It included the staff-student ratio as a measure of teaching quality.
Knowing how to identify and measure great teaching is a huge step toward providing better feedback and support for teachers and building a better education system for all our children -- but it's just one step.
The department also quotes research from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the United States which has argued that good teaching is vital to pupil achievement - and as such it is important to be able to measure what represents effective teaching.
Voters also will decide the fate of Prop. 227, a measure aimed at teaching students almost exclusively in English after a one-year transition class.
Starting in 2009, the Gates Foundation supported a project known as the Measure of Effective Teaching, or MET, which worked with 3, 000 teachers to come up an evaluation and feedback system that helped teachers improve.
FORBES: Bill Gates Says There Is Something Perverse In College Ratings
And if lessons learned from addressing equally complex challenges in other sectors are any guide, investing in a reliable system to measure and support effective teaching will pay rich dividends.
The Los Angeles Times has embarked on a project to measure the impact of effective teaching.
University rankings miss hard-to-measure factors such as the quality of teaching and the campus atmosphere.
Some 30 years ago, Milk led the successful fight against Proposition 6, a measure that would have barred gays from teaching in California schools.
There are others who say that teaching is so nuanced that it is simply impossible to measure.
Under the leadership of an outstanding Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, we launched a Race to the Top, through which states compete for funding by committing to reform and raising standards, by rewarding good teaching, by supporting the development of better assessments to measure results, and by emphasizing math and science to help prepare children for college and careers.
Because we have been unable to define effective teaching, we now reward teachers for easy-to-measure proxies like master's degrees and seniority, even though there is no evidence that these things help students learn.
If you really, truly want to measure outcomes, you should not create a system that incentives teaching to a test.
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