knowledge, and customs they bring with them to the classroom. We must also be aware of the factors that are relevant to the academic achievement of the students we currently teach. There are many of these factors, but I want to focus on two; teacher quality and low teacher expectations.

Schools are and will forever be learning institutions, but learning isn’t limited to purely comprehension and fact memorization that can be found in books. Furthermore, knowledge is an unquantifiable metric and similarly, grades and scores have a multitude of factors that could affect the results. This is not to devalue good academic standing but rather raising a question of “Do we want to develop students holistically or