Teacher Evaluation and Compensation

We can change our schools in dramatic ways. This book leads you to consider six paradigm shifts: 1. The child: being a child in the 20th century school is to be the object of the sentence. Teachers teach classes. It’s not wrong. It’s not enough. The paradigm shift is to make the child the subject of the sentence. This is singular. The child owns their own education. The teacher engages with each child within a class learning community. There is no average; the average child does not exist. Each child is imago Dei actual and potential. 2. The academic administrator: becoming an academic administrator today means stopping being a teacher. However, there is no clear direction as to what the new job entails. Administrator has the intent of the word leader – but no direction in which to lead. It has the word academic, but academic is constrained by the idea of administrator. Stereotypically it includes curriculum oversight, discipline issues, schedule, meeting standards, testing. It’s not wrong; it’s not enough. The paradigm shift is that we have a clear vision of the academic administrator as leading and growing teachers. When that is done well, the school is able to recruit and retain the best teachers available. 3. The teacher: the old dispensation of the autonomous individual in the isolated classroom cannot meet the needs of the child in a 21st century context. The paradigm shift is for the teacher to think of the classroom not as individual space but as a learning environment, to think of the child not as an object to be taught but as co-learner to be engaged, and to think of “colleague” not as separate from but as integral to success. 4. Professional growth: the old term is professional development, connoted by in-service days, schoolwide training by an outside consultant, and sending teachers to conferences. This can actually work well for first-year teachers. It’s not wrong; it’s not enough. The paradigm shift comes when, like the child, each teacher owns their own growth over a 40-year vocation / career. The relationship with the academic administrator radically changes to engagement with each teacher in their own practice within their own learning environment. Growth is focused on the individual and on the individual within the Christian Professional Learning Community. It is daily. It is yearlong. It is vocation / career long. 5. Evaluation: measuring teacher impact is so hard to do that it stereotypically is not done at all. Teachers routinely report that their supervisor does not engage in a meaningful way with them. This is unacceptable when we want to know whether the mission is truly being delivered in the life of the child. But the public-school route of standardized test scores is clearly insufficient. The paradigm shift is for the academic administrator to engage the teacher in their own learning journey, provide persistent and consistent conversation about how the teacher can meet each child’s needs, hold each teacher accountable for each child’s learning, and hold every teacher accountable for their professional performance. We must change merit from years of experience and degrees obtained to the impact in the child’s life, an outcome identified in the Portrait of the Child. 6. Compensation: all compensation is merit-based on some criteria or other. The paradigm shift is in moving “merit” from counting years of experience and credits at university to impact, supporting the teacher’s own journey of excellence, connected to the child’s own journey of excellence.