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Teachers have been expressing frustrations over the recent attacks on the quality of teaching. Experience always teaches us how reality is ambiguous and cannot be looked through a lens and cannot be seen as a single color. This rigid view is exactly what we find many school reformers having who never believe in consulting teachers and offer simplistic, short answers such as ending tenure, charter schools, merit pay and standardized testing as a way of dealing with challenges.

A group of fourteen high school teachers in the United States urban districts have webinared many respected practitioners and teachers from across the country in partnership with the Center for Teaching Quality. This initiative is funded supported financially by the Ford Foundation. The practitioners and researchers were chosen from all sides of debates related to school reform and data review and personal experiences were taken into account.

A Teacher Solutions report was released recently that outlined necessary steps to be taken in order to bring about sustainable and effective school reform. Some of the key recommendations proposed based on this study include –

Candidates working in a classroom must be provided with quality supervised time backed by effective teacher preparation programs including alternative certification such as Teach for America and traditional university credential classes.

It pointed out that in certain teacher residency programs across the country, specially trained master teachers work in conjunction with the teacher residents before they are allowed to take class on their own. Rigorous standards are stipulated for the teacher residents and they are required to successfully grasping executing practice and theory in order to qualify for license.

The study also proposed using valid, fair and reliable measures to evaluate teachers and students. This will completely eliminate the method of assessment of teachers and students based on standardized testing.

Students can be evaluated based on methods such as their work including their portfolio as opposed to their ability to select the right answer from multiple possibilities in the multiple choice tests.

Unbiased ratings of student work by teachers were found to be a result of a performance based multiple statewide measures taken in the 1980s through the Vermont’s Portfolio Project and Kentucky’s Alternate Assessment Program.

These types of tasks that are performance based must be called for by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium that is Federally funded to be crafted by the teachers. There must also be an accurate assessment of performance of teachers through self-assessments, regular meaningful observations and multiple measures as opposed to reliance on value added models that are unstable.

It is also imperative to enhance teacher collaboration. Turnover can be greatly reduced and instruction can be improved through better peer learning. Teachers must be engaged in meaningful discussions through weekly meetings that are strongly supported by the administration in order to encourage optimum professional development.

More numbers of schools must base their operations on enhanced teacher participation in the decision making process. All staffs of the school must be involved in determining budgets spent by the school and organization of policies and programs apart from hiring of new staffs and their induction into the school community.