Value teachers
Add to everyone’s
lives.
Antoinette M. Joe
University of St. Thomas
EDCU 6320: Educational Research and Scholarly Writing
Dr. Catherine Barber
Date: June 21, 2014
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Value teachers Add to everyone’s lives.
Value is defined as “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth,
or usefulness of something. It is also defined as, a person’s principles or standards of behavior;
one’s judgment of what is important in life” (https://www.google.com/#q=value+definition).
Educators are charged every day to provide students with a quality education. The Value added
method is a process in which teachers are evaluated to determine their effectiveness as educators.
The concept of this method is to measure the effectiveness of teachers by looking at the overall
performance or achievement of students. School districts, teachers, parents and students may feel
there are both positive and negative issues with this approach to measure teacher effectiveness.
There are some who believes, teacher value added evaluation approach enhances
motivation since it measures the effectiveness of teachers in terms of the delivered outputs. A
teacher who records an improved output through high contribution to the success of students will
be motivated to even put in extra efforts to maintain or improve further on the test-score results
for his or her students. In such situation, other teachers are also motivated to work hard and
ensure that their students perform better. The force behind motivation for teachers is due to the
outcomes that are associated with better student outcomes, which include increased performance,
promotion and job security. It is these factors that motivate teachers to improve their
performance. It can also be important when a school is in need to retain teachers who have the
required expertise and ability to maintain high performance in class as opposed to retaining
teachers with long experience in the teaching field. The advantage with this approach is that it
eliminates teachers who are not recording high performance even if they have been teaching for
long. A teacher may have a long teaching experience and still incapable of enhancing improved
performance for students. Therefore, this approach helps to solve the problems in the traditional
approach of retaining teachers based on experience where schools could lay off competent
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Value teachers Add to everyone’s lives.
teachers simply because they have no experience and retain experienced teachers who may not
be able to enhance high performance for students. The approach looks keenly into teacher’s
strength, complementarities and weakness.
Value added approach is based on the measurements, outcomes and results of students
without necessarily considering the input or the effort put in by teachers in the course of the
teaching process. This means that this evaluation approach is biased since a teacher may suffer
consequences that are not as a result of his or her fault. It is possible that poor performance or
low test results may as well be due to failure of the students to work hard or adhere to what the
teacher taught in class. This approach is one way evaluation measure where by the teacher bears
all the blames in case the expected success is not attained. There are so many factors that
contribute to the success of students some of which include high ability of students themselves,
availability of resources, greater involvement by the family and high out-of school support. This
is true when looking at students with special needs and English language learners. Therefore,
success in such a case does not necessarily mean that the teacher is effective. It is a situation that
elicits controversy over this method or approach of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers by
looking at the tail end results without considering other contributing factors. You will find that
teachers who teach under poor success contributing factors are likely to deliver low success and
suffer the consequences of being alleged as not being effective.
Are today’s teachers being valued for what they truly do daily to provide knowledge to a
student? Value added method could be both a positive and a negative way of evaluating teachers.
The process is a way to motivate teachers to do what they have been hired and trained to do.
There are some teachers who become teachers for the long vacation time during the summer and
the benefits. They do not choose the profession to give students a quality education. Value added
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Value teachers Add to everyone’s lives.
forces teacher to give students the quality education they deserve. In some cases value added can
be a negative thing as well. The government feels if students do not show positive growth on
statewide assessments, then the teacher was not successful in educating the student properly.
There are many factors that are involved in educating students. It can be the environment in
which they are living or a disability which prevent them from learning everything being taught.
Teachers have been stripped from their ability to truly teach. They are forced by districts and the
government to follow a curriculum that forces them to teach what is deemed to be acceptable by
the state. Teachers are like robots being controlled by the state, and local governed. Before
valued added, teachers were given full rights to teach meaningful lessons to students. This
allowed teachers to teach the content and applied it in their own way, and students were very
successful. There are many intellectual individuals in the world today who received a quality
education from teachers who had full creative control of lessons being taught. If the methods in
which teachers taught students were valued in the past, then why can’t we value what they are
doing now and in the future? If teachers not deemed as effective teachers today, then why it is
we have all of these successful individuals who sat in the classroom like our students today
learning the same information they are learning today. Give teachers back their classrooms and
take away all of this unnecessary pressure, so they can be the successful, creative, loving, caring,
concerned, educator they are today, they were yesterday and who they will be forever more.
Reference
Google (2014) Definition of value. Retrieved from
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism.