Mid-career professionals who transition into teaching bring years of career experience, a sense of purpose, and—according to recent research—a stronger likelihood of actually stepping into the classroom than their less experienced counterparts.
As the field of neuroscience advances, so does our understanding of what works in teaching and learning. The best recent example of this? The reading movement. Our knowledge of how children's brains learn to read has increased, and it has led to a revolution in how to teach children to read.
Parents in Massachusetts are stirring up "some good trouble" by suing the authors and publishing companies who "peddled a raft of products and curricula that sought to diminish and even exclude systematic and daily phonics instruction."
Dear Mr. President,
Congratulations on your inauguration. I write to you concerning a matter that is critical to the success of our great nation: teacher quality.
How targeted professional development in math and science can significantly boost student achievement—and which strategies truly make the difference.
New research reveals that the share of well-prepared STEM teachers in high-need schools has been increasing over the last 15 years, though high-need schools still have a smaller share of these teachers than more affluent schools.
The end of the year offers an opportunity to reflect on what we learned and what sparked interest in the education community. In that spirit, NCTQ devotes the December edition...
The NCTQ team and I extend our sympathies to those affected by the devastation of Hurricanes Helene and Milton.Each fall brings the continuation of many traditions—some of which I love...
What can the education field learn from Netflix? How to revolutionize staffing to better meet the needs of those you serve. Our outdated model of teaching makes it hard for schools to hire and keep great teachers.
A new study finds that this cost-effective evaluation system could improve math outcomes in districts with fewer students, teachers, and resources.
How much does reading policy work its way into classrooms? A new study exploring the state of reading across the U.S. underscores the need for consistent support and monitoring of reading policy implementation to make waves in classrooms.
Some suggest that teachers are "lured" out of the profession into more lucrative fields. But a new study of pre-pandemic data paints a more complex picture of who leaves the classroom and how much they earn afterward.
When the pandemic closed schools across the country in 2020, testing centers closed too—making it impossible for future teachers to take licensure tests and become fully certified. So the
In the past four years, almost every state has lowered its standards for entry into teaching. I know this all too well, as I was a policymaker in one of those states.
New research examining ESSER's impact on school district hiring in Washington state confirms potential teacher layoffs as the funding wanes.
As districts face impending fiscal cuts and teacher layoffs, states and districts should take this opportunity to reexamine their approaches to attracting and retaining teachers—especially those who do the most good for students.
Teachers improve rapidly in their first years in the classroom. New research seeks to identify strategies that can move more of this growth to their pre-service training.
This reading teacher wasn't prepared to teach students who struggled to read. Thanks to a training program that taught her structured literacy, she can now help all students become strong readers. She describes why teachers need support in implementing scientifically based reading instruction.
New research suggests that targeted and timely AI feedback on teachers' instruction is possible and can improve instruction—but teachers still have their doubts.
Since 2019, policymakers have enacted more than 220 literacy-related bills nationwide. The distance from the statehouse to the classroom is long, and policies passed in the state capitol...
A working paper reveals a commonly held assumption that teachers frequently miss work compared to other professionals is wrong.
Researchers say Chicago Public Schools ultimately assigns students to teachers known to be low-performing and unlikely to improve.
As ESSER funding depletes and teacher layoffs set in, school districts should consider teacher performance and other alternatives to last-in-first-out.
Teacher preparation isn't a sprint; it's a marathon. And just like preparing for a long race, it requires well-planned practice, feedback, and the guidance of experts.
As increasing numbers of schools, districts, and states embrace and invest in a scientifically based approach to teaching reading, some are bound to wonder about the efficacy of their efforts.
In March 2023, Arkansas passed the Literacy, Empowerment, Accountability, Readiness, Networking and School Safety Act (LEARNS). A recent research brief from the University of Arkansas analyzes how LEARNS has influenced teacher salaries statewide in its first year of enactment.
Apprenticeships offer a promising model to help expand and diversify the teacher workforce. But NCTQ President Heather Peske cautions: We're long on enthusiasm for apprenticeships and short on the details and data. We must still ensure that apprenticeships train candidates to be highly effective teachers.
New research found measurable differences in teacher quality between different generations of teachers—with Baby Boomers being least effective.
Understanding how and from where to recruit people into the teaching profession has long been a focus for researchers, education leaders, and policymakers, yet little research has been done on the...
A new report explores why some teachers don't use standards-aligned curriculum materials. Here's what states and districts should do to ensure teachers feel empowered and supported to use high-quality materials.
Non-teaching staff can have a big impact on student outcomes, yet little research explores how their turnover rates vary and what effects that could have on the school. New research explores turnover among different staffing groups, including which conditions predict churn and which conditions prevent it.
State education leaders shouldn't work alone to enact teacher-focused reading policies, writes NCTQ President Heather Peske. Instead, they can look to states that have already blazed the trail and laid down clear markers to follow. Our State Reading Policy Action Guide outlines what policy actions leaders should take to revamp reading instruction and highlights examples of states leading the way.
NCTQ's Teacher Quality Bulletin distills the latest education research into clear, actionable information for education leaders. From topics like effective reading instruction to teacher diversity, here are the posts that caught their attention this year.
Every year, countless English learning students pass through our education system without getting the help they need. And for each one, a teacher is left feeling frustrated, or confused, and may not even realize why.
Five actions education leaders can take to tap into the power of background knowledge.
New Research Reveals Surprising Long-Term Effects of Teacher Performance Pay on Students.
Teachers need to be constant learners to keep up with an ever-changing landscape. But professional development can vary a lot, which makes it hard to know what will ultimately help students.
How do you balance teachers' need for professional development with the time it takes away from their students? And do you make sure that time is well spent?
Do state leaders suffer from a lack of strategy? To really connect the dots and make an impact, states need to simultaneously prioritize teacher quality and learning outcomes.
Filling those hard-to-staff teacher vacancies doesn't have to be so hard. Making a few straightforward adjustments to compensation, incentives, and partnerships can change the game.
A recent working paper shows a simple hack school leaders can use to ease teaching vacancy woes: Automate data collection.
Little is know about paraprofessionals in the classroom, but a recent study in Washington sheds some much-needed light on these important players.
Teachers demand better training on how to teach reading. Teacher prep programs ought to do more
A four-day work week may seem like a good way to attract teachers and address tightening school budgets, but researchers say it might do more harm than good.
A new study examines a program in Dallas—Accelerating Campus Excellence or ACE—that sought to boost teacher pay for stellar educators willing to teach in high-poverty schools. Compared to similar schools where they didn't attract high-performing teachers with higher pay, the ACE schools produced dramatic results for students. But those results didn't last.
As states quickly shifted requirements for teacher licensure in the early days of the pandemic, some also saw an opportunity to learn from the responses they put in place.
Teachers can choose from different instructional approaches, such as direct instruction, open discussion, and others, but which approach is the most effective? Does the best instructional approach depend on the subject?
Mention AI in a school setting and most people think of ChatGPT and cheating scandals. But AI in school settings isn't all bad.
Almost no one is tracking the impact recent policy decisions have on student learning and how they perpetuate educational inequity.
Challenging some assumptions, perhaps, new data shows that veteran teachers continue to improve late into their careers.
New research examines the impact of career and technical education teachers who entered the profession through different pathways.
What if states applied the "seat belt" policy approach to solving our current mathematics education crisis?
The answer (perhaps less satisfying than policy wonks would like) is that It depends on the school context.
Policymakers are overlooking teacher prep as a critical force in promoting teacher quality and better outcomes for students.
New research from Illinois reiterates that the nature of the teacher shortage problem is one of inequity.
New research looks into how teachers select or are selected into positions based on their preferences and those of the principals hiring them.
New research digs deeper into the well-documented positive impact that Black teachers have on students' academic and life outcomes.
Providing teachers with feedback—through a medium that allows them to explicitly see how they responded to various scenarios—could help teachers become more effective.
I was recently reading a NASA article with my 12-year-old child about the dynamics of flight and was struck by the important role content knowledge played in helping her make sense of the text.
The most-read Teacher Quality Bulletin posts of 2022 reflect the questions, overturned assumptions, and trade-offs that face education leaders.
Since "good" teaching is so multifaceted, it requires multiple measures to capture its complexity.
A new study finds sizable gains for students when they are assigned to a teacher for the second time.
Every family sends their child off to school, hoping the teacher will effectively meet their child's unique needs.
What many still don't recognize is that teachers' reading instruction changes the wiring in children's brains.
Temporary gains accompanied by longer-term challenges.
New research finds that paraprofessional support, time, caseload, resources, and professional development all play major factors in retention.
A new RAND Corporation survey asked teachers what would be the most effective strategies to recruit and retain more teachers of color.
Parents and families must be part of the partnership to help students gain back their academic footing.
New research explores the dynamic between teacher relationship skills and elementary student learning in math and literacy.
A focus on teacher recruitment without appropriate attention to retention is like trying to collect water in a sieve.
Who wants someone who has not demonstrated their knowledge and skills to be trusted with landing the plane? Teaching is no different.
A new working paper provides evidence that newly credentialed teachers earn higher salaries if they enter the classroom, rather than pursuing other job opportunities.
Beyond the important areas outlined in the Secretary's remarks, we see two big challenges to the goal of access and equity to quality teachers that have yet to be addressed.
Many states are moving to eliminate existing measures of content knowledge for aspiring teachers, citing concerns around possible teacher shortages.
One thing we know for certain: K-12 educator workforce data is lagging, lacking, and limited.
Now is the moment to chart a new path forward.
We must join together to ensure that our nation keeps children and teachers safe.
One concrete step districts can take to build a stronger teacher workforce is to move up their hiring timelines.
Do teachers who return to the district they graduated from have a competitive edge over other beginning teachers?
Every now and then, conventional wisdom gets it wrong.
New research adds important findings on the positive effects of teachers of color on the academic and life outcomes of students.
People have life coaches, nutrition coaches, and executive coaches. So, it's no surprise to see schools turning to coaches as well.
A new working paper may be cause for genuine concern regarding the most widely-used evaluation instrument in the country, the Danielson Group's Framework for Teaching.
As the challenge of recruiting a new generation of teachers gains increasing urgency, what's old is being made new again.
A new study makes the case that a $23 billion investment in California schools didn't just fail but backfired.
Few areas of teacher policy have received as much overdue attention over the past few years as teacher diversity.
Assigning elementary teachers to teach only their best subjects, also known as "teacher specialization," holds a lot of appeal...
A new study explores how education policymakers in the U.S. use research evidence to inform their decisions.
While most states have made progress in building out their data systems, key data connections are missing.
Our nation's educators and students are exhausted and embattled, but not beaten.
A new working paper adds additional insight into the important question of how race impacts teacher hiring decisions.
A recent paper puts the spotlight back on the quality of feedback teachers receive in their evaluations.
Tenure, a hotly debated education policy lever, is often viewed as a component of a teacher's overall compensation package.
There's clear evidence that teachers are more effective reading instructors with special education students when both their preservice preparation and their school district emphasize evidence-based reading practices.
New data show the extent of the mismatch between teachers' certification and the area in which teachers are needed.
A new study focused on Massachusetts finds a direct link between its performance rating of providers with the future effectiveness of providers' graduates in classrooms.
A new study adds to the mix research that unpacks which candidates particularly benefit from high-quality student teaching placements.
Policymakers and teacher prep programs often claim there's an extremely limited pool of effective mentor teachers when pairing them with student-teachers. A new study aims to find out if that's actually the case.
Many efforts to increase diversity focus on getting more teachers of color to the door of the classroom, with too little attention to what comes after.
A new study out of Chicago has garnered a lot of attention for finding that Black teachers were significantly more likely to receive low classroom observation scores as compared to their White peers.
New research on implicit racial bias in schools and its effect on student achievement.
Lo and behold, it turns out that stricter certification requirements do appear to pay off—but not for the reasons that have all that much to do with what happens inside a college of education.
Are some teacher absences more likely to be covered than others? And what can be learned from the situations when it is not possible to find a sub?
Black and Hispanic college students don't enter teaching at the same rate as white students, but new trends indicate some upward movement.
A new meta-analysis finds a positive and significant relationship of performance pay on student learning outcomes.
New data suggests expectations placed on novice teachers during their first real professional development experience are far too low.
Teacher candidates' clinical placements should represent an environment similar to what they'll experience in their first teaching job.
While it may still feel like the 273rd day of March, we're really truly nearing the end of December, and the year 2020.
A recently published study sheds some light on how teacher evaluation and accountability policies might affect the quantity or quality of new teachers available to schools.
What if districts could significantly improve student outcomes by moving around the teachers they already have?
The path to becoming anti-racist is long, challenging, and for teachers, essential. Tackling one's mindset and implicit biases takes hard work, and even trainings intended to help people do this work may not lead to changes in behavior.
The absence of a college diploma, or worse, someone not wanting one, has become something that must be overcome, which reveals our deeply rooted belief that someone who is uneducated has less value.
Pervasive late hiring processes hinder districts' ability to hire high-quality teacher candidates, yet still many districts can't seem to rise out of this rut. One large district figured out something to do about it.
At first blush, this new study appears to confirm the well-established finding that more experienced teachers are not really much more effective than less experienced teachers. However, there's a novel and surprising twist on this common refrain. There's one group of teachers who continue to gain effectiveness the more years they are in the classroom.
Unlike any other state, the majority of Texas teachers are prepared by non-traditional programs.
Does removing the stress of a standardized test keep teachers in the classroom?
Teacher turnover has proven to be not only costly for schools, but also detrimental to teacher effectiveness and student learning. Still, some teacher attrition is not always a bad thing, in particular when the teachers who leave are the least effective.
Some sensible solutions sometimes turn out to be counterproductive. A prime example may exist in Washington state, which recently instituted a policy requiring new special education teachers to pursue a second endorsement.
A new study finds that the presence of Black teachers in advanced track courses produces a higher probability of Black students in that school not just enrolling, but passing advanced track courses.
A recent study from CALDER provides some insight into how a lack of information may contribute to the challenge of achieving equitable outcomes for students with and without disabilities.
Well before COVID-19 hit, many states had backed away from only recently adopted teacher evaluation policies. With COVID-19 now dominating the landscape, more schools and districts are opting to forgo teacher evaluations.
Researchers have spent decades investigating the most valid predictors and measures of teacher quality, with one of the hopes being that school districts will know exactly what to look for when hiring new teachers.
Some of the essential skills can be learned from textbooks and lectures—but knowing how to put it all in motion requires some real-world practice.
In light of the economic turmoil that COVID-19 is bringing about, pension shortfalls are likely to grow at an even more staggering rate.
Believing that one's students have potential—and treating them accordingly—helps them rise to their teacher's expectations.
Student teaching may not be a magic bullet for combating the myriad problems that plague teacher preparation, but it sure comes close...
Although Brexit and Megxit may be dominating headlines, politics and the royal family aren't the only issues worth reading up on from across the pond.
Remember when we learned just how powerful a good cooperating teacher can be for a teacher-in-training?
If there's one thing we know about teacher evaluations, it's that they're only as effective as the people doing the evaluating.
Just as football and basketball teams spend hours reviewing game tape, teachers have much to gain from self-observation.
Looking for a good principal? Start your search with good teachers.
While all student teaching experiences are not created equal, understanding and measuring how they are different turns out to be a challenge.
Here's a legitimately scary topic never far from teachers' minds when the economy takes a downturn: the threat of being laid off.
Perhaps this headline seems self-evident, but the backlash against licensure tests suggests otherwise.
If this measure can help identify and reward those teachers who are effectively encouraging kids to show up to class every day, especially those kids who have been falling behind, then it seems like one worth considering.
Our drum is beating for both better base pay and much more strategic use of compensation dollars by school districts to purchase what they most need and value.
A new study calls attention to consistency problems—even in an evaluation system that appears to align with best practices—concerning enough to warrant additional study and, perhaps, some adjustments in practices.
"First, do no harm" is a good dictum for doctors, and may be one for policymakers as well. Even the best-intended policies can cause an unintended ripple of harm.
"This should work!" Reading between the lines of a new study looking at how to make the most of effective elementary teachers, it seemed pretty clear that even its dispassionate authors, Kevin Bastian and C Kevin Fortner (of UNC Chapel Hill and Georgia State University, respectively) were taken aback by their results.
As district leaders and union representatives sit down to negotiate teacher contracts, an invisible hand has already decided many of the potential issues for them. That's because states' collective bargaining laws set the ground rules for what can be negotiated.
Tennessee is at it again! The Volunteer State, known for its strong policies around teacher prep and teacher evaluation, is once again offering up its data.
We all know that new teachers are more apt to get handed the toughest classrooms, a double whammy on student growth (where it's most needed) and teacher attrition rates. What's not as clear is what we mean by toughest assignments.
It's safe to say that recessions are bad – people lose jobs, investments lose value, politicians lose elections. However, it turns out there's one group that benefits from an economic downturn: students.
How can we fix well-documented disparities in the education experiences of children living in poverty?
A new study casts some legitimate doubts about just how much of a cash cow ed schools really are.
Not all teacher turnover is created equal. Some turnover is a good thing. Too much of it is a bad thing. The timing of turnover also matters...
Some noteworthy findings from Richard Ingersoll and his colleagues in the recent examination of how the teaching workforce has changed in the last thirty years...
New research adds two fascinating twists to this (thankfully) increasingly popular field of research.
A new study confirms, yet again, the positive benefits of students of color having a teacher of the same race.
The newest scare about teacher shortages focuses on the question of teacher retention...
Oftentimes research is way out ahead of the conventional wisdom. Occasionally though, common sense ends up being justified by research.
The right incentives can motivate a student to do homework, an employee to hit a quota, and even a child to finish her vegetables.
A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research compares two approaches to incentivizing teacher performance and highlights the value of initiatives aimed at rewarding ability and effort.
In most job sectors, employers use their compensation dollars to purchase what they most value.
Over the past century, science has revealed a great deal about how the brain functions.
A new study adds to some evidence that, although a relatively reliable measure, teacher observations may be capturing more than we would like.
A new paper adds to the growing body of research pointing out just how difficult it is to tell teacher prep programs apart based on outputs.
Time and again research has failed to find evidence that earning a master's degree make a teacher more effective.
There are new teacher evaluation systems that show substantial promise, but as with any systemic effort, we need to watch for and guard against any unintended consequences.
Student teaching is intended to serve as the opportunity for aspiring teachers to apply what they have learned from their preparation programs in real classroom settings.
The nation has taken steps toward giving all students, regardless of their background, equal access to great teachers. By more equitably distributing teachers, can schools actually get more equitable results, or are teachers too small a piece of the achievement puzzle?
Teachers who had been getting a particularly bad deal stood up to advocate for change in their states, but while the first strikes set off others, it hasn't really gone viral.
It's teacher hiring season, and school districts are out in full force working to recruit teachers.
In Tennessee schools, accountability starts at the top - and that might be making all the difference.
With decades of research that have shown the number of children struggling to read can be cut by two-thirds or more if the methods used to teach them to read are scientifically based, why aren't teachers using these proven models?
About 20 school districts have adopted new staffing models known collectively as Opportunity Culture, each designed to maximize the impact of great teachers. Makes sense, but does it work? Thanks to a recent study from Ben Backes and Michael Hansen, the first bit of evidence is in.
Without first understanding a problem, it's next-to-impossible to fix it. A new policy brief demonstrates how one state looked first to data to better understand its schools' inequitable assignment of teacher talent, surfacing some issues that were largely unknown.
We've all had our favorite teacher. A teacher who has made a difference in our lives. And as much as our teachers want us to remember polynomials or the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the reality is that sometimes, we remember that teacher for the life lessons she taught us and how she made us feel, more than for what she taught.
Teachers often say that of all parts of their training, student teaching was the most valuable. This may leave their course instructors wondering: does everything they say go in one ear and out the other?
No one is surprised when 9th and 10th grade students want to be rock stars, professional athletes, or YouTube celebrities. But when some of them want to be teachers, it's worth taking a moment to unpack what's motivating those students—and figure out how to leverage that motivation to inspire others—especially when it comes to attracting the most talented students into the profession.
As many states struggle to staff all their classrooms, they might want to examine the degree to which their own policies discourage qualified teachers from applying.
A new study suggests that offering performance bonuses to a smaller segment of high performing teachers than is typical in schools using performance pay may be a smart move.
There is a cautionary lesson from a new working paper examining Houston's bold talent initiative. In many ways, it yielded the results intended by retaining a higher number of great teachers and exiting weak ones. It also led to a few unintended and unwelcome outcomes.
Without further ado, here are some of the research articles that stood out to you in 2017:
Local context matters. It's true when it comes to teacher shortages, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that it would be true when it comes to teacher retention, too.
Districts spend on average $18,000 per teacher every year on professional development, with little to show for it. That's why we were excited to see the new research findings looking at the New Teacher Center's induction model--most teachers' first experience with professional development. A recent study found that the New Teacher Center's approach resulted in up to five months of additional learning. Remarkable!
But there's a real puzzle here to be solved. While student outcomes--what matters most--showed tremendous gains, teachers' observation ratings did not. Other than there not being enough observations conducted to detect differences, one explanation may be the instrument used to observe the teachers, that being the tried and true Danielson Framework. It may be time to revisit those indicators to ensure that they align with student outcomes at the earliest stages of a teacher's career.
Here are the attributes of the NTC approach that yielded dramatic learning gains:
First off, significant time is dedicated to building districts' capacity to support the induction model. Mentors are carefully selected and intensively trained to assess their teachers, and instructed to meet with each mentee for at least 180 minutes a month and focus on instruction during that time.
Most striking was the program's significant investment in mentor training--with a requirement of 100 hours of training for each mentor teacher for two years. Could that be the secret sauce?
The big question left isn't if districts should use this model, but if they can afford it. The cost to implement the program is just $500-$900 per new teacher for the New Teacher Center's services, but that doesn't include the districts' costs for the mentor teachers and any associated stipends or salaries. These line items could run a district $5,600-$8,000 for a fully-released mentor per teacher, depending on the local salary scale (credit to NTC for providing us with these estimates). Our bottom line is that if these outcomes are consistently replicated, the costs are without question fully defensible.
NCTQ has long supported teacher pay for performance in school districts. Better pay can encourage the best teachers to stay in the classroom and prompt talented people to enter the profession knowing they will be rewarded for their achievements.
In 2015, Dallas became the largest school district to adopt performance pay instead of a traditional salary schedule. Results out this month reveal that three years into this program, the district has achieved impressive gains.
The district is reporting improvement in teacher retention, keeping 86 percent of its teachers compared to 83 percent statewide, but most critically, with the most effective teachers having the highest retention rates. Meanwhile, half of those at the lowest effectiveness rating left--also key.
In addition, the district has been able to reduce the number of schools with a low rating from the state from 43 down to 14 campuses. And Dallas' graduation rate has grown significantly, from 83 percent to 88 percent between 2012 and 2017.
While it is unlikely that all these achievements can be attributed to teacher pay reforms, we see signs of smoke, even though we cannot yet say there is fire.
Ever play the carnival game of whack-a-mole? Every time you smash one mole back into its hole, two more pop back up. That's how NCTQ's analysts feel right now with states' plans to close educator equity gaps under the ESSA. However, what's at stake here is not a cheap stuffed animal prize, but the access that some of our most vulnerable students have to strong teachers.
Among the 34 state plans we reviewed this fall, too many permit continued discrimination against low-income students and students of color by failing to ensure that these students have equitable access to effective, experienced, and in-field teachers; that is, to those teachers who are most likely to contribute to these students' academic learning and growth.
This past spring, we analyzed states' plans to meet ESSA's educator equity requirements for the first 17 state plans submitted to the United States Department of Education for peer review and approval. We discovered these plans to be a real mixed bag, displaying strengths but also significant opportunities for improvement. Our spring analyses spotlighted specific components of state work worth replicating, but also noted numerous areas where states missed the mark.
Unfortunately, the plans of the remaining 34 states address few of the common flaws noted in our prior review. Instead of emulating the promising practices among the first 17 state plans and adapting suggestions for improvement, as appropriate based on local context and need, we found that an even greater percentage of the ESSA state plans that we analyzed this fall fell short.
Although plans alone are insufficient to change students' daily in-school experience, language matters. A state's ESSA plan sets forth its understanding of the current status of education within its state and the steps it intends to take to address any shortcomings that are preventing all students from reaching their maximum potential.
Yet, among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, fewer than half of states define "inexperienced teacher" based on research demonstrating that teacher effectiveness increases substantially after two years in the classroom. And only seven states include sufficiently detailed and rigorous timelines and interim targets for eliminating their identified educator equity gaps. Such measures are important to help ensure that states and stakeholders are able to hold themselves accountable for monitoring, assessing, and -- ultimately -- eliminating any existing educator equity gaps.
Despite these flaws, we are pleased to acknowledge and celebrate states from our fall review with plans that contain some strong elements. For example, many state plans include promising strategies to eliminate existing educator equity gaps, including Florida's ESSA state plan which leverages a state law that prevents any Florida student from being taught by an ineffective teacher for two years in a row.
Other states, including South Carolina and Ohio, are calculating and reporting educator equity gaps using, among other data, student-level data, which enable these states to determine whether there are any educator equity gaps existing within a specific school.
Additionally, Kentucky and New York go above the beyond the statutory requirements to calculate and report educator equity gaps for additional student groups: students with disabilities and English learners. Calculating and reporting the extent to which these vulnerable student populations are taught by ineffective, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers enables these states to take steps to address additional educator inequities that may exist within the state, beyond those required by the statute.
Nevertheless, overall, we are forced to conclude states have largely shirked their responsibility to prevent low-income students and students of color from being disproportionately taught by ineffective, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers.
Fortunately, there is still time for states to improve their plans. We hope that states will carefully review and consider our analyses, which highlight specific opportunities for each state to strengthen its plan. More can and must be done to ensure that all students have equitable access to effective, experienced, and in-field teachers.
Despite how some organizations tend to discuss teacher supply, the United States doesn't have just one teacher labor market, but at least 50. Why is the labor market so fragmented? Each state creates its own teacher licensure policies and none of them employ a practical approach to licensure reciprocity. The result is a complex and expensive process for teachers who want to teach in another state. Couple this obstacle with inflexible pension systems and, voila, each state has its own labor market.
In that vein, a group of economists at the University of Missouri set out to learn how these 'walls' between states impact student achievement. To investigate, Dongwoo Kim, Cory Koedel, Shawn Ni, and Michael Podgursky devised a clever study comparing student achievement at schools that are within a few miles of a state border to schools that are not near state borders.
Why would that be telling? We know from previous research that teachers like to work close to where they live, so if various state policies make it difficult for teachers to move across state lines, those schools close to state lines would in theory have a smaller pool of teachers from which to recruit. This, in turn, might decrease teacher quality in those schools.
Imagine a test where the only grades a student could earn were A or A-. Envision an update to Yelp that allows customers to rate restaurants using only 4 or 5 stars. Picture a panel of judges at an ice-skating competition where the only scorecards say 9 or 10.
That's what's going on with teacher evaluations, despite a long and brutish effort to get states and districts to do otherwise. Most teachers continue to receive high ratings and there's very little evidence that anyone is below average.
Like all of us, principals respond to performance pressures by seeking to alleviate them as quickly and simply as possible. Unfortunately, when it comes to the pressure to improve test scores, the simplest solution may be the most likely to backfire.
A recent study by Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt University and Demetra Kalogrides and Susanna Loeb of Stanford University shows that over a ten-year period, principals in Miami-Dade County Public Schools rearranged their teaching staffs in response to the accountability pressures of No Child Left Behind. Principals moved their best teachers into tested grades (3rd through 10th), presumably with the goal of improving outcomes in the grades most obviously linked to schools' accountability scores.
The researchers found that principals were more likely to engage in this type of "strategic staffing" in schools where they had more control over staff assignment and in schools that had received a failing grade and were therefore facing particularly intense pressure to improve. Overall, a below-average teacher (with student assessment scores one standard deviation below the mean) had a 13 percent chance of being moved to a non-tested grade, compared to a 5 percent chance of being moved among above-average teachers.
Of course, moving a struggling teacher to a different grade would not be bad IF that teacher turns out to be better equipped to teach that new age range. A non-state assessment administered by researchers to gauge performance in the earliest grades revealed this not to be the case; instead, they found that K-2 students taught by teachers who had been moved from a higher grade lost so much ground that it carried over into their performance on the 3rd grade tests, if not even longer.
What seems like a sound short-term strategy actually creates longer-term harm.
Mississippi had to do something. 
Between 1992 and 2013, no more than 55 percent of its 4th grade children could look at a piece of writing and locate relevant information or use their understanding of the text to identify details that support a given interpretation or conclusion.
In short, nearly half of these students couldn't adequately understand what they read.
But in recent years, the state's response to this challenge has been strong and swift:
In April 2013, Mississippi passed a law which requires, with some exceptions, holding back 3rd grade students who score at the lowest levels on the state-wide reading test. In Spring 2015, the year the law first went into effect, 15 percent of third graders placed at the lowest achievement level—potentially having to repeat the grade.
Beginning in January 2014, the state education department launched a massive professional development program that offered LETRS training to all Mississippi K-3 educators. In target schools (those with large proportions of low-performing readers), the state mandated participation in the training and provided literacy coaches.
During this same period, the state also worked with the Southeast Regional Education Laboratory to develop a test for teachers on early literacy and an observation tool to measure classroom practice.
Recently, researchers used the results from the test and observations to examine how teacher knowledge and classroom practice changed over two years. Jessica Sidler Folsom and Kevin Smith (both of Florida State) and Kymyona Burk and Nathan Oakley at the state education department summarized their analysis, finding results that might best be characterized as "cautiously hopeful."
As measured by the test, average teacher knowledge of early literacy skills did go up about ten percentile points, an improvement which appears to be correlated with the LETRS training.
Similarly, in the schools where training was supplemented by on-site observations, the key areas observed (instructional quality, student engagement, and teaching competencies) all showed improvement that related to the LETRS training
It's important to note several caveats with these results. First, the study is not experimental, so cannot prove causation. Second, even after training, teachers managed to answer about half the questions correctly on average. There is still a long way to go. Third, the law requires the state to produce better student achievement results, not merely improve teacher knowledge and skills.
However, rather than end on the standard "more research needed" note, we did a little digging and found two positive, relatively recent student trends that may be attributable to these efforts:
(1) In 2015, 60 percent of Mississippi 4th graders met the grade-level standard for the NAEP reading test – the highest proportion since 1992.
(2) In spring 2016, 13 percent of Mississippi 3rd graders did not meet the standard to be promoted to 4th grade. One year later, that proportion had fallen to 8 percent.
So perhaps, in addition to more research, more time to let these interventions play out is needed as well.
Whether you're running a marathon, learning something new, or trying to improve student achievement, there's no advantage quite like a head start. Unfortunately, teacher prep programs tend to squander this precious advantage.
Recently, experts with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) released findings from a federally-funded study examining the impact of TNTP's Teaching Fellows program—a non-traditional certification route that trains teacher candidates in the summer and provides coaching and instruction during the following school year, while participants also serve as teachers in their own classrooms. Despite working under the condensed time frame, the study found that TNTP's program has produced teachers of about the same quality as those who enter the classroom through other routes, including traditional teacher prep programs.
The seven-district study compared TNTP Fellows to other teachers with similar levels of experience (all were in their first few years of teaching) and similar classrooms (in terms of student characteristics). TNTP Fellows produced similar gains in student achievement and earned similar scores on observations of their teaching practice as their colleagues who entered through other routes. To top it off, TNTP Fellows were more likely to return for a second year by a margin of 6 percentage points (78 percent vs. 72 percent).
Our takeaway from these findings is straightforward. Given that traditional preparation programs generally have a couple of years to prepare teacher candidates, there are few plausible explanations for why their candidates shouldn't then outpace by a substantial margin candidates prepared in a much shorter time-period.
While TNTP remains a relative bargain compared to other non-traditional programs, especially residencies (whose costs exclusive of stipends average $65,000 per candidate), it still carries a higher cost than what districts pay to recruit and hire a traditionally trained teacher.
If colleges approached their student teaching requirements with the same rigor and deliberateness as high-quality non-traditional certification programs, they could provide districts and prospective teachers with all the benefits of non-traditional programs and more.
To this end, NCTQ is developing a new approach to infuse more training into student teaching in order to increase the value of the experience for both teacher candidates and school districts. Future teachers will learn and practice additional key skills they need for success, and districts will be able to use student teaching as a more reliable, low-cost pipeline for recruitment and hiring of high-quality candidates. A field test of the program is taking place this fall. Look for further updates!
In 2011, Florida's legislature passed an ambitious performance pay policy that requires districts to pay their most effective teachers the district's highest annual salary awards. Recognizing the importance of this law, NCTQ has praised Florida as a national leader in performance pay in our State Teacher Policy Yearbook.
Florida's policy favoring performance over the accumulation of graduate degrees is aligned with longstanding research that demonstrates that paying teachers more for earning advanced degrees generally does not positively contribute to student learning.
Recently, we evaluated a subset of Florida's districts to determine how well they implemented this law. The discouraging results have implications that go beyond the sunshine state.
We've long been arguing that districts could tap retired teachers to ease the transition of new teachers into the classroom. We recently found a great example of a district doing just that, Aurora Public Schools in Colorado.
Aurora designed a program to engage retired teachers as mentors, and it appears to have had strong effects where it matters most: on the math and reading achievement of the students assigned to these well-mentored new teachers. After the first year, those classrooms reported gains equivalent to one month of additional learning in math and about the same in reading after two years. Although the impact wasn't found to be quite as large as that of the New Teacher Center's year-long, mentor-based induction program, Aurora's program targeted a broader swath of teachers (all those new to the district, even if they had several years of teaching experience elsewhere). Aurora's teachers may not have had the same professional learning needs as the true novice teachers included in a recent study of the New Teacher Center approach.
Aurora layered this new program on top of its "business as usual" support, in which new teachers were always paired with a "buddy" who provides at least 15 hours of support and a mentor who provides at least 30 hours of guidance and opportunities to collaborate over the course of each year.
The program didn't have much of an impact on the new teachers' evaluations, but that may speak to a weakness in the evaluation process more than to a failing of the program, as the program participants were demonstrably more effective in advancing student learning. While the program was not found to improve retention rates overall, the study revealed a strong relationship between the total hours spent with a mentor and the likelihood that a teacher would stay in the district. Each additional hour of mentoring increased the odds a teacher would return the following year by 12 percent.
Implementation costs ran approximately $171 per student—a bargain according to the researchers who also estimated that the growth in achievement was likely to translate into an additional $2,760 in lifetime earnings for the students taught by teachers in the program.
There has been substantial media attention recently regarding states' Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans, much of which has focused on states' efforts to meet ESSA's accountability requirements. Here at NCTQ, we took a close look at another aspect of ESSA, by analyzing states' plans to meet ESSA's educator equity requirements.
Last month we released educator equity analyses of the 16 states and the District of Columbia that submitted their plans in spring 2017. Our analyses highlight strengths and opportunities among these states' work to ensure that low-income students and students of color are not disproportionately taught by ineffective, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers.
Criticizing states or highlighting failings in these plans are not the goals of these analyses. Instead, we showcase states with strong elements worthy of replication and mention opportunities for these plans to be enhanced.
Of course, equity issues extend beyond districts and schools. Indeed, many of these issues have their roots in our shameful national history of housing and hiring discrimination, racism, and classism. Nevertheless, states have a critically important role to play in ensuring that, regardless of the cause, where educator equity gaps exist, states, districts, and schools must work to eliminate them.
Since research clearly demonstrates that a teacher is the most significant in-school influence on student achievement, states, districts, and schools must provide effective teachers with incentives and support to serve where they are most needed: in our highest need schools. States and districts should take actions designed to ensure that more of our best teachers are teaching in classrooms where they can help our most at-risk students.
Overall, our review of state's efforts to meet the educator equity provisions in ESSA state plans found that some promising work is underway, but also that significant room for improvement remains. Specifically, we found that the best plans contain the following elements:
Our analysis found that many ESSA state plans include strong definitions for an ineffective teacher that include objective measures of student growth. However, many states have substantial room for improvement in establishing ambitious and achievable timelines and interim targets for eliminating existing educator equity gaps.
Failing to ensure that low-income students and students of color have equal access to excellent teachers robs them of a vitally-needed chance to succeed. Fortunately, states have powerful levers that they can use to close equity gaps.
For example, when designing strategies intended to eliminate educator equity gaps, states should engage with the full range of policymakers who will be responsible for implementing these plans. States also should carefully review whether districts with longstanding equity issues are using state and federal education funds strategically to address any existing educator equity gaps.
Additionally, states can and should take steps to ensure that progress toward eliminating equity gaps is regularly measured. States should also implement processes for evaluating and improving the strategies that districts are implementing to eliminate educator equity gaps.
We hope that states will carefully review our analyses and consider incorporating our suggestions for improvement.
It's no secret that teacher prep programs often fail to teach scientifically based approaches to reading instruction. Our December 2016 analysis of undergraduate elementary teacher prep programs found that just 39 percent provide instruction in all five essential components of early reading instruction, leaving most future teachers unprepared.
Now, Dr. Deborah Glaser, a national expert in the teaching of literacy (and reviewer of hundreds of textbooks for us), has a solution -- an online course that focuses on the most up-to-date research in reading instruction and strategies to support that instruction.
The Reading Teacher's Top Ten Tools: Instruction that Makes a Difference is a self-paced, interactive professional development resource that helps teachers improve their reading instruction. The training program incorporates media-rich applications and interactive elements so teachers see how these best practices can enable actual students to learn key literacy skills.
The three-credit course guides teachers through ten tools: knowledge, oral language, phoneme awareness, phonics and spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, writing, read alouds, and collaboration models. New teachers and veterans alike will find the course crammed full with valuable information to enhance their students' reading abilities.
For more information about this course visit www.ReadingTeachersTopTenTools.com or email Dr. Glaser directly at DrDeb@TopTenTools.net.
Data, data everywhere but not a drop to drink.
That's what many principals have concluded after gaining access to more data about teachers' past performance without understanding how to make the most of it during hiring. A recently published study by Marisa Cannata (Vanderbilt University) and her colleagues at the University of Michigan and North Carolina State University examines this challenge and identifies big and small steps district central offices can take to remedy the problem. Namely, the study highlights the need for districts to communicate about data availability and help principals use data to complement their professional judgment.
The researchers surveyed nearly 800 principals in multiple districts and followed up with a selection of interviews. Many principals are proactive in their approach to gathering relevant data (for example, they may ask applicants to bring previous teacher evaluations with them) and systematic in their approach to assessing a teacher's fit within their school. One principal describes a clever way to use his district's evaluation rubric for demonstration lessons:
NCTQ's new report on teacher prep programs provides an updated perspective on how well some 700 colleges and universities are preparing high school teachers. While it is certainly no easier to teach high school than to teach 1st graders, our results certainly appear to indicate that the recipe for preparing a high school teacher is at least more straightforward.
Get this fun fact. In our ratings, only 6 percent of the high school programs got a D or an F, compared to 52 percent of the undergraduate elementary programs we rated most recently.
With today's release of NCTQ's newest teacher prep ratings, we single out 16 programs as the "Top Tier." These programs at the top of our rankings are the best places to go to become a high school teacher.
We've long been excited about the wealth of information – and its potential uses – coming from Tennessee's teacher prep report cards (see here and here). The state's Department of Education is bringing that potential to life, as they describe in this new report.
The highlights: the state is collecting a ton of data on both their prep programs and what's happening in their K-12 school districts. Even better, they're thinking strategically about how to use all those data – including incorporating their report cards (which you can find here) into the teacher prep program approval process and integrating teacher prep data and school district data so that the two systems can work in concert.
Why does all this matter? Whereas other states are concerned about teacher shortages without much information on where or why those shortages are happening, Tennessee is able to say with confidence that while there's a decline in the number of grads from their teacher prep programs, "the bulk of this decline has been in the number of veteran teachers obtaining additional degrees rather than in the number of new teachers entering the profession." Moreover, the state can identify the specific subjects in which they have a surplus (English language arts) and where they have a shortage (ESL, world languages, and science) and in which types of schools these shortages are most pressing (those in high-poverty districts) – so that they can target solutions to these very clearly defined problems.
And it gets better. The report outlines specific ways they want school districts and prep programs to learn from these data and to work together. For example, the state provides detailed information (beyond what's publicly available) on prep programs' graduates' placement, retention, and performance – including information from their classroom observations – that those programs can use to guide improvement. The state also urges school districts to project their teacher staffing needs further in advance and to share that information with prep programs so that programs can recruit the types of teachers that districts want to hire and direct those aspiring teachers to the districts that need them.
We can't help but point out one area for improvement – Tennessee's public-facing report cards don't distinguish data by program. They would be even better if they showed, for example, if hiring and retention rates are different for elementary versus secondary prep programs at an institution, or if the undergrad or graduate programs tend to produce more effective teachers.
But, we're not ones to let the perfect be the enemy of the good – and we certainly see a lot of good in what Tennessee is up to.
Even though I'm well launched into my professional career, I still keep in touch with my old high school English teacher. From my freshman year onward, she drove me to participate more in class and had a lasting impact on my life trajectory. I know she taught me much more than the difference between metaphors and similes—and now there's research out there to prove it.
Benjamin Master (RAND), Susanna Loeb (Stanford University), and James Wyckoff (University of Virginia) investigated teachers' long-term impact on student achievement across subject areas. Using achievement data on middle schoolers in New York City and Miami-Dade County, they asked two key questions:
The answers: yes and yes.
Calculating teachers' value-added scores after their students had moved on to the next grade, they found that the contributions teachers made to student achievement in the subject they taught persisted not only through the following year but for the following two years (and perhaps even longer, as that was as far as they looked).
The researchers also calculated teachers' impact on their students' achievement in another subject that they did not teach. Again, even after two years, English teachers' contribution to students' math achievement persisted, with an impact ranging from about a quarter to nearly half as much as their impact on students' English scores (comparing findings for the two districts).
However, the reverse didn't hold for math teachers, and it's not hard to understand why. Students learn broad skills in English class that translate across disciplines, such as the ability to read a math problem. In our scramble to address the shortage of STEM teachers as well as our nation's lackluster achievement in math and science, we would do well to remember the power of a top-notch English teacher.
For all our efforts to understand the science behind learning and effective instruction, it can be easy to forget the most basic prerequisite for school success: showing up.
For obvious reasons, student attendance makes a difference in how much students learn and the likelihood that they will graduate from high school. A recent study by Stanford's Jing Liu and Susanna Loeb (yes, it's all Susanna Loeb this TQB!) examines how teachers influence student attendance rates. Their work reveals that for some students, having teachers who encourage good attendance can mean the difference between dropping out or walking proudly across the graduation stage.
Looking at middle and high school attendance in a large California district, and controlling for factors such as time of day, achievement, and past attendance rates, they found clear evidence that teachers vary significantly in their ability to motivate students to come to class. Their work suggests that teachers who regularly have full classes one year are very likely to have high student attendance in subsequent years. This is not by chance: there is something about these teachers that enables them to engage their students year after year. The effects aren't massive—after all, most students recognize their need to attend class regardless of who is teaching—but they do translate into a meaningful reduction in dropout rates.
So, what can we do with this piece of information? Most teachers would bristle at any suggestion that they be evaluated, even in small part, on the basis of their students' attendance. There is, however, some clear momentum for increased accountability at the school level. Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Tennessee, among others, all plan to use chronic student absenteeism as one way to gauge school performance, and we're eager to see what lessons we'll learn along the way.
April 13, 2017
Dear State Legislator:
First let's get the obvious points out of the way. I get that your constituents love small class sizes. Certainly, no rational teacher will tell you that large classes are easier to teach than small classes. And, unlike many education fixes, the benefits of smaller class sizes do not require lengthy explanations making the eyes glaze over. Everyone immediately understands—and applauds!
For these reasons, I'm not surprised that the North Carolina legislature has gotten itself into a real pickle over class size reductions, now having to figure out what to do with a well-intentioned but unworkable new law. That law, passed in the last session, requires school districts to lower K-3 class sizes from the current limit of 24 students to as few as 19.
With the law set to go into effect next fall, districts have announced that in order to comply with the new law that they will have to concurrently lay off art, music, and PE teachers—who, in addition to being wildly important to parents and kids, are the reason classroom teachers get a much needed break during the day to refuel and plan. Catch 22. Suddenly this very popular move isn't looking so popular anymore.
It's not my intention to single out the NC legislature here. There is no shortage of states that have gone down this road and lived to regret it, most dramatically California in 1996 and Florida in 2003. Those states were dumbfounded over the unintended—but entirely foreseeable—problems of their own creation as a result of top-down mandates. It started with the lack of empty classrooms available to accommodate new teachers, but more importantly, they learned that there is not a bottomless supply of teachers, especially good ones.
In other words, it turns out that students are better off in a crowded classroom that is led by a strong teacher than in a small class taught by a weak teacher.
Here's an example in the extreme. My daughter lives on a farm in rural South Africa. She volunteers teaching English at the local public school, encountering class sizes that make a mockery of our class size debates. Classes in this remote Zulu school range from 75 to 100 students, with four children sitting in desks intended for two. Her first impression of this situation was immediate sympathy for the school's well-meaning English teacher and what an impossible job she has.
But as she has spent more time in this classroom, she is more struck by how poorly, indeed incompetently, the teacher and her principal have chosen to deal with this tough situation—such as ignoring a closet full of new computers that could help them break the classroom into more manageable groups and failing to assess the students on their proficiency so that they might be re-organized, if only to teach each other—to name but two basic strategies that could be relatively easily put in place, but which have not been. It is no wonder that most of these 13-year-olds, who must learn English if they ever want a real job, have yet to learn to string together a sentence of English.
Don't get me wrong. There's still no question that the class size here is a huge obstacle. But the bigger problem in this poor, rural school resides in the poor quality and training of the both the teacher and the principal who oversees her work. Neither is in a position to change the hand they've been dealt, but additional training and some ingenuity on the part of these adults could produce far better outcomes.
Every classroom has its challenges that must be overcome. While in the US, even the weakest teachers are likely to know to pull out the computers and find a way to group the kids, more complex and immediate instructional challenges are harder to anticipate, and certainly impossible to solve from on-high. And given my druthers—and I'd wager every parent's—I'd rather that the person in front of the room can think fast on her feet and pivot on a dime, which is what well trained, skilled teachers know how to do.
When legislatures opine about smaller class sizes, I can't help but think that the evidence isn't getting a fair hearing, particularly the poor return on investment from a long history of states' class size reduction initiatives. Says economist Rick Hanushek, "Perhaps the most astounding part of the current debates on class size reduction is the almost complete disregard for the history of such policies."
I do know that the positive results from the Tennessee STAR class size reduction experiment routinely get trotted out in these debates, with one important fact routinely omitted. None of the STAR champions point out that it was a carefully constructed experiment involving only 11,000 students attending schools that had voluntarily signed-up to participate. The schools had the opportunity to decide it made sense for them to participate.
Buy-in, local context, and comprehensive planning all critically matter. Apparently, those are lessons that are best learned state by state, legislator by legislator, which is too bad for kids.
While I have many memories from my first year of teaching, one of the most visceral comes from my early morning commute. I had to take several buses across the Bronx to reach my school, always aiming to arrive well before my students. In the dead of winter, after too few hours of sleep, I'd wait for one bus while watching the one I'd just exited turn around – heading back toward my apartment. Some mornings, I needed all my willpower not to chase it down and go back to bed. But instead, I always continued my journey to school, and to the piles of work and (mostly) eager 7th graders awaiting me.
A new study shows that like me, other first-year teachers are quite good at consistently showing up to school rather than staying home. Ben Ost (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Jeffrey Schiman (Georgia Southern University) look at how the number of teachers' absences (counting only sick and personal days, not professional development) change as their workload (e.g., class size, years of experience) changes.
While first-year teachers take few days off, teachers' absences edge up for the next few years of teaching (at least based on the data from North Carolina). This trend toward more absences among more experienced teachers is notable because past research has found that teacher absences hurt student outcomes. In fact, this paper estimates that the gains in student learning attributed to having a more experienced teacher would be about 10 percent higher if those veteran teachers took fewer days off. This finding reaffirms that every day a teacher spends in the classroom is a critically important one.
While improving teacher attendance is no simple task, the North Carolina study sheds light on one potentially influential factor: school culture. Researchers found that when a teacher transferred from one school to another, her rate of absence crept toward the average for that school – for better or worse. (And yes, the authors took several steps to ensure that they weren't simply capturing a "school-level shock" like a flu that hits everyone at the school.) Given that NCTQ's past work on this issue, the 2014 Roll Call study, didn't find any district policies that were silver bullets for improving teacher attendance, it seems that school-level factors may be a promising place on which to focus.
How can we evaluate the effectiveness of pay-for-performance compensation systems if those systems are implemented only half-heartedly? That continues to be the prevailing question, as we review yet another expensive study reporting on the outcomes from another highly flawed performance pay experiment.
A recent Mathematica Policy Research study examines the experience of 66 schools housed in 10 districts that received Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant money beginning in 2010. Through the grant, teachers were eligible for bonuses intended to be substantial, differentiated based on role or setting, and challenging to earn. Teachers working in the control group received a 1 percent raise each year.
So what happened? The TIF schools reported a small bump in student achievement, equaling roughly four additional weeks of learning over the three-year study period. Based on teacher surveys, researchers found little evidence of the negative outcomes that many worry could arise from a competitive pay system, such as increased dissatisfaction with the school environment or evaluation processes.
Still, this experiment continues what's now become a tradition of really poor implementation. Almost all of the teachers qualified for bonuses (70 percent), the schools shorted teachers in the terms of the size of the bonuses (probably because they were handing out too many), and the districts oversaw an apparently inadequate communications plan that left nearly half of the teachers working in the schools unaware that there were any bonuses to be earned.
The small bump in student achievement … how do we explain that? It's possible that we would have seen greater improvement with better program implementation. It's also possible that performance pay initiatives of this type have effects that mitigate the potential for any meaningful gains in student achievement. The flaws in this study run too deep for us to know the answer.
In our ongoing tally of performance pay experiments, we're putting this one in the dud column.
Looking for an effective math teacher? What about a skilled science instructor? Need both? UTeach programs have you covered.
That's the takeaway from a remarkably positive study of seven UTeach programs that prepare some of the most effective math and science teachers in Texas. Ben Backes and his colleagues at CALDER found that, compared to other high school teachers in the state, graduates from the original UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin produce as much as four months of additional learning in math and nearly six months of additional learning in science. For high school algebra and biology, the difference in student outcomes for UTeach and non-UTeach teachers is larger than the difference in outcomes between new teachers and what we typically see after a teacher has ten years of experience!
Established 20 years ago by UT Austin and now in place at 45 institutions in 21 states and the District of Columbia, UTeach not only produces more effective teachers but also produces a lot of them. STEM teacher production has grown substantially at many of the institutions, in some cases even doubling output since implementation of UTeach. By 2020, UTeach programs will have produced over 8,000 math and science teachers.
What's the secret? Unlike most traditional teacher prep programs (which recruit for those who wish to teach), UTeach programs seek to interest in teaching those headed to math and science majors. As early as their first year, program participants complete two field-based courses, and if they opt to continue, all professional coursework is STEM-specific. Teacher candidates can complete the UTeach program in four years, graduating with their math or science degrees along with certification.
While the study's authors concede the difficulty of conclusively ascribing outcomes to the UTeach model—as opposed to other institution-level effects—the central finding is clear: school leaders who hire UTeach grads are making a pretty good bet.
Over the course of NCTQ's first decade, I'll admit to having struggled a bit to figure out how to influence the policies and practices of school districts. There are 14,000 school districts, and only one of us.
For a substantial amount of time, we studied specific districts' teacher quality practices, hoping to generate change, one district at a time. The approach we took was to make sure whatever we learned in our studies was made available to local community actors, helping them to become change agents on our behalf. So each time we finished one of these studies, we'd deliver our findings at community meetings with lots of local press in attendance. With a few notable exceptions, the superintendent and even the union heads would show up, anxiously biting their bottom lips as NCTQ inevitably revealed data most districts would prefer not be held up for public consumption.
Though many of these studies generated important reforms, I'm no longer convinced that this was the right way to go. More recently, I'm struck by the enormous challenges school districts face, particularly big districts teaching a lot of kids who live in poverty. Districts rarely make the news for positive reasons. (Even when there is positive news, there always seems to be at least one reporter who, deciding that the district must be playing fast and loose with the numbers, acts like a dog with a bone.)
Enough with the self-criticism. It's time to discuss our fresh approach.
Last week we announced the first eight school districts in the country earning our Great Districts for Great Teachers honors. It's our way of elevating those school districts that have established the policies, programs, and most importantly the culture of recognizing, valuing, rewarding, and supporting their best teachers.
The first-ever Great District winners are (in alphabetical order):
Running in Place highlights the paradox of the ineffective "effective" teacher—one who fails to impact student achievement but remains eligible to receive a good performance evaluation. This prospect represents a major weakness in evaluation frameworks, and we'd love to see this particular loophole closed. But, no conversation about teacher evaluation is complete without a reminder about the importance of using multiple measures to assess teacher performance. A new study about student surveys gives us the perfect opportunity to keep up that drumbeat.
Researchers Tanner Wallace (University of Pittsburgh), Benjamin Kelcey (University of Cincinnati), and Erik Ruzek (University of Virginia) used data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project to see how well student perceptions of teacher quality aligned with other performance measures, including observations and value added. The survey instrument—Tripod—covers seven dimensions of teacher quality, including the student's perception that a teacher cares about students, solicits their viewpoint, teaches engaging material, clarifies ideas, places content in context, sets high expectations, and exhibits good classroom management.
They found that students' overall perception of their teachers (measured as a composite of all dimensions, except classroom management) correlated, albeit modestly, with teacher's value-added scores. The classroom management dimension, by itself, also correlated with teachers' value-added scores and the classroom management component of teacher observations. In other words, the study provides fresh evidence that student surveys provide credible, supplementary insight into teacher performance.
The results are good news for the rapidly growing number of states that rely on student surveys in teacher evaluations. In 2013, 14 states encouraged or required the use of student surveys in teacher evaluations; by 2015, that number had grown to 33. Together, surveys, student achievement measures, and observation scores can provide a more complete picture of a teacher's performance—presuming states and districts treat each component with the seriousness it deserves.
What makes the difference in how well low-income students perform on Advanced Placement (AP) exams?
A recent study published in Urban Education investigated over a dozen characteristics of students, teachers, and schools to identify common trends among students who beat expectations on AP Biology and AP Chemistry exams. The study, which included nearly 12,000 students in high-poverty schools, focused on students who earned higher AP scores than predicted based on their Preliminary SAT Qualifying Test (PSAT) results.
Student characteristics (in particular, whether a student speaks English as a second language) had the greatest impact on AP scores. Certain school and teacher characteristics also pushed the needle—but not always in the right direction. Teacher quality, teacher professional development, and school screening practices each add pieces to the puzzle.
Teacher knowledge and experience: A quality teacher can make the difference
Unsurprisingly, teacher knowledge and experience had a substantial, significant impact on student performance. When a teacher had more years of experience teaching a subject (especially teaching that specific AP course), stronger participation in professional associations and conferences related to their subject, or experience serving as an AP reader or consultant, the difference showed up in student scores. One of the best ways that schools can help their students earn higher AP scores is ensuring those classes are taught by teachers who really know their stuff.
Professional development: An inconsistent factor
For the best AP teachers, current professional development offerings just aren't cutting it. Teachers whose students beat expectations on the AP tests reported the lowest satisfaction with their PD activities. All teachers need the opportunity to continue their professional growth, and this study provides a prime example of how great teachers can feel left out of development opportunities that may not be differentiated for top-performers.
Student screening: High scores with a high cost
Of the schools in the study sample, 55 percent limited enrollment in AP classes using a screening process, which might be based on previous achievement or teacher recommendations. This selectivity created the single greatest AP score gain over expectations of any school or teacher variables. However, we know that student screening, particularly when it involves subjective judgments, tends to leave out students of color who could benefit from and succeed in challenging academic settings. Screening might produce a higher pass rate on AP tests, but if the end goal is to create a culture of high expectations for all students, more inclusive enrollment practices may win the day.
Other factors, such as greater per-student funding and a longer school year also led to better student performance, but the effects were fairly small. Students cannot change where they come from, the income-level of their parents, or their native language, but their schools (and teachers!) can provide them with opportunities to perform well on AP exams and beyond.
I saw this headline in my clips and did a double take, wondering if The Onion had begun mocking education policy: "Teachers would have to demonstrate ability to teach under bill headed to Utah Senate."
But no, it was a headline from the Utah Deseret News. Its irony wasn't lost on us but we wager most of the subscribers were left scratching their heads, not realizing that teachers don't have to demonstrate that they are effective teachers in order to keep their jobs. Even in states that have passed landmark laws within the last five years requiring that teachers' evaluations incorporate measures of student growth, virtually all teachers still continue to be rated effective.
The status quo on teacher evaluations has barely budged.
Given that Donald Trump's daily decisions tend to mop up all the press attention, it would have been easy to miss a new report from NCTQ, Running in Place: How New Teacher Evaluations Fail to Live Up to Promises. This report describes a rather remarkable yet unreported phenomenon in which 28 of the 30 states that now require teacher evaluations to incorporate significant evidence of student learning don't really do what these laws set out to accomplish. These new laws' regulations and guidelines, most of them probably written with substantive contributions from "stakeholder groups" interested in preserving the existing system, undercut the laws' intent.
In fact, in 16 states teachers who receive the lowest possible score on their ability to increase student learning, can still mathematically qualify for a rating of effective or higher. Another bunch of states chose not to weigh in but left it up to their districts to decide, with the results that there too we see little change in the status quo.
Running in Place highlights the danger of relying solely on legislative action to advance education reforms. It reveals how state education organizations need to become more centered around supporting positive change, even if it means disrupting cozy relationships with opponents of change. While we certainly should celebrate when a state legislature enacts reform-oriented laws, faithful implementation is crucial to the law's success in the real world.
Frankly, I fear the ship of teacher evaluation has not only sailed, but also sunk. Legislatures, hyper sensitive about shifts in political winds, will be more likely in 2017 to backpedal even further, given recent pushback on holding teachers accountable for student learning. After all, if teacher evaluation laws don't change the status quo, why bother expending political capital on them?
However, not all hope is lost. We know that states can take powerful action because two states have done so successfully. Indiana and Kentucky have clear policies that require teachers to meet specific goals on student learning in order to be rated effective. And New Mexico is implementing a system that sorts teachers into meaningfully different categories in spite of what the laws technically allows.
States should prevent teachers from earning an effective rating if they are ineffective at increasing student learning. Teacher evaluation must evolve from an exercise of compliance to a process that identifies an individual teacher's strengths and weaknesses in an effort to support continual development. ESSA provides states with a prime opportunity to carefully consider the role of student growth in their teacher evaluation systems.
A vital lesson from this study is how difficult it is to make real change in the education system that benefits students. Even if one level agrees to an improvement, other levels can thwart it. As exhausting as the legislative process may be, the regulatory process is just as important if not more important.
By working at all levels we can take stories about states ignoring student achievement in teacher ratings and relegate them to the realm of satire where they belong.
No school district wants to lose their most effective teachers. But pension systems, which are under the purview of state legislatures, are one roadblock to retention. These pension systems often incentivize teachers to make early retirements - and districts are powerless to change that.
Dongwoo Kim and his colleagues at the University of Missouri experiment with a novel retention tool aimed at teachers nearing retirement age.
They developed two models - one addressing STEM teachers in Missouri and the other addressing teachers found to be highly effective in another unnamed state. Each model estimates the effects of giving these teachers bonuses at particular ages, beginning with teachers in their mid-50s, around the time when they might begin to retire to maximize their pension benefits.
Not all that surprisingly, the bonuses did the trick, with larger bonuses having bigger effects. Furthermore, the effects compounded over time, meaning that experienced teachers would come to factor the expectation of bonuses into their retirement decisions and stay longer.
How expensive is this approach? They found that the net cost to get a STEM teacher to stay an additional year in Missouri schools is $32,000 (including the cost of the bonus, plus the additional cost of the experienced teacher's salary compared to an inexperienced new hire). That's not cheap, but for districts with specific shortages, the cost may be worth it.
Do low-income students have the same access to effective teachers as their more affluent peers? A new study from Eric Isenberg and his colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research and the Brookings Institution examines this question and draws a surprising conclusion.
In 26 urban districts, the researchers set out to measure the "effective teaching gap," that is, the discrepancy in students' access to effective teachers depending on their socioeconomic status (SES). Teacher effectiveness was determined entirely by value-added scores.
Applying this framework, if all students had equal access to effective teachers, the effective teaching gap would be zero. The reality wasn't that far off the mark and in contrast with the findings from a fair amount of other research. Many (though not all) of the districts turned out to be providing all students, no matter what their SES, roughly the same access to effective teachers.
To the districts' credit, these results reflected a good deal of work on their part. On average, districts in the study had implemented around five common strategies aimed at promoting the equitable distribution of teachers across schools. They include comprehensive teacher induction, highly selective alternative routes to teaching, targeted use of bonuses, performance pay, and early hiring timelines in high-need schools.
What makes this study so different from others that have pursued similar questions and gotten different results? For one, there were clear methodological differences, particularly when it comes to calculating a teacher's value-added score. Isenberg's study controls for peer effects (a measure of how the characteristics of a class as a whole might affect the performance of any one student); however, many other studies do not incorporate peer effects in value-added measures. In addition, this study focused solely on the distribution of teachers within each district, not between them. It did not attempt to answer the question as to an effective teaching gap between urban districts and the suburban districts that border them.
For a detailed discussion of the conflicting literature related to the effective teaching gap, we recommend this CALDER brief, which describes the debate around peer effects, differences in research conducted across vs. within districts, and other methodological points.
Teacher quality researchers made plenty of provocative headlines in 2016. They identified trends to monitor, new tips for the trade, and a few wins worth celebrating. Here are the papers we think are the 2016 standouts.
1. Great teachers beget more great teachers
Papay, J., Taylor, E., Tyler, J., & Laski, M. (2016). Learning job skills from colleagues at work: Evidence from a field experiment using teacher performance data.
In one of our favorite experiments of the year from researchers at Brown University and Harvard Graduate School of Education, researchers helped schools identify a teacher who was struggling in a particular area and matched that teacher with someone who excelled in that particular area. Then, they left them to their own devices. No training. No oversight. The paired teachers found a way to work with one another to address deficiencies and grow professionally. In the end, gains for the low-performing teacher were large and persistent from year to year.
2 and 3. And the theme continues: When it comes to professional development, small may be better
Jackson, K. & Makarin, A. (2016). Simplifying teaching: A field experiment with online "off-the-shelf" lessons.
Okonofau, J.A., Paunesku, D., & Walton, G.M. (2016). Brief intervention to encourage empathetic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents.
In a similar vein to the simple paired teaching strategy are two other papers, each helping us to better understand how professional development could be improved. They each involved inexpensive, light touch interventions that led to great gains. In the first, from the prolific Kirabo Jackson with his Northwestern colleague Alexey Makarin, teacher performance dramatically improved after they were given access to a library of high-quality, low-cost lesson plans in mathematics, as well as a few emails to remind them to use them. Teachers who also received access but no reminder emails did not use the plans and their performance did not improve. In the second paper, from Stanford researchers, suspension rates plummeted in classrooms taught by teachers who had participated in only a 45-minute online session, in which teachers were prompted to thinking about how to build more positive student-teacher relationships.
Both studies serve as a reminder that when big change is needed, every small step counts.
4. Districts must find better ways to address teachers' unintended racial bias
Grisson, J.A., & Redding, C. (2016). Discretion and disproportionality: Explaining the underrepresentation of high-achieving students of color in gifted programs.
2016 began with a sobering finding: even when black students have the same high test scores as white students, they are much less likely to be enrolled in a gifted education program. The main culprit is the identification process, relying heavily on teacher recommendations. As we explore in this paper, jointly authored with Brookings researcher Michael Hansen, districts will not be able to hire their way out of this problem, recruiting more teachers of color. The solutions must also include better training of faculty and safeguards to help teachers recognize and overcome their biases.
5. Groundbreaking policy and smart talent management continue to make the District of Columbia a district to emulate
Adnot, M., Dee, T., Katz, V., & Wyckoff, J. (2016). Teacher turnover, teacher quality, and student achievement in DCPS.
Over the last decade, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has charted new territory in teacher recruitment, retention, and management--and they have faced plenty of pushback and skepticism along the way. But this year the Academy has weighed in with a paper from University of Virginia researchers, surfacing proof that one of their biggest bets is paying off. By letting low-performers go, doubling down on retention efforts, and getting smart about recruitment, DCPS has increased the quality of their teacher workforce substantially. The result is real growth in student learning, surpassing what's been measured in any other urban district.
6. On the need to get more intentional about student teaching
Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J.M., & Theobald, R. (2016). Does the match matter? Exploring whether student teaching experiences affect teacher effectiveness and attrition.
Our top list wouldn't be complete without a paper from Dan Goldhaber and company. This year's top Goldhaber paper looks at student teaching, a much unstudied topic that the researcher and NCTQ both agree deserves a lot more attention. This Washington state study finds that teachers are more effective if they have completed their student teaching in a school that was demographically similar to the school where they would ultimately work. Not only that, but teachers are also more likely to remain in the profession if they student taught in a school that had low teacher turnover. Two important insights for teacher prep programs to ponder.
Today, NCTQ is excited to share the latest results in our ongoing analysis of teacher prep programs, this time focusing on what we've learned from 875 undergraduate elementary programs.This is our first set of grades since 2014, and our research discovered that programs have made some gains. We're far from out of the woods, but at least we can see a bit of light through the trees.
The top undergraduate elementary programs in 2016 (all scoring in the 99th percentile) are:
Purdue University (IN)
Louisiana Tech University (LA)
Texas A&M University (TX)
Taylor University (IN)
University of Alaska Fairbanks (AK)
CUNY - Hunter College (NY)
University of Houston (TX)
Arizona State University (AZ)
University of Arkansas (AR)
University of Mississippi (MS)
University of Nebraska - Lincoln (NE)
Unlike previous Reviews which grouped together all different types of teacher prep programs at once--publishing data on over 2,400 programs!--this report is smaller in scope, looking only at undergraduate programs preparing elementary school teachers. (We'll cover the other kinds of programs in future reports, each spread out by about six months, with the next one on undergraduate secondary due out in Spring 2017.) For more information on changes, see our Profile, one in a series of short blogs about different aspects of teacher prep and the TPR.
We are pleased to report some genuine overall progress by programs on the evidence-based criteria we examine. The big news is that more programs are adhering to evidence when teaching elementary teachers how to teach reading. In 2016, 39 percent of programs teach evidence-based approaches to early reading, up from 29 percent in 2014.
While most programs are still not selective enough (with only 26 percent limiting selection to the top half of college-goers), there was some progress. More programs that are housed in institutions lacking strong admissions requirements have stepped up, setting their own relatively high admissions standards (at least a 3.0 GPA for admission)--up from 44 in 2014 to 71 today.
Importantly, half of these selective programs are also relatively diverse when compared to the institution as a whole or to the state's teacher workforce. These 113 programs demonstrate that teacher prep programs can be both diverse and selective.
Unfortunately, in light of the recent PISA results, the news on mathematics preparation is gloomy. Just 13 percent of programs cover the essential math that other nations expect their elementary teachers to have mastered.
The findings are even worse on content preparation--which is so important for states that have adopted the Common Core or similar standards--with just 5 percent of programs requiring aspiring teachers to be exposed to the literature, history, geography, and science found in the elementary curriculum.
For more information see our Landscape report and our Teacher Prep Review website.
This report not only will help principals and human resource officers looking for where to find teachers with excellent training, high school guidance counselors will also find it helpful in advising students interested in becoming teachers to the best programs. It will help guide teacher prep programs in their own efforts to do better, and we hope it will inspire university officials to upgrade the quality of their teacher prep programs and even lead states to reconsider the oversight they provide.
We urge our readers to share this report with university officials and teacher prep leaders, encouraging them to use this as a blueprint for change. Districts also can use their leverage by recruiting first at top rated programs, giving their graduates first pick of jobs, and insisting that the programs make reforms if they want to continue to send their student teachers to the district. State officials can recommend that programs voluntarily adopt more research-proven methods and content or risk more mandates from above.
Thank you for joining us in our efforts to raise the quality of teacher prep programs so that all children can be taught by more effective teachers.
If there's one thing that research has shown us time and again, it's that being a brand new teacher is hard—and being one of their first students is not all that ideal either. But what happens when an experienced teacher switches to a new grade level or subject? Does she start all over again? This shift, called "churn," might not sound like a big deal, but as with any change in professional responsibilities, it does come with a learning curve and some predictable consequences.
In a new study looking at data from New York City over a 35-year period, Allison Attebury (UC Boulder), Susanna Loeb (Stanford), and Jim Wyckoff (UVA) find that a student taught by a churned teacher faces a moderate disadvantage. But because 25 percent of the city's teachers churn to a new grade, subject, or both within their school every year, that moderate difference can really add up to a significant learning loss over several years.
Little Johnny encounters 4-5 churned teachers in grades 3-8, but just one brand new teacher.
As we explored in last month's TQB, it seems plausible that there could be an upside to shifting teachers to new grades within a school. Maybe Mrs. Jones does better with older students than younger, and so a switch in this instance could help her find a better teaching fit. But unfortunately, this study did not support that hypothesis as a guiding principle. Instead there's no clear evidence that churned teachers end up performing much better in new positions.
Nevertheless, if we're not speaking about within-school churn but transferring schools, it may be another story. Susanna Loeb, one of the study's co-authors, recently published another study with Min Sun (University of Washington) and Jason Grissom (Vanderbilt) that does identify some benefit to moving teachers around. Experienced and relatively effective math teachers who transfer from one school to another create a "spillover" effect—meaning math scores go up for the students taught by the other teachers in that grade level. This finding suggests that there are some ways in which administrators can rethink teaching assignments to improve student outcomes—as long as these shifts are made sparingly and strategically.
Passing a good law and implementing it with fidelity are two very different tasks.
Earlier this summer, Indiana University researchers took a
thorough look at that state's ground game on teacher evaluations—and identified quite a few missed opportunities.
Like many states, Indiana passed a law that ushered in evaluation reform (the implementation timeline is
here), being one of the first states out of the gate. Most notably, the law required districts to use student
achievement to evaluate teachers starting in 2014. Ultimately, each district
was permitted to develop its own evaluation system—provided it met certain
criteria established by the state.
That
provision resulted in 271 evaluation plans which are all over the map in terms
of quality. (There are roughly
295 districts in the state, but not all of
them submitted evaluation plans that were reviewable by the researchers.) The
majority fail to include key components that the researchers assert would be
elements of any high-quality evaluation—and indeed it's hard to argue with
their logic. For example, only 15 percent of districts link a teacher's
evaluation with their professional development, and less than 25 percent of
districts require evaluators to hold pre- and post-observation conferences with
teachers, giving them the feedback they need and deserve.
In
addition, many districts struggled to articulate policies that would have built
teacher trust in the evaluation process. Fewer than half of the districts
require evaluator training and certification, and fewer than a third of the
districts convene an evaluation oversight committee. Of those districts that
have an oversight committee, few districts have put a process in place for the
leadership team to meet regularly and resolve ongoing issues.
Change
is hard. If we want to make
evaluation reform stick, districts need to not only lay
the foundations of a fair and reliable system, but also include practices and
policies that make evaluations meaningful for, and trusted by, teachers.
For a long time, we've
heard about the damage done by teacher turnover. Often, the thinking is that
schools struggle to replace the teachers who leave with replacements who
perform at least as well or better.
And while it is true
that high turnover can really hurt a school, it turns out that the damage is
largely caused by the ripple effect of a teacher leaving, mainly the amount of
grade switching that occurs. A new working paper
from Eric Hanushek, Steven Rivkin, and Jeffrey Schiman measures the broader
impact of teacher turnover in a large school district in Texas.
When a teacher leaves a
school, the remaining teachers often have the opportunity to move around,
selecting what might be considered 'better' grades and leaving the more
'difficult' grades to be taught by newer teachers. Not only do the new teachers
have to deal with the more difficult assignment, but the teachers who switch
grades, as some other recent research
has found, are also less effective, at least in their first year teaching the
new grade.
Not as new but always
worth restating: Hanushek et al. again
find that the weaker teachers were more likely to leave their schools than
strong teachers, which means that unfocused efforts to reduce turnover are not
necessarily in the best interest of schools.
If you look closely, they're actually not hard
to find: inexpensive professional development opportunities for teachers that
actually do make a real difference in student learning. Earlier this year, we
covered an experiment that demonstrated that teachers are remarkably more
empathic towards their students after completing just a brief 70-minute exercise. We also learned how pairing a highly skilled teacher with one
who is struggling, even absent a formal curriculum, turns out to be more
effective than a lot of higher priced PD models.
Now, we're offered new evidence that spending
very little money giving teachers access to high-quality math lessons can yield
big pay offs.
In a white paper from the National Bureau of
Economic Research, Kirabo Jackson and Alexey Makarin describe a nice little
experiment in which 119 math teachers were given access to a library of
inquiry-based lesson plans that currently runs at a cost of $320 per teacher
for the year. Teachers also received a few occasional email reminders about the
availability of the resources and were reminded that they could collaborate on Edmodo with other teachers
also using the lessons. That was it.
The results were remarkable. By the end of the
year, the growth in student achievement among these teachers was on par with
far more costly efforts, such as reducing class size by 15 percent or replacing
an average-quality teacher with a great one.
A couple of interesting points:
First, it was the lowest performing teachers who
saw the greatest gains.
Second, there were some teachers in the
experiment who didn't get the email reminders and, with that group, there were
no gains at all.
There are also some important caveats to this small study, including
a significant decrease in lesson downloads and usage over time, suggesting that
teachers did not themselves appreciate their value enough to implement more of
them.
You can check out the lessons used in the study on the Mathalicious website.
As we discussed
earlier this month, holding teacher prep programs accountable for the
performance of their graduates is no easy task. The data is often scant and
researchers usually can't distinguish any standouts in a sea of mediocre or weak
programs.
That's why we are
pretty enthusiastic about a new study
from Matthew Ronfeldt and Shanyce Campbell of the University of Michigan. Previous
studies looked only to one data source—graduates' value-added scores—to determine the
strength of program graduates. These
two researchers use multiple measures involving, first, teacher observation
scores and, second, value-added scores. They unearth clear evidence that others
have not: not all programs are created equal.
In the sample of 118
programs, 21 surface for graduating teachers who consistently have either
higher observation scores than most other programs, or, conversely, consistently
lower scores.
The waters do get
muddied a bit when folding back in the value-added measures. Not surprisingly,
programs that did really well or really badly on observation scores didn't
always have similar results on value-added. In fact only about 40 percent of
the programs produced observation and value added scores that were similarly
positive or negative.
Nevertheless, if a
policymaker were to assess program quality by looking only at the overlapping
data, it seems safe to conclude that there are programs clearly succeeding or
failing--producing teachers who consistently get both great evaluations and great test score results or the
reverse.
When all was said and done,
there were #25 standout programs in the state, but as is the frustrating custom
of academic research, these programs were not identified.
These promising results
reinforce our interest in multiple measures for evaluating program quality. One
such additional measure could be provided by TPI-US, essentially a
comprehensive on-site inspection process imported from the United Kingdom. In its
assessment process, teams of four trained education professionals visit prep
programs to collect evidence on program quality as well as to provide actionable
feedback. They observe student teachers and course instructors, examine data on
candidate performance, and conduct interviews with key stakeholders, including
graduates and leaders at the schools that hire them—all of which could serve as
yet another source of data on a program's quality.
Licensure tests:
depending on who you ask, they're either an important check on a prospective
teacher's knowledge before entering the profession or a burdensome requirement
that keeps good candidates out of the classroom.
If
you want to judge the quality of a teacher prep program, one approach is
obvious: examine whether the teachers who graduate from that program actually
help students learn.
Easier
said than done. Many factors affect whether a teacher will succeed in the
classroom, and determining how training factors into that success requires more
data and statistical power than is typically available. That's one of the
reasons that academic researchers, states, accreditation agencies, and NCTQ's Teacher Prep
Review assess prep programs
mainly by measuring the program features known to influence teacher
quality—such as admissions standards and what teacher candidates are being
taught about reading instruction.
A
new study
from Paul T. von Hippel (UT-Austin) and his colleagues is among the most
promising of the few studies that have sought to measure the direct impact of
individual prep programs on student learning. Thanks to cooperation with the
Texas Education Agency, he was able to examine outcomes across thousands of
teachers and hundreds of thousands of students in the nation's second-largest
state.
Unfortunately,
even with this much data, they turned up little new evidence that one teacher
prep program is better than another.
Given
the impressive load of data that von Hippel et al. had at their disposal, this
conclusion raises some red flags. The data set is unprecedented in size and
includes a diverse set of traditional and alternative prep programs. Given this
variety, it is reasonable to expect to be able to pinpoint at least a few
obviously high or low performers. Instead, we see more evidence that many of
the challenges in teacher prep likely exist across the board. It's a finding
not unlike NCTQ's own much different scan of the landscape in which 80 percent
of all teacher prep programs earned scores classifying them as weak or failing.
The
study authors use these results to warn policymakers against using student
outcomes data to make decisions about program expansion and closure, reasoning
that the programs were all too similar for anyone to be sure they were singling
out the right ones. We're hoping Texas policymakers will start asking a new
question: Why are programs continuing to
operate without clear and specific standards for what teachers should know and
be able to do?
Is it too much to ask that professionals stay abreast of the research? The authors of a recently published study, "
The Dyslexia Dilemma
," don't think it is and the extended
title of the study suggests the reasons why without mincing words: "A History of Ignorance, Complacency and Resistance in Colleges of Education."
[1] The
study highlights the fact that the Science of Reading instruction is neither
studied nor taught in teacher prep programs.
For 20 percent of
children, reading is the most complicated, difficult endeavor they will face
probably until adulthood. Often these children who struggle to learn to
read are labeled "dyslexic." The term has been medicalized into a neurological
syndrome across the board. The authors of this study, led by David Hurford,
contend that these children are simply not being properly taught. The authors'
dissatisfaction with the failure of teacher preparation programs to teach the
science of reading to aspiring teachers almost rises to the level of outrage—as
well it should.
In spite of decades of research and
legislation going back to the 1980s' A Nation at Risk, the 1990's America's
Schools Act, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the 2001 National Reading
Panel Report, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, and the Common Core State
Standards initiative, reading achievement in the United States remains
stagnant. By NAEP measures, reading achievement remains at 1992 levels. Well
over 50 percent of children in grades 4, 8, and 12 do not read at a proficient
level. Even the attempted "end run" of a couple decades of teaching to the test
has not caused the scores to budge.
Failure to learn to read has dire consequences
reaching beyond the school years well into adulthood. The psychosocial issues
related to dyslexia include low self-esteem, depression, post-traumatic stress,
substance abuse, incarceration, poverty, social dysfunction, and more. Failure
to learn to read proficiently also constitutes a national economic
liability.
Nonetheless, a survey of hundreds of teachers
revealed serious gaps in teachers' knowledge of basic scientific findings. It's
especially lacking when it comes to their need to understand the structural
phonology of language and its relationship to learning to read. Only 20 percent
in a sample of over 700 teachers could segment words into speech sounds, for
example. The teachers surveyed reported that they had never received formal
instruction in phonological processing.
NCTQ has documented this lack of instruction in the
reading courses taken by teachers. So too has Kelly Butler from the Barksdale
Institute in Mississippi, Milt Joshi from Texas A&M, and several others.
Not surprisingly, phonemic awareness is the single most absent topic in reading
syllabi. So let's be clear about reading failure and teacher accountability:
teachers cannot teach what they themselves
have not been taught.
In the same way that teachers cannot teach what they
have not been taught, neither can college instructors. The difference is that
college instructors have a responsibility to be on the cusp of research. Both
the ignorance and culpability are systemic in colleges of education.
In addition to documenting the pervasive weaknesses
in reading found in most Ed.D. and Ph.D. programs, Hurford et al point to the
persistence of myth in teacher preparation, the most insidious of all being the
idea that learning to read is a natural, innate process—the myth that gave rise
to the scientifically discredited and abject failure of the "Whole Language"
approach to reading instruction.
Many children who
come to school ready to read are labeled dyslexic. The etiology of their
dyslexia notwithstanding, they can be taught to read. Hurford
et al close with: "Children with dyslexia and reading difficulties are waiting
to be taught to read and the knowledge and skills necessary to do so exist. It
is essential that the Science of Reading become part of the vocabulary,
knowledge base and training within colleges of education." Children who are
neurologically dyslexic or just struggling to learn to read will continue to
suffer until the benefits of scientific findings gleaned over decades of
research with tens of thousands of children and adults make their way into
college classrooms.
Bob Marino leads
the NCTQ review of reading coursework as part of the Teacher Prep Review and is
a former principal in Baltimore City Public Schools.
The entire Teacher Preparation Strategies team was saddened to learn of the death of Sam Stringfield, a member of the Technical Panel for the Teacher Prep Review. Sam's passion for better teacher preparation was evident in all of his advice, often expressed in no-holds-barred emails that overflowed with wit and wisdom.
For most students, the start of middle school represents
some newfound independence. For the first time, they get to travel the halls
from class to class without being led by an adult.
Of course, this new freedom stems from how middle
schools are set up. Few teachers have the training to teach every subject in
the middle school curriculum so instead of having one primary teacher, there
are at least four. Students find themselves traveling to the teachers, each a
specialist in their subject area.
There's been a lot of debate over the years about when
to introduce subject specialization. In fact many elementary schools introduce
the model at 4th grade.
But a strong new study from Harvard economist
Roland Fryer calls into question that practice.
Fryer conducted a two-year experiment in 50 public
elementary schools in Houston, Texas. Half of the schools remained on a
traditional elementary school schedule; in the other half, principals assigned
teachers to teach specific subjects based on their observed strengths and
previous value-added scores.
For the most part, assigning teachers to specific
subjects didn't make much of a difference—and when it did, that difference was
generally negative. Reading and math scores declined, while problem behaviors
and absences actually increased—albeit to a small degree. Basic economic theory
predicted an efficient assembly line in which every teacher installed her
piece; reality told another story.
It's hard to know exactly why the experiment didn't
have better results. Perhaps teacher specialization would have a positive
impact if teachers received extra training in their assigned subjects. Perhaps
lost time getting to know each individual student eliminates any benefits that
could come from specialization.
Regardless of the cause, the results serve as a
helpful reminder that elementary
teachers need a strong grounding in all four traditional content areas, not
just the ones they're more drawn to, as principals can't simply
rearrange staff based on interest or inclination and expect better student outcomes.
Further, Fryer's study is robust, using a large sample size, multi-year
implementation, sound experimental design, and realistic policy implementation.
As this study failed to find a benefit to teacher specialization in Houston's elementary
schools, it's unlikely that other districts would fare better.
One feature of an ideal school environment, we
believe, is that both students and their teachers reflect America in all of its
diversity. Everyone, including children coming from privilege, benefits from a
diverse school experience.
It's no wonder that as the minority student
population has grown in numbers in the past few decades, surpassing 50 percent,
so many of us are troubled that the minority teacher population has failed to
keep pace, standing now at only 18 percent minority. The push to achieve racial
parity between teachers and students has never been stronger, with urgent calls
from school boards, states, and even the U.S. Department of Education for the
nation to make teacher diversity a top goal for school districts.
This sentiment is understandable, commendable, but
— at the risk of being a wet blanket — not even remotely achievable within the
foreseeable future.
No matter how you run the numbers, school districts
simply cannot recruit and retain enough black and Hispanic teachers to achieve
racial parity between the teacher workforce and the U.S. student body – no
matter how many reprimands HR officials have to face from the their school
boards for the paltry results.
Researchers from NCTQ and The Brookings Institution
recently analyzed what it would take to create a teaching workforce as diverse
as the students it serves. You can find a full report of our analysis and
findings here.
We estimate the effects of different interventions
that might increase the number of minority teachers, extrapolating population
projections for the next four decades to see how close they can come to
creating a racially representative teacher workforce.
The findings are startling: parity or even
significant inroads to parity will remain completely elusive unless we fire on
all cylinders. If we can somehow boost the rates of college completion,
interest in teaching, hiring, and retention so that these rates for black and
Hispanic college students and adults mirror the rates of their white
counterparts, then parity becomes an achievable goal – but is still several
decades away.
How can this be?
Let's walk through what we found, drawing on a
model we built using U.S. Census projections and data about the current teacher
and student populations to estimate the impact of various interventions.
For example, let's see where a big push on
retention of black teachers gets us. Currently, 16 percent of America's public school
students are black, compared to 7 percent of teachers, creating a nine
percentage point gap in the diversity of students and teachers.
