Assessing the productivity of schools through two “what works” inputs, teacher quality and teacher effectiveness

This paper is a critique of the school education productivity evaluation and two
research constructs germane to it, teacher quality and teacher effectiveness. The paper will
argue that policy inceptions of teacher quality and teacher effectiveness proxy for the productive
capacity of schools and more broadly, school systems. Student achievement scores
as determined by high stakes testing are the school education outputs of policy significance
in current times while inputs thought to matter are increasingly tapered towards the particular
characteristics of classroom teachers, specifically their quality (usually credentials) and
effectiveness (teaching behaviours). The paper finds that attributing school system success
largely to teachers and their work, especially in terms of their classroom teaching practice(s),
distorts the school education policy agenda so that evaluations of school productivity purely
serve accountability purposes.