Accountability: State by State

STATE BY STATE | TEACHERS | ATTITUDES | RECOMMENDATIONS

Yes, other states are far ahead of California in some ways. Take a look at these encouraging signs of progress in Tennessee, Massachusetts, Texas and New York. Here's where we think our system should be headed.

TENNESSEE

Tennessee is the hands-down leader in measuring teacher effectiveness. They worked out this fair and innovative system in 1992, calling it the Value Added Assessment System. It works like a baseline medical exam, using your current condition as a starting point, and then measuring improvement from that point forward.

Here's the details. By looking at the value added by each teacher to each of her students for the one year she has them, Tennessee can measure how well that teacher has performed. It's called gap analysis, and its logic was so compelling that even the teachers union in Tennessee buckled under and agreed to it. The results are not made public, but are used gently in the teacher's performance review.

We think it's the hottest thing on the research front. The father of this program is Prof. William Sanders from the University of Tennessee. Its conclusions are hopeful. What affects student performance the most is teachers: not zip code, not ethnicity, not famiily income. This conforms to what parents believe is common sense. But it conflicts with what educators believe to be the gospel. For this reason, it's very controversial.

TEXAS

The Lone Star State is known as the toughest in putting teeth to its accountability laws. In 1998, they linked teacher evaluation to how well students performed on tests. Last year, however, they put in place their Professional Development Appraisal System (PDAS). It evaluates teachers in eight areas.

The teachers union went along, but not happily. "We have no problem with teachers being held accountable for student performance," remarked their president, Ignacio Salinas, Jr. "But we have a problem with using the TAAS (Texas' standardized test). There are other ways to measure student performance."

Texas has also discovered what Tennessee did: bad teachers have a serious and long-lived effect on the students they miseducate. Conversely, good teachers also matter greatly. Dallas district officials were struck by just how much teacher quality mattered to student achievement.

MASSACHUSETTS

Their accountability efforts are already anchored to what Education Week calls "some of the best standards in the country." In addition, they're developing new tests for students, that will match the test to what Massachusetts teachers are supposed to be teaching, grade by grade.

Where they may point the way for California is in their focus on improving teacher training. When more than half the new teacher applicants failed the state's licensing exam in April 1998, Gov. Cellucci called for testing all the state's teachers, newbies and veterans.

The legislators then swam upstream, and looked toward imposing accreditation standards on the state's teacher colleges, as well. They also created a carrot, a new initiative for teacher recruitment and training. Known as the "12-62" plan, it offers signing bonuses of up to $20,000 for new teachers.

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