What could happen if schools took real and
substantive steps to retain their black teachers so that year in and year out
black teachers stay in the classroom at the same rate as white teachers
(improving their current attrition rate from 10 percent to mirror white
teachers' 7 percent)? We still wouldn't close the diversity gap even projecting
out to 2060 (the furthest year of Census projections available).
Next, imagine we committed ourselves heart, body,
and soul (as many districts are, in fact, trying to do) to hire more black
teachers. The rewards would be tiny even projecting all the way out to 2060.
Okay, so what about persuading more black college
students to consider teaching? Higher education could heavily promote teaching
with undergraduates, or graduate programs and alternative providers could
recruit more black candidates—something that many claim to be doing already.
But let's imagine pouring some real resources into these strategies, such as increased
salaries, loan forgiveness, or more leadership opportunities to succeed in
persuading black adults to consider teaching at the same rate as white adults (currently
4.3 percent of black undergraduate students major in education compared with
6.9 percent of white undergraduates; we see similar disparities for graduate
college education degrees and alternative certification enrollment).
Again, the results would be fairly paltry – closing
the diversity gap by about two and a half percentage points by 2060.
I'm guessing that a lot of people reading this are
thinking "but look at the success of Teach For America, now recruiting new
cohorts which are about 50 percent teachers of color?" TFA was able to achieve
these huge gains in part because it developed unprecedented recruitment efforts
of minority students beginning in their freshmen year—a great strategy to
emulate. But keep in mind that the corps is tiny compared to America's needs.
Teach For America supplies less than 3 percent of the nation's teachers. Its
hard push on this problem still only produced about 800 new black corps members
in a year. That's enough to translate into significant gains for TFA, which is
only recruiting some 4,100 teachers in a year, but remains a far cry from the
300,000 more black teachers needed to achieve parity across all American
schools.
Let's go back to the point of greatest disparity
between black and white students: the college completion rate. If we invest
heavily to support black students and ameliorate their low college completion
rate so that they graduate college at the same rate as white students
(currently 28 percent of black 22-year olds have earned a bachelor's degree,
compared with 47 percent of white 22-year olds), we still will not come close
to closing the gap by 2060.
Disheartening, no?
For Hispanic teachers, the dismal scenario is much
the same. In fact because the Hispanic population in the US is growing at such
a fast rate, much faster than the black population, the diversity gap is
expected to widen if we do not take action.
Only if we are able to graduate more Hispanic
teachers from college or draw more Hispanic adults into careers in teaching can
we reduce the growing diversity gap significantly, otherwise expected to be 22 percentage
points by 2060.
Clearly, the answer is to combine all these
interventions and be successful at
all of them (success defined here as achieving the same rates as their white
counterparts) to make any real dent. If over the next decade we were to improve
college completion rates, interest in teaching, hiring, and retention to mirror
that of white teachers at every point, we would actually achieve parity by the
year 2044 for black teachers and students. The picture is less cheery for
Hispanic teachers, only coming within the ballpark (three percentage points
away from racial parity) by consistent pushes through 2060.
So are we
suggesting we all throw up our hands and give up on achieving greater parity?
Absolutely not. But let's not underestimate the ambition, commitment, and
persistence needed, or browbeat school superintendents or human resources
officials when they are only able to make incremental progress. Let's also not
advocate for racial parity at the expense of quality. The research is clear
that students' success still depends most on the quality of their teachers
In the meantime, other important solutions can
achieve greater equity in our schools. Let's look for meaningful ways to ensure
that teachers – who want to do right by their students – don't unintentionally
do harm to the kids who don't look like them. Let's go beyond the stuff of
current trainings in which teachers and teacher candidates engage in a lot of
reflecting on their implicit biases, analyzing their white privilege, or
developing cultural sensitivity, much of which hasn't had much impact –
although these do play an important role. Let's do more to have teachers
examine their daily interactions with students by asking themselves: which
students do they call on to answer questions? Are some students more likely to receive
harsher disciplinary actions than others? Do they select some groups of students
for more challenging work over others? Give teachers the training and tools to
make sure that they do not allow their biases along race, gender, class, or any
other lines to get in the way of helping every child thrive.
It's a popular movie theme--the story of that one teacher who really connects with
students, setting them on the right path to a productive future.
We're thrilled to welcome NCTQ's newest addition to
our Board of Directors, Paul Kihn. Paul
brings with him the ideal resume to guide NCTQ into the future having taught
middle school both in the US and South Africa, earning his school district
stripes as the #2 in Philadelphia's public schools and as an educational consultant for McKinsey &
Company. Welcome Paul!
You
can't teach what you don't know—and
when it comes to math, some teachers just don't know enough. Why?
Michigan
State University professor William H. Schmidt and his colleagues look at the
mathematics that American middle school teachers took during their teacher
preparation and produce some hard evidence of prevailing substandard
preparation.
First
though, recall some earlier
work in which Schmidt examined how teachers were prepared in 16
countries. There, he unearthed the essential knowledge for middle school
teachers based on the relationship between coursework and teachers' strong
performance on an international assessment of math content knowledge and math
pedagogical content knowledge. The top performing teachers had all studied nine
topics, including linear algebra, calculus, probability, differential
equations, functions/equations and also had opportunities to analyze math
instruction.
This latest study looks
more closely at US preparation, examining how many US programs deliver this
essential content. Even on this basic question, Schmidt finds enormous,
inexplicable variations among institutions in what they consider to be
essential content. Schmidt estimates that only about a third of America's
middle school teachers took coursework addressing this content. For the rest of
teachers, a sizeable portion of the content never gets covered. Compare that to
some of our international counterparts which include a number of countries
where 80 percent of all teachers learned essential content.
Percentage
of Middle School Teachers Who Completed at Least Eight of Nine Essential Math
Courses
If half the battle is just showing up, some teachers have already lost the war.
That's what we learned in our 2014 study Roll Call: The Importance of Teacher Attendance. In 40 large school districts, we found that while most teachers come to work regularly, a significant number of teachers (44 percent across the districts) missed a heck of a lot of school—11 or more days in an average school year.
Last month, the US Department of Education followed suit, releasing data that reinforces our findings. And, just like Roll Call, it revealed inexplicable differences among states, with Utah and South Dakota reporting relatively low rates of chronic absenteeism but others faring much worse, with 75 percent of teachers in Hawaii and 49 percent of teachers in Nevada missing more than 10 days per year.
Neither NCTQ nor the Education Department data sheds light on why some schools struggle so much with this basic personnel practice. So there's much to be said for new research from Seth Gershenson which unearths at least one device that improves teacher attendance: threat of sanctions.
Looking at data from the early days of No Child Left Behind, Gershenson examines how K-5 teachers in North Carolina responded when their school failed to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP). Teachers in schools that failed to make AYP in 2003 significantly reduced their absences in the following year by about 10 percent. Chronic absenteeism (when teachers miss 15 or more days) fell by 20 percent.
Not surprisingly, these declines in teacher absences translated to real gains in student achievement.
NCLB was certainly not without its flaws, but this study serves as another reminder that strong systems of accountability lead to positive outcomes—and that every day a teacher spends in her classroom matters to her students. The challenge of teacher absences is unlikely to have a single solution, but we're grateful for any additional insight.
Every great teacher knows that her grading practices need to be fair. And any good policymaker should know that teachers expect the same of their own performance evaluations.
That's one of the reasons why in 2014, the U.S. Department of Education offered states the option to delay using student growth data to evaluate teachers during the transition to new state standards and assessments. "These changes are incredibly important," Arne Duncan
explained, "and educators should not have to make them in an atmosphere of worry."
Still, many wondered: Would the new test scores
actually
have led to inaccurate value-added measures for teachers?
To
help settle the essentially theoretical question, Ben Backes and his colleagues
examined value-added
scores from before, during, and after states' transition to new standards and
assessments. The five-state study, conducted with support from CALDER, included
changes that occurred during the Common Core era and as far back as 2001.
The
conclusion: assessment data from transition years would have produced the same
evaluation results for teachers as the older tests.
The
researchers analyzed the data from multiple angles, including the correlation
of value-added scores from year to year, the likelihood that a top- or
bottom-ranked teacher in one year would rank in the same range the next year,
and differences in teacher performance rankings by classroom type (advantaged
or disadvantaged). All in all, transition-year math assessments performed about
the same as in other years across all five states; in reading, two states saw
slightly more variability during transition periods.
It's
good news, but it doesn't mean the one-year moratorium was a mistake. For
teachers who were already skeptical of value-added in 2014, the message that
transition-year data would likely be much the same as data from any other year
probably wouldn't have soothed any anxieties. A smart political decision, even
if there was no crisis to avert.
In the face of all evidence on the (apparently) utter uselessness of most professional development, might there be something that works? A new NBER working paper claiming just that perked up our ears.
Researchers John Papay, Eric Taylor, John Tyler, and Mary Laski employed a relatively simple approach. High- and low-performing teachers in Tennessee were paired together based on their professional strengths and weaknesses and then asked to spend a year developing the low-performer's skills that needed improving.
That's it.
No new, mandatory meetings. No expensive coaches. No new policies. And cheap. The only real cost to schools was the time the teachers needed to work with each other—and even that was left to the discretion of each school.
The results were astounding: in classrooms taught by low-performing teachers, students scored, on average, 0.12 standard deviations higher than students in the control classrooms. To put that in perspective, the authors compare this improvement to what you would expect from a student assigned to a teacher ranked at the median rather than in the bottom quartile—or to an experienced teacher rather than a novice teacher. There was also evidence to suggest that the gains in teacher performance persisted or even grew in the year after the partnership was completed.
Might this be a one-hit wonder? After all, it only looked at 136 teachers who all taught in the middle grades. A study of the impact on a larger sample is in the works. For the cost, though, we think it might be worth a try elsewhere!
30
million words. It's a staggering number representing the tremendous gap in the
number of utterances (not distinct words) a child hears by age
four—depending on where his family falls on the socioeconomic spectrum.
Preschool
is regarded by many as the best opportunity for an early course correction,
allowing all children to be launched on a successful
academic—and life—trajectory no matter what is happening at home. Yet the jury
is still out on whether preschool can deliver on that promise. Research on the
long lasting contributions of preschool is at best mixed.
There's
a lot of conjecture about why preschool investments may not
pay off as much as one might expect: the length of the preschool, parents' involvement,
support services, low quality curricula, and poor oversight.
One
more plausible but largely ignored explanation remains: poor and/or
uneven preparation of preschool teachers.
While
preschool teachers' dismally low salaries have garnered lots of attention, even this week, there's
been little attention to the training given to preschool teachers before they
enter the classroom.
A new
NCTQ study to be released next week explores whether programs are
delivering essential content preschool teachers need. After all, beyond
being patient and caring, preschool teachers must be able to learn
and practice a wide swath of essential skills.
Put
more practically, when faced with the tremendous gaps in language skills in a
classroom of 20 four-year-olds, how many of us would have an inkling of where
to start?
Many
preschool advocates heavily champion the notion that all preschool teachers
must earn a bachelor's degree in order to guarantee sufficient quality. Some 33
states now require that the preschool teachers in the programs they fund must
have bachelor's degrees.
Though
there's been little hard research to help guide that requirement, states made
what seemed like a safe bet, assuming that teachers who earn a bachelor's
degree are more likely to learn how to create a higher quality preschool
environment than teachers who do not earn one.
Yet,
as it turned out, the assumption was just that, an assumption.
Our
new study out on June 22nd, Some Assembly Required, takes a
look at a healthy sample of 100 teacher preparation programs located in 29
states. The vast majority of these 100 programs conferred
degrees: 54 led to a bachelor's degree and 41 to a master's, as
well as 5 at the associate's degree level. We looked at course
requirements, course descriptions, syllabi, student teaching handbooks,
observation instruments, and textbooks to identify high-level evidence of key
content.
A review of these multiple factors reveals that almost all of these programs fail
to reference even basic
content needed for a teacher to learn how to build children's language, a
precursor to becoming a successful reader.
In many programs, the instructional skills specific to the
job of preschool teaching are marginalized, buried by other content only relevant to a teacher of later grades. Even on paper,
programs do not claim to devote much—or any—time to training candidates in
developing young children's language skills and vocabulary or building critical literacy skills.
It's
not just language and literacy that get short shrift. We found even less
evidence of programs attending to the knowledge preschool teachers need to
build math skills, explore early science concepts, or help children develop
executive functioning skills.
We're
all for raising the bar for educators, especially those that play the crucially
important role of teaching young children. A bachelor's degree makes
sense. But we need to make sure that the sheepskin earned by the preschool
teacher stands for something relevant and valuable.
Want
to learn more? Join the webinar next Wednesday, June
22.
We've known for years that students of color are underrepresented in gifted education programs across the country.
Over the last few decades, the field of teacher education
has heavily promoted the use and even the mandatory adoption by states of
standardized assessments that can be used to judge how well a teacher candidate
can deliver a lesson. The push has come with a promise that these
"TPAs" fulfill three important and otherwise largely elusive functions:
1.
They would help programs to better structure
training on how to plan and deliver instruction far better than the home-grown
efforts used by most programs.
2.
They identify the quality of candidates and
therefore can serve a gatekeeper for entry into the profession.
3.
They provide information which states could use
in the aggregate to hold programs accountable for their training.
We concluded four
years ago that the edTPA adequately fulfills the first function. TPAs are
an exponential improvement over the rubrics and observation forms most programs
use to assess a "live" lesson.
A new
study from three researchers at CALDER (Dan Goldhaber, James Cowan, and Roddy Theobald) provides evidence
on this second function—whether TPAs actually identify the more capable
candidates who deserve to be entrusted with a classroom of children. That's long overdue given the pressure that
AACTE and others have put on states to adopt an instrument without any evidence
that it was predictive of teacher performance.
As was widely
reported in the press last week, results from graduates of teacher prep
programs in Washington state (one of the first states to adopt the edTPA) are
mixed. Goldhaber et al. found that a passing score in the reading portion of
the edTPA is significantly predictive of teacher effectiveness in reading, but
not in the math portion.
Given that the edTPA is a lot of work for programs and is
costly to boot, is this enough bang for the buck? After all, instructions for
candidates entail 40 pages and candidates are alerted that they can be
evaluated on the edTPA on nearly 700 different items. The process consumes the
attention of teacher candidates and teacher educators in their programs for a
good share of candidates' semester-long student teaching placement.
There's a strong argument that the complexity is merited if
it prevents unqualified persons from teaching—unless the same results could be
had with a lot less time and investment. A recent
study on the measures employed by District of Columbia Public Schools to
screen its teacher applicants indicates that one of the components with
predictive validity is simply a 10-minute audition. A few more studies with
similar results may make it difficult to justify blanketing the nation with edTPA
requirements.
That leaves the third function: program accountability. According
to Goldhaber, the variation of scores of candidates within Washington programs is greater than the variation of scores across programs. This result, which
Goldhaber did not publish, means that all but the most egregiously low performing
programs are likely to have candidates whose scores vary considerably across
the range.
The bottom line to date in this still-unfolding story about
TPAs: the edTPA 1) is a good organizing vehicle for training, 2) may produce
scores that at least partially discriminate among candidates in terms of
effectiveness—but through a process that appears to be unnecessarily
cumbersome, and 3) may produce scores that cannot be used to hold programs
accountable because they are insufficiently related to the quality of candidate training.
On behalf of the entire Teacher Preparation Strategies team, I want to express our sadness at the death of Barry Kaufman and our condolences to his wife of 50 years, Gail. Barry provided NCTQ with invaluable assistance for close to six years as a member of the Technical Panel for the Teacher Prep Review. Barry's expertise—gained from serving as an ed school dean and as a member of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing—was combined with an unwavering commitment to improve teacher preparation. He always made himself available to NCTQ staff for consultation and helped us to ensure that the picture of teacher prep painted in NCTQ reports is accurate. We will miss Barry's endless goodwill and spot-on advice!
The headline of a new study from Matthew A. Kraft (Brown University) and David Blazar (Harvard Graduate School of Education) caught our eye: Intensive, personalized coaching programs can improve teacher performance substantially.
Professional development that works? Well… perhaps.
The two researchers examined New Orlean's yearlong adaptation
of a coaching program from Boston-based MATCH School. Participants spend a week
in a summer workshop followed by four one-week sessions of observation and
feedback. Importantly, the participants teach a range of grades and subjects,
distinguishing the program from more common coaching interventions that focus
on early literacy.
Teachers who got the coaching scored significantly higher
than the uncoached teachers on an index of teacher quality that includes
classroom observation scores, principal evaluation, and student surveys. In
fact, the impact of having been coached exceeded even the impact of a teacher
gaining more experience. The difference between coached and uncoached groups
was nearly 50 percent higher than the difference between novice and experienced
teachers.
Coached teachers outperformed uncoached teachers by 0.59 standard deviations. For comparison, experienced teachers (3+ years experience) outperformed novice teachers (1 or 2 years experience) by a smaller margin of 0.44 standard deviations.
