The Metrics of Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Quality Research Sidelining the Issues that Really Count

Most developed nations measure the performance of teachers in audit evaluations of school productivity. Accountability metrics such as "teacher effectiveness" and "teacher quality" dominate evaluations of student outcomes and shape education policy.

The Metrics of Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Quality Research explores how these metrics distort analyses of student achievement, sideline broader contextual and systemic influences on learning, reinforce input-output analysis of schooling, and skew the educational debate. Focusing on recent phases of school education policy reform, this book utilizes qualitative data from classroom teacher participants to examine how and why issues of teacher effectiveness and teacher quality figure so prominently in policy reform and why pressing matters of social class, school funding, and broader contextual influences are downplayed. The authors use this information to suggest how teachers can develop their role as pedagogic experts in a highly scrutinized environment.

This book will be of great interest to education academics and postgraduate students specializing in teacher performance, accountability and governance.

Chapter One. Framing the Scene

Chapter Two. Simplifying the Complex

Chapter Three. Reform

Chapter Four. Improve or Else!

Chapter Five. The Case of Teacher Effectiveness Research

Chapter Six. "Making the Difference": Sidelining the Contingent

Chapter Seven. Instruction, Skills or Pedagogy: Inventing the New Teacher

Chapter Eight. Pedagogic Adaptability

Chapter Nine. Implications

Chapter Ten. Concluding Comments

Andrew Skourdoumbis is an associate professor in education. His research engages with the quantitative findings of teacher effectiveness research and subsequent implications for policy development in pedagogic practice. His work examines global reform efforts in education and also teacher effectiveness/teacher quality and their impact on teaching and learning.

Shaun Rawolle is a senior lecturer in education. His research includes the way that education from schools, vocational education and training, and higher education is constituted, measured and impacted through education policy and by economic thinking. He draws on Pierre Bourdieu, contractualism and the social contract of education in his work.