Is a good teacher hard to find?
Statistically, no. A good teacher is easy to find if you check their SAT scores, their resumes and then see if their students' standardized test scores beat the average and close the gap. But a really good teacher--one that isn't just perfect on paper, but is also effective in the classroom--is harder to seek out. No one can pinpoint what exactly makes a good teacher, if not their results from the students.
So the search begins. The Gates Foundation, a large proponent for education reform, has dedicated $2.6 million towards finding what exactly makes a good, effective teacher. The study, called the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET), will last two years, beginning with the 2009 school year, with the goal to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of a teacher without having to rely on the performance results from the students' standardized test scores.
This study is going beyond just measuring test scores. They realize that it is going to be hard to take into consideration what all a teacher does in the classroom. They've upped the ante by asking for volunteer teachers to sign up their classrooms to be observed by way of videotape, their students' test scores and also by taking test themselves.
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