Despite relying on a generally strong methodology, the size of the sample involving only 30 matched pairs tones down our enthusiasm a tad. But more importantly, the sample is restricted to teachers from urban charter schools who wanted to participate in the program—meaning that this approach may not translate well to other settings or less willing groups of teachers.
Still, given how little we know about how to help teachers improve, even preliminary evidence of some ways professional development might become more effective is noteworthy.
Isn't it amazing how someone or some things gain traction when the facts clearly aren't on their side?
Just like the media handed off most of its airtime and column inches to elevate Donald Trump's candidacy, so too is the media guilty of announcing a crisis in teacher supply when the facts just don't support it.
While there are no data to suggest we are in the midst of teacher shortage, there are certainly school districts that are experiencing real problems—but they're largely the same school districts which have been struggling for years, even in times the media was reporting big teacher layoffs.
There are some data to suggest that enrollment has dropped considerably in some teacher preparation programs in some states. But as we'll show, it's a big leap to say that the drop in enrollment means there won't be enough teachers.
These two graphs from economist
Dan Goldhaber illustrate the importance of taking the long view.
This first graph does indeed
show that the number of new teachers produced since 2008 has declined. But keep
in mind that that drop was preceded by a
three-decade
period of enrollment growth
, far outpacing the demand year-in and year-out
(as the second graph shows). America's 1,450+ institutions which train teachers
have been OVER-enrolling for years.
The current decline is what we
normally see when unemployment dips and the pool of folks looking for work
isn't as large as in other years.
And as programs have not traditionally
seen it as their responsibility to direct candidates to shortage teaching areas
(e.g. special ed), there continue to be massive misalignment between the types
of teachers trained and the types of teachers public schools need to hire.
Most notably, programs have been
routinely graduating twice as many new elementary teachers as public schools
hire each year.
Even when confronted with these
facts, many districts have begun to panic. In part they have grown accustomed
to dealing with a pretty distorted labor market and the low quality of many
teacher candidates. They're used to having to sort through a pile of resumes to
find a single good hire. They are also often not nimble or flexible enough to
adapt their recruiting and hiring practices to a tighter job market.
What then is a reasonable response to a
downturn in teacher production? It's not
to open the floodgates and let just anyone teach. We need to continue to
encourage teacher prep programs to become more selective and do a better job
preparing new teachers so that districts don't have to count on 20 resumes to
find a single qualified teacher.
Districts would do well to tap
into the enormous pool of the many hundreds of thousands of people who were
certified to teach but never did. Some estimates put the percentage of new
teacher graduates who don't actually teach at 50 percent. Neither states nor
districts make it easy for those folks to reconsider the profession a few years
down the road.
A
lot of us can rattle off the possible shortcomings of using value-added test
scores to evaluate teachers: The scores vary from year to year. They lack
transparency. They cannot control for other events going on in the classroom,
like broken air conditioning or teachers consistently being assigned
exceptionally motivated students.
Sad
to say, these problems aren't relegated to the statistical wizardry behind
VAM—it turns out classroom observation scores may suffer from many of the same
ills.
New
research from Matthew
Steinberg of the University of Pennsylvania and Rachel Garrett of the American
Institutes for Research employed data from the Methods of Effective Teaching study to look at how classroom
composition relates to teachers' observation scores.
First,
they found that teachers who were assigned to high-performing students were
more likely to earn higher observation scores. They also found that some
domains of the evaluation instrument used in this study (the Danielson framework)
appeared to give teachers undue credit for traits, achievement levels, and
other factors students arrived with at the start of the school year; domains
like "engaging students in learning" and "establishing a culture for learning,"
which rely heavily on student-teacher interaction, were the primary culprits.
The authors offer two competing hypotheses for these higher scores: they could
be a sign of observer bias—meaning, for example, that a teacher might get a
score boost for having an eager and well-behaved class, even if she basically
inherited her students that way—or they could indicate that teachers either
perform or become better when working with a class of higher-achieving
students.
Finally,
teachers who teach multiple subjects, like most elementary teachers, had observation
scores that were less related to their students' incoming achievement—unlike
the scores for teachers who only teach a single subject (and therefore older
grades). This difference could be because teachers' observations in older
grades are spread across multiple classrooms, or because teachers who spend
more time with one group of students are better able to adjust to their needs.
So,
would Steinberg and Garrett's findings hold true elsewhere? After all, the MET
study observation data relied on an unusually robust approach to teacher
evaluation, using highly-trained off-site evaluators who rated videotapes of
lessons. In contrast, districts more often rely on in-person observations,
often by school principals and APs.
Unfortunately,
the findings from more typical on-site evaluations by school administrators may
look even worse, according to
Whitehurst, Chingos, and Lindquist. These Brookings researchers tackled
the observation issue a few years ago and found that outside observers produce more valid observations than school
administrators—so Steinberg and Garrett's work could actually understate the
problem.
Read more about observations in our
previous month's Teacher
Trendline.
Earlier this year, the Every Student
Succeeds Act (ESSA) launched "nonacademic factors" into the national
discussion, as such factors can now be used as part of school accountability
metrics. As states explore which factors to use, they may want to consider a
recent working paper that finds that teachers who are rock stars at raising
student test scores may not be the same ones whose students are either
well-behaved or even particularly happy.
Using a large sample of upper
elementary classrooms across four districts, David Blazar of Harvard University
and Matthew A. Kraft of Brown University examine teacher influence on math test
scores and students' self-reported behavior, self-efficacy, and happiness in
math class. Their work revealed not only that teachers do indeed have a
significant effect on non-tested outcomes, but also that the teachers who are
most effective at improving test scores are not necessarily the same teachers
who are most effective at improving non-tested outcomes—echoing the findings of
another recent study.
Although Blazar and Kraft don't take
a stand on incorporating measures of non-tested outcomes into teacher
evaluations, their findings highlight the potential difficulty of doing so. In
the sample, more than a quarter of the most
effective teachers (based on test scores) were among the least effective when evaluated using student non-tested outcomes.
To further complicate matters, the
non-academic outcomes don't always correlate. For example, teacher scores on
classroom organization had a positive correlation with student behavior but a
negative correlation with happiness in class.
These contradictory findings are
problematic since many of these factors influence long-term outcomes. Could it
be that teachers improve one important student outcome at the expense of
another? Or does this study highlight the complexity of the student experience
and the challenges of measuring it with a survey?
Clearly, this study raises more
questions than it answers.
Editor's Note: We spoke with Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like A Champion (now in its revised 2.0 version), Reading Reconsidered and Practice Perfect to discuss the challenges facing teachers today and how certain habits can lead to some being less effective than others. Below is a slightly adapted version of our conversation. (Follow Doug on Twitter @Doug_Lemov).
Q) In your experience, what are some of the core things teachers need to accomplish to be effective in the classroom?
Teachers need several different things to succeed. First, as Erin pointed out, they need to have a strong, positive classroom culture, one that not only prevents negative behaviors but fosters an enjoyment of school and encourages students to do things that are productive and supportive of learning. Also, teachers need to reward kids for their attentiveness with engaging content and rigorous lessons. Those things are really critical, though they are easier to describe than they are to do.
I would say it's also important for teachers to ask themselves, "Who's doing the work in my lessons, me or my students?" One of the fastest ways to make sure it's the kids doing the work and not the teacher is to increase the amount of in-class writing they do. When you ask a question and take a hand, one student elaborates on the answer but when you ask the class to write their response, every student answers and has to put it in writing, which is cognitively demanding.
The fourth thing is checking for understanding, distinguishing the "I taught it" from the "They learned it" to know whether mastery of the content has truly taken place.
Q) Would you agree with Erin on the importance of frequent, low-stakes testing?
There's a lot of research coming to the fore on the positive effects of this type of testing, which is a way of asking students to constantly recall the information that they have learned in a variety of settings. So, yes, I think it makes sense. In addition "Cold call," a technique I discuss in my book, is in some ways a form of low-stakes assessment. It's when a teacher poses a question to the entire class, but immediately calls out a specific student for the answer. This creates a constructive tension where students know at any point they may have to recall and re-engage previously learned content at any point in the lesson. Students then know they have to stay in the game. When the mind has to work to recall things frequently learning increases.
Q) Why is it that some teachers struggle to be effective?
Well, first of all teaching is incredibly difficult work. I mean of course people struggle at it. But we do want people to nail the manageable aspects of the craft so they can move on to mastering the more challenging ones. A good example of a manageable challenge that teachers struggle with is failing to build a positive culture in the classroom. And when teachers are struggling to do so, they know it. It's very possible that you could struggle to be sufficiently rigorous and not really know or feel it every day, but if you are struggling with culture and don't have a classroom where kids do what you ask them to, it's uncomfortable and you know you're not doing right by kids. It's unfortunately a very common experience.
It's challenging to get 30 people in a room to do the most productive thing. When you add to that that we're talking about 30 young people whose motivations may vary and who may have varying levels of interest in the endeavor you are asking them to work on, it's a very, very challenging thing to do.
Q) What about rigor, which you mentioned is something teachers may not even realize they're struggling with?
Right. As I mentioned earlier, if I'm a teacher, one question I'd ask myself is "Are kids writing every day in my class?" The other question I'd ask is "Are my kids doing reading and generating knowledge from text every day?" We know that students can learn from talking to their peers, what's more challenging when they reach college, and what so many eventually struggle with, is having to do a lot of learning on their own strictly from text.
Q) How can teachers struggling with rigor get their students to write more in class?
It usually boils down to doing more lesson planning. Teachers shouldn't be doing too much of the cognitive work by answering questions for the students. So planning well and ensuring questions are demanding and rigorous, and also that there is time for students to write and revise their writing is crucial to upping the rigor.
Arguably my favorite technique in Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is called "Art of the Sentence." Ask kids to distil or respond to a complex idea in only a single sentence. There's power in scarcity of writing. If you can only write a single sentence, you have to use syntax in a way that really captures nuance. It disciplines your thinking and grows your range as a writer. My second favorite technique in the book is one called "Show Call." I take a student's work and put it up on the projector. Then we start a class discussion of how to make it better, more precise, and focused. And then I have the whole class revise their own sentences accordingly.
Q) What do you wish teacher prep programs would take away from your research on high performing teachers?
I guess I wish that teacher preparation dealt with realities a bit more than it did theories. It's really important how you ask your questions in the classroom, what prompts you use to get kids to do something and when you ask them to revise their work whether you can get everyone to follow your instructions. These things are so important. We should honor and respect the craft of teaching enough to study it deeply.
The solutions to the challenges and difficulties so many teachers face lie in the classrooms of high-performing teachers. We should be studying these teachers for the solutions to teaching challenges. First, because they're the ones who have found the highest-value solutions to the problems, and second, because doing so honors the profession.
In the long run, if we're going to draw the best people to the profession, actual teachers have to participate in generating the knowledge base of the field. It can't always be people from outside the field. We have to make the study of the best among us intentional and honor those teachers by learning from their work.
Editor's Note: I heard Erin Burns speak at an Opportunity Culture conference about her decision to return to the same struggling high school where she started her teaching career. She ended up turning around a whole team of veteran teachers by helping them to form more effective teaching habits. I asked Erin to share the recipe to her secret sauce. —Kate Walsh
My first teaching job was as a high school biology teacher in an urban, Title 1, North Carolina school serving mostly low income, minority students. I arrived at age 22 with an inextinguishable passion for the power of education to achieve social justice, excited in particular about hands-on biology lessons. However, my pineapple eating Jello enzyme demo and edible candy DNA activities were quickly shunned by my colleagues for being too cutesy and I was instructed to drill students with multiple choice worksheets instead. I left after just one year to teach at a neighboring school that embraced my more hands-on approach. There, those same "cutesy" activities led to some of the highest student growth scores in the entire school.
Five years later, with data to back up my teaching style and some leadership experience under my belt, I ventured back to that same high school—still as underperforming as ever—where my career began. This time I was to lead the school's biology team.
By taking concrete, actionable steps, we've achieved a big turnaround in short order. Each teacher on my team has moved from negative student growth to meeting growth standards.
I've learned a lot about the habits which can stand in the way of a teacher's success.
Here are my top five:
1) Rigid (boring) lesson structures
Many low performing schools fear any activity that doesn't have a rigid structure. Rigidity does not always equal rigor. For example, my teachers did a lesson in which we modeled DNA & Protein Synthesis by decoding a "DNA recipe" and creating, of all things, Rice Krispie treats. Students were up around the room transcribing mRNA to gather ingredients and make their "protein" (Rice Krispie treat). Though there were slight moments of chaos because students were so excited, every student was engaged. Students would frequently reference these types of engaging lessons and activities at the end of the year, as they had made a memorable impact. Worksheets and multiple choice drills, although they may look more controlled from an outside perspective, were not frequently referenced as having a significant impact on the students' deep understanding of the material.
2) Not being organized.
Disorganization can lead to hours of valuable time lost, duplicating the workload for teachers. Teachers in my school used to spend hours searching for last year's flash drive, worksheet or lesson. Teachers are not always taught how to create a systematic way to organize lessons and materials.
I created a central repository (with the use of Google shared drives) for everyone to combine resources. We created a standardized lesson plan template built into a PowerPoint. Teachers could simply pull up the PowerPoint with directions for the activities, notes, etc. all at their fingertips. Now, my teachers know exactly where the aligned lessons are located and can focus on tweaking the lesson as opposed to repeatedly, frantically creating something from scratch.
Furthermore, teachers bought into this system because they had created the original shared lesson plan; as opposed to using a purchased, packaged curriculum.
3) Reactive, rather than proactive, classroom management
At my school, too many teachers previously let one disruptive student ruin the entire class period for the other 29 students eager to learn. For example, a student might have put on headphones and disruptively started singing along. This would then be typically followed by a loud five-minute spectacle between student and teacher ultimately ending with the student being removed from class. Inevitably these confrontations have ripple effects, resulting in multiple students being kicked out, wandering the hallways and missing out on even more instruction.
Instead, I encouraged teachers to take preventive measures. Before these incidents multiply, identify the few students in need of special emotional support and behavior correction (conferences, calls home or utilization of administrators). Proactively build positive relationships with those students who are behaving well.
Simply walking around the room and talking to students as individuals has an incredible impact on classroom culture. "How did you do at the game last night?" "Did you get that new job you applied for?" I would frequently model this strategy for my teachers. This can take as few as 30 seconds, but it has big payoffs.
4) Administering tests and quizzes too infrequently
It may be unpopular in this anti-testing environment to suggest more testing, not less; but it works. My team of teachers transitioned from one large test every few weeks (that wasn't revisited until the final exam), to numerous mini tests and quizzes.
Now, with more frequent assessment, students have multiple attempts to show mastery of a concept. Students have hope after failing a test as opposed to just giving up and having to accept the F. We've built in opportunities for students to retest and replace poor quiz grades on large interim assessments. They always have the opportunity to work towards a higher grade and grow their knowledge of the topics covered as the semester progresses.
This change meant helping my colleagues make a shift in mindset as well as building a strongly planned assessment calendar. It's been worth it.
5) Infeasible goals for improvement
In the same way that we built in an assessment calendar for our kids, those of us who lead teachers need to have a growth mindset for adults, reevaluating where an individual teacher is each week, quarter and semester. We are told never to label students as failures—why should we do so with teachers?
When I first started working with my team, many of my teachers simply needed a shift in outlook because they were constantly told that their students' poor test scores were all their fault. I started by acknowledging their frustrations. Oftentimes, this simply looks like a brief venting or therapy session. Yes, it can be draining for a school leader, but it is necessary to let teachers get it off their shoulders. Let their voice be heard so they can move on.
I pushed my team to grow their students as individuals. Our goal was beyond hitting a specified proficiency number, but to simply make sure our students left our classes knowing more biology than when they entered. The proficiency numbers would increase eventually if we just focused on growing students one by one.
Allowing teachers to focus on growth instead of a seemingly impossible, looming proficiency goal allows them to stop acting out in frustration to student behavior and lack of engagement and starting focusing on their individual student growth goals. When leaders create a culture of focusing on the positive, it trickles down to teacher-student interactions.
Creating a teacher turnaround plan without observing or talking to your teachers will flop. Stop boring lessons. Stop wasting time by looking for ways to work more efficiently and collaboratively. Stop modeling or allowing negative student-teacher relationships. Stop giving students only one chance to demonstrate mastery. And stop only focusing on your failing test scores. Start creating individual turnaround plans for each of your teachers with students at the center.
About the Author
Erin Burns is in her 7th year of education. She was a North Carolina Teaching Fellow, received her Bachelors in Biology with minors in Education and Entrepreneurship from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Master of Education Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently in her second year as part of Project Lift Turnaround (a component of the OPportunity Culture), serving as a Multi Classroom Leader in her school.
Shout out
to the graphics team at Goshen College for coming up with one of the best
interactive charts we've seen in some time. Scroll down on this page to "Career Pathways" to see the graphic that
has us all talking. It tracks all their alumni since 1980 by major to their
eventual career field. This is exactly the kind of emphasis on data that more
of higher ed, particularly teacher prep programs, ought to have.
A year ago a group of 20 out-of-state teachers filed a lawsuit
in Minnesota over the state's teacher
licensing regulations which they claimed were inconsistent and incoherent. The
state's Office of the Legislative Auditor recently released its opinion, falling clearly in the teachers'
camp, declaring the licensing laws "complex, unclear and confusing."
