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Article Excerpt
In June 2009 the New Teacher Project released its latest report, The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness (Weisberg, Sexton, Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009). Published a few months earlier, Larry Cuban's Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (2009), updates his landmark historical study of teaching practice, How Teachers Taught (1993). These two pieces, read side by side, high-light the challenges to improve teaching practice on a large scale. Taken together, they bring to bear economic and historical lenses on the persistent questions: Why do we continue to allow weak instruction to go unaddressed in schools? What can policymakers do to ensure more teachers in the work force are able to foster students' academic growth?
The authors of The Widget Effect (Weisberg et al., 2009) coined this term to name the "flawed assumption that has pervaded American educational policy for decades--the assumption that teachers are interchangeable parts" (p. 9). The report studies teacher performance management policies and practices in 12 school districts in four states. Its major finding is that teacher evaluation systems fail to "produce meaningful information about teacher effectiveness" (p. 10). Without such information, administrators are unable to recognize and reward the most talented, weed out the most incompetent, and provide targeted support to improve the practice of the vast majority of teachers who fall in the middle of the performance range. For the authors, this amounts to an unacceptable indifference to instructional effectiveness that reflects a deep disrespect both for teachers and for the most vulnerable students in schools who are most likely to experience poor instruction. To...
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