AUSTIN, Texas – It’s a fight that’s been repeating itself all over the nation.

State lawmakers want to update teacher evaluation laws to include some measurement of student performance. Teachers unions come out against such efforts, saying it’s unfair to measure a teacher’s value based on the success or failure of students on standardized tests.

The current debate is being waged in Texas, where one bill, sponsored by state Sen. Dan Patrick, would make student performance worth between 20 and 50 percent of a teacher’s annual evaluation, according to the Houston Chronicle. The details would be left up to the Texas Education Agency.

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The legislation could be up for a full Senate vote this week, according to the news report.

Obviously there is no teacher on the planet who is going to have success with every student. Some kids will fail regardless of their teachers’ best effort for reasons that have nothing to do with school. Many kids come from chaotic home environments where education is not a high priority, and most of those children will only accomplish so much.

But there’s no disputing the fact that some teachers are more effective than others, and students with more effective teachers will generally have better standardized test scores. Monitoring those scores is one important way to measure whether a teacher is effectively doing his or her job.

Would any union officials argue with the notion that some teachers are better than others? Would they argue with the desire to have the best possible teachers in classrooms? How would they propose to determine the best teachers without some sort of measurement of student learning under each teacher?

Certainly the new system proposed by Patrick would be more useful than the current system in Texas, under which some teachers are only evaluated every five years and about 95 percent are judged “proficient.”

There are ways to build more fairness into a test-based system. Perhaps teachers should be allowed to throw out two or three low scores from their class, to account for social problems over which they have no control.

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But we fail to see what is so difficult or unfair about devising a curriculum for each grade level, then developing a test to measure how well students have learned that curriculum. It’s a simple question of whether students are meeting goals and expectations or not. If they’re not being met by a majority of students, something is wrong.
Schools exist to teach children. If children are learning, teachers are doing their jobs. If they are not, then the school and the teacher have failed in their mission and a new strategy is needed. That has to be the bottom line, in Texas and the rest of the nation.