Just wondering when the word “effective” became loaded, pejorative or bad. Over at the Save Seattle Schools blog, there’s a conversation going on that started out as a back and forth over a set of values statements for bargaining teacher contracts crafted by a group of advocates – the League included. At some point in the discussion folks get obsessed with “effective teachers,” asserting that this is loaded language of those beast-devils known as reformers. How do you define effective, they ask. I feel like I’m being forced to sit through President Clinton’s tortured defense of his affair with “that woman” – remember him asking for a definition of “is?” – do we seriously not know what effective means? One writer throws out the “H” bomb – Hitler – to define effective, as in he was effective at murdering people. WTH? Effective = Hitler? Whoa. Slow down there, Tiger.
Here’s how Webster’s defines effective; producing a decisive, decided or desired effect. And with this definition in mind are we really going to debate whether we should expect classroom teachers to be effective? Really? If you wanted to argue that we don’t always have the information we need to measure whether teachers are effective, you might have something. Certainly our two-tiered system for evaluation (satisfactory and unsatisfactory) isn’t all that illuminating. Is that a byproduct of the lack of good diagnostics or is the lack of good diagnostics due to the fact that it doesn’t take much to check off a box marked “satisfactory?” Chicken meet egg, egg, chicken.
As long as we continue to debate whether teachers should be effective we don’t have to create ways to actually measure whether effectiveness happens. Or as my four-year-old son says, “Look, a pickle!” as he points to thin air.
Chris Korsmo is the executive director of the League of Education Voters.
