Race to the top and the senses of good teaching

Following up on the education reform initiatives of the 1990s and early 2000s, which are centered on the notion of accountability, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top initiative strives to bring such accountability down to the level of the individual teacher through the use of advanced statistical parsing of student achievement data. Through the calculation of “teacher value-added,” a given teacher’s “effectiveness” can be measured and ranked, hence assigned a value. Duncan’s speeches around the issue, and the assumptions visible in the studies of teacher quality and effectiveness that he and other reformers cite, suggest that at long last we as a society will be able to know and to communicate just who our best and our worst teachers are. Such an ability will allow us as a polity, on this view, to direct public funding much more efficiently than has heretofore been possible: armed with this new knowledge, we can reward the best teachers to ensure that they do not abandon the profession for higherpaying employment, and we can cull the worst teachers so as to replace them with more effective personnel. The newfound ability to distinguish between good and bad teachers also has transformative implications for teacher training programs. By analyzing the practice of the highest quality teachers, one might discover “what works” in classrooms, the specific behaviors, skills, or mental states involved in highly effective teaching. Once discovered, these behaviors, skills, or mental states might then be given to pre-service teachers, which would dispense with what Duncan considers to be the overly theoretical and largely abstract curricula of current teacher education programs.curricula of current teacher education programs.