While nearly every state in the nation has much to clean up
in how it is decided who gets to teach, Minnesota's approach is unique. Both
the state's board of teaching and its department of education have authority to
make decisions about and issue teacher licenses. Surprisingly—said no one
familiar with teacher licensure ever—this bifurcated system causes confusion
and makes it nearly impossible for many qualified, out-of-state teachers to
obtain a Minnesota license.
Chief among the auditor's recommendations? Give one agency,
either the board of teaching or the department of education, the power to
oversee all aspects of teacher preparation and licensing. If we had a say, we'd
vote for putting authority in the hands of whichever agency is most likely to
view licensure through the lens of K-12's increasing demands. Minnesota's
licensure problems reflect the constant disconnect between what higher ed and
K-12 say they need from new teachers. From our perspective, it's time for K-12
to stop being a passenger and start driving the bus.
Regardless, Minnesota clearly needs a system where all
parties involved speak the same language, both figuratively and literally. The
two agencies apparently even had different terminology to describe the exact same licenses.
One final note: while Minnesota stands out for its "broken" system, we would
wager that a look under the hood of the licensure processes in all 50 states
would unearth a long list of inconsistencies and examples of poor collaboration
among the agencies involved.
No one's happy about laying off teachers during an economic
downturn, but some approaches to deciding who to lay off may yield better
results than others. Breaking away from the many districts that still rely on
"last in, first out" (LIFO) policies that shed the newest teachers regardless
of their effectiveness, one district tried giving principals total say over
which teachers were to be let go.
A new paper from Matthew Kraft at Brown
University found that when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools gave principals this
discretion the results were better for students and likely led to greater cost
savings and fewer layoffs as well.
Since collective bargaining is against the law in North
Carolina, the school district could establish reduction in force (RIF) policies
unilaterally. The district gave principals five broad criteria for selecting
teachers for involuntary reductions: 1) eliminating duplicative or excess
personnel and positions; 2) planning for future enrollment projections; 3) job
performance considerations; 4) job qualifications—including tenure status,
education and licensure type and status and 5) seniority.
It seems that principals used their power wisely. They
identified teachers who were generally less effective than average, based on both
principal evaluations and value-added calculations (the latter was true even
though principals never saw their teachers' value added scores—they were
calculated by Kraft during the study). In fact, teachers who were evaluated as
one standard deviation lower by a principal had a four percentage point
increase in the probability of being laid off.
Teachers weren't selected for layoffs purely based on their
evaluation scores, though. Teachers facing layoffs usually fell into one of the
following categories: non-tenured, returning-retired (meaning they had retired,
were rehired and were drawing both a salary and a pension), teachers hired
after the start of the school year, those with a licensure deficiency or
low-performing teachers.
Teacher effectiveness aside, Kraft also suggests that this
dismissal policy stacks up favorably in terms of cost and number of layoffs as
well. For example, he estimated that the policy in Charlotte cut the budget by
more than $30 million with 645 layoffs, whereas a standard LIFO policy would
cut the budget by $25 million with 781 layoffs.
Contrary to many people's fears, a discretionary hiring
policy didn't lead to widespread dismissal of teachers with the greatest
seniority (given that they garner the highest salaries), but rather it produced
layoffs of a mixed group of individuals who tended to be lower-performing.
With Congress having reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act earlier this year, there's been a lot of celebration from some
camps and hand wringing from others over the future of teacher evaluation. There is a perception
True, a few states like New York have acted on the perception that
they are now free from federal requirements, announcing significant changes
(i.e. backpedaling). And it is certainly true that there were formerly some big
federal carrots and sticks to persuade states to get serious about teacher
evaluations, coming first with Race to the Top and then with the ESEA waivers. Especially through the waivers,
the feds 'encouraged' some states to move farther and faster on teacher
evaluation than they really wanted or were ready to do.
But it just isn't my sense that, as New York goes, so too
will most other states.
The numbers don't make the case of a big shift in
commitment. In our most
recent scan in late 2015, just five states (California, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska and Vermont) had no formal state policy
requiring districts to factor objective measures of student achievement into
their teacher evaluations. Another three states–Alabama, New Hampshire and Texas–had adopted more rigorous
evaluation policies clearly for one purpose—to obtain a federal waiver. It was
not a secret that there were states doing nothing on teacher evaluation; Texas
was far from quiet about it.
Yet the vast majority of states—the remaining 42 and DC—kept
moving forward on teacher evaluation.
Of course, the change
in landscape regarding teacher evaluations had a lot to do with political
momentum. But I am of the glass-half-full opinion that this momentum had more
to do with state readiness to repair a system everyone acknowledged was broken,
and less to do with federal pressure. In our State of the States report from last fall, we mapped the
timeline and found about a third of the states adopted new legislation and
regulations in the interim between Race to the Top and the waivers when no one
was asking or pressuring them to do anything.
To start fixing this
broken system, states looked to incorporate better, more meaningful measures in
teacher evaluations: objective evidence of student learning was one important
feature of improved systems and better observation rubrics focused on effective
instruction was another. Both are incredibly important.
What we're learning
from early implementers is that, for many reasons, it is difficult to get real
differentiation among observation scores. It is still too easy for principals
to say every lesson they see is just fine. This makes the need for the
objective evidence all the more important.
Regardless of how full or empty you see the glass when it
comes to unpacking the motivation behind the flurry of state activity around
teacher evaluations in recent years, it is almost impossible to separate the
pushback against using tests in teacher evaluation from the larger anti-testing
movement. The simultaneous implementation of new college- and career-readiness
assessments and new teacher evaluation systems has been a significant
challenge, one that has unfortunately amplified the pushback to each issue
individually. In New York, for example, the teachers union
worked hard—and seemingly succeeded—to conflate the two. But while much work
remains on implementation, the policy landscape around teacher evaluation is
completely transformed in this country, and that's not going to be easy to
undo.
I'm still cautiously optimistic. It is very hard to build trust in new
systems until teachers experience it. In states like Tennessee with a few years
under their belt teachers report increasing satisfaction with the system and, most importantly, that it is
helping improve their practice and increase student achievement.
It is probably wise for people involved in this work to be
wary that course correcting could be an early warning of an about face in
direction. But as states and districts get deeper into the honest work of
implementation, there are reasonable shifts that states may take in order to
keep the momentum going, while at the same time building trust and buy-in for
evaluations. After all, most everyone agrees that the traditional
systems—characterized by a lack of frequency and objective measures including
student growth—did no favors for teachers or students. Where state policymakers
suggest reverting back to those systems this can only be viewed as a
short-sighted reaction that has the potential to compromise the broader vision
to build an evaluation system with a lot of promise to deliver
positive results.
A version
of this editorial first appeared as a back-and-forth between the author and
Kate Pennington on Bellwether's blog "Above the Heard."
For all intents and purposes, Chicago Public Schools appears to be out of money—having recently borrowed $725 million just to keep the doors open. The district's financial struggles set the backdrop for what has proven to be a contentious negotiation for a new contract with the teachers union. This negotiation has caught our attention because the primary sticking point seems to be less about traditional areas of disagreement and more about plain old bad faith. Trust between the district and the teachers union appears to be at an all-time low (see here and here) after the union unanimously rejected an offer from the district that it had touted as "serious."
Failure to reach a deal has resulted in mid-year budget cuts and teachers being forced to take three days off with no pay. In February, the district gave notice that it might end its pick-up of most of teachers' required contributions to their pension system; the union responded by saying it would go on strike April 1 if the district followed through. Just last week, the district announced it would not stop the pension pick-up—at least until the final phase of negotiations is complete. In response, the union has promised a "Day of Action" on April 1, perhaps easing the previous threat of a strike.
Chicago teachers already fare pretty well when it comes to salaries and benefits as compared to other large districts. Still, the district offered an 8.75 percent phased-in salary increase over the next three years, but in return wanted to end the practice of picking up seven percent of the contribution teachers are supposed to make to their retirement system.
The union's response to the offer, however, does not appear to point to teacher compensation issues as a sticking point. We can't find any specific demand or counteroffer that lays out what the union wants instead. Perhaps those demands are being made behind closed doors, but it seems more likely that the union just flat out doesn't trust the district to keep any of its promises, financial or otherwise.
The union seems to get that the district is not playing chicken about its financial state. Consider that the Chicago Teachers Union came to the table with some demands that are not commonly seen in the typical collective bargaining negotiation. Alongside ordinary bargaining issues like class size and preparation time, the union's stated priorities included unusual demands like placing a freeze on charter school expansion and the district engaging in legal action against banks that it says contributed to the district's poor financial state.
As atypical as they are, the district actually responded to these demands in its last public offer. Along with dropping the pension pickup, giving raises and changing evaluations, the district has also offered to draft and find a sponsor for a tax bill, work on legislation to alter the Illinois Charter School Commission and identify and support a progressive state tax. A district offering to get involved in the political process as part of teacher contract negotiations? That's a new one for us.
There's little doubt that the teachers union has plenty of reason to be dubious of the district's financial promises, but it isn't easy to see how a negotiation where the most recent proposal was rejected more out of lack of trust than substantive differences can be resolved. What can the district offer that meets the union's criterion of stabilizing district finances? How on earth do you negotiate trust? Someone is going to have to find an answer to these questions or no one is going to walk away a winner, especially not the kids in Chicago's schools.
For some great data comparing Chicago to other districts in Illinois and large districts across the country on the typical issues that usually drive teacher contract negotiations, see our most recent Teacher Trendline.
New data shines a spotlight on what's happening in the black box of teacher prep – but what it reveals is just plain depressing.
A non-profit organization which describes itself as an education-focused version of Consumer Reports, the Educators Consumers Foundation is out with an interesting small study looking at the outcomes of graduates from Tennessee's teacher prep programs. While a few programs perform well, most programs in the state routinely graduate substantially more ineffective teachers than effective ones.
Let's sit with that for a moment: most of Tennessee's teacher prep programs are producing more teachers who fall in the bottom quintile of performance than those in the top quintile.
There are some caveats, but none which justify dismissing the grim findings.
First, one might assert that it's unfair to expect new teachers to be effective. The data compares teachers' performance over their first three years of teaching with the performance of all teachers in the state, so perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a program to produce effective new teachers relative to the broader population of teachers. In any case, if it were so unrealistic, how come some programs consistently produce relatively new teachers who perform just fine against more experienced peers? Here's looking at you, Lipscomb University—which NCTQ also identified as having a top-ranked undergraduate secondary prep program in the country in 2014.
Also worth pointing out is that many of the findings aren't statistically significant. For example, the state's 2015 report card offers data on Lipscomb's teacher performance in 11 different grade/subject bands – but only two are statistically significant.
Finally, and this problem continues to be a major sticking point for us as we try to evaluate programs on student achievement outcomes, the state continues to lump all graduates from an institution into the same pot, even though they have graduated from programs within that institution which we know are substantially different in terms of their selectivity, coursework, and the professors who teach the coursework (as we show here). In other words, there's almost no similarity between graduate and undergraduate programs on the same campus. That's why NCTQ is unable to include VAM data for Tennessee programs in ourTeacher Prep Review, tempting though it may be.
These three concerns aside, the findings paint a stark picture of programs that are not instilling minimal competency in their grads.
With the year's most romantic holiday fresh
in our memories, we turn to a different kind of matchmaking: matching student
teachers with the right schools.
In a new CALDER study, Dan Goldhaber and colleagues continue to mine
the student teaching experience as a largely unexplored area of research. This
time, they learn that the demographics of the schools where teachers complete
their student teaching have an impact on future teacher effectiveness in the
classroom as well as whether they'll stick with teaching.
Using a large sample of student teachers
enrolled in six Washington state teacher preparation programs, Goldhaber et al.
find that new teachers were more effective if they completed their student
teaching at schools with similar demographics to the school where they were
ultimately hired. This certainly makes sense. That means that if we want
teachers who will be successful in more disadvantaged schools, we need to stop
looking for "easy" placements and instead identify placements in schools
serving more challenging populations.
These differences
in student teaching experiences explained more of the variation in future
teachers' effectiveness than the prep program where the student teachers were
enrolled.
There's a bit of a Catch 22, however. A
teacher is less likely to leave teaching if s/he did student teaching in a
stable school with low teacher turnover rates--hardly the reality in many
disadvantaged schools.
This suggests a sweet spot for where to
place student teachers: yes, in high needs schools, but only those which are
relatively high performing, and presumably stable--something most districts
have in short supply.
As any district can attest, overhauling teacher evaluations represents a huge lift for all involved. The temptation to look for shortcuts is equally huge.
In 2008, Chicago Public Schools decided to pilot a new teacher evaluation system. Researchers Matthew Steinberg and Lauren Sartain used this opportunity to answer the question "Can the process of evaluating the teachers in a school actually improve a school's performance?"
For the first cohort of schools implementing the evaluation, principals received extensive training and support, with a focus on how to use the rubric and what to look for when observing teachers. Principals held both pre- and post-observation conversations with teachers. Not unlike what DC learned (see above), this group of schools with their well trained principals realized a statistically significant improvement in students' reading scores compared to schools that did not implement the evaluation.
But the results were not nearly so strong for the second cohort of schools. What changed? This time, Chicago provided only minimal training to principals. Teachers still got evaluated. They still got feedback. But this cohort of schools reported few learning gains--indeed faring no better than schools that did not implement the new evaluation system at all.
It seems like a simple lesson to learn. A good evaluation system is only as good as the training and support provided to those asked to deliver it.
What happens in DC has the potential to
impact districts across the entire nation.
A few weeks ago while my
blizzard-frenzied hometown of Baltimore was busy emptying grocery shelves of
bread and toilet paper, I took off for Paris—at the invitation of the OECD.
There's nothing I love more than a great big snow storm, but sacrifices
must be made.
The occasion was OECD's
kickoff event for a new study to look at how the world prepares its teachers.
Just as the U.S. had recently begun paying attention to the critical role
teacher preparation plays in teacher quality, so too has the international
community. (One of the first assignments I had when I arrived at NCTQ 13 years
ago was to participate in an OECD study on teacher quality. Exactly as
the teacher quality debate has played out in the U.S., virtually ignoring
teacher prep until recently, that study only identified the selection but not
the preparation of teachers as a factor of interest.)
My assigned role was to speak about US teacher preparation. It did
occur to me that If the OECD had consulted with American higher education
institutions or the AACTE about who would have been best to provide such a
perspective, my name would not have been on their list. And I will concede that
I did not paint a pretty picture, but it was a fair one backed up by the
evidence.
In fact, no country was there to boast, not even the largely Asian
PISA powerhouses. Finland's delegate, for example, dismissed the notion
that only the top 10 percent of their college grads are admitted into teaching,
a myth he ascribed to the poorly understood fact that candidates are able to
apply multiple times and most, he asserted, eventually make it in.
Representatives from Hungary and Turkey expressed considerable dissatisfaction
with what they felt were their country's excessive focus on teachers' content
knowledge—and didn't seem to notice me turning green with envy. Other nations,
particularly Australia and Chile, expressed problems eerily similar to ours.
I was also interested to hear that teacher bashing, however it
might be defined, appears to be a multi-national problem. Only South
Korea continues to report the high status of teaching as a chosen profession
while the rest of us bemoaned the profession's ability to attract the best and
brightest. The most universal complaint? Without question, the deaf
ear on the part of higher ed to the practical needs of novice teachers.
In any case, the purpose of such a meeting is to fully air the
range of problems and organize them into manageable buckets, not come up with
the solutions. Actually, I'm not sure if a set of solutions should ever
be an expectation at any stage. The real challenge for any international
effort is the discipline and persistence required to descend from the clouds,
delivering comparative data at a level that is practical and concrete for the
countries involved. As I cannot recall more than a handful of such studies over
the last 20 years, that must be easier said than done. Most depend on
platitudes to fill their pages—not to mention a dizzying array of
incomprehensible flow charts (why does anyone think that converting a narrative
into a heavy mixture of text boxes and arrows somehow makes complex systems
more comprehensible?).
Solutions reside within each nation, perhaps spurred by education
ministries or groups such as ours (which appear to be increasingly prevalent, I
was heartened to see). We all benefit enormously from better
international data—not unlike the way that PISA results have helped the broader
education movement engage in better advocacy.
Many times over the
years NCTQ has reached out to education ministries and academics in other
countries with what we believe to be basic questions—such as "How many
schools of education do you have?" "What are the courses teacher
candidates take?" "What does it take to get in?" or "What
level of math proficiency does an elementary need to have?"—generally without
success. These are questions which are grounded in the nuts and bolts of
practice and which, if answered, might explain a lot. That's how we learn
and improve. Not with generalizations or by
making assumptions about what works in other countries, but with facts and data
to back them up.
Shouldn't we expect that teachers will initially perform
differently in the classroom based on the quality of their preparation? After
all, there are no fewer than 1,400 institutions of higher education in the U.S.
(not to mention a burgeoning market of alternative routes) purporting to
prepare teachers, setting the stage for huge variations in teacher training.
Maybe not, suggests new research
from AIR's CALDER. Authors Koedel, Parsons, Podgursky and Ehlert (you may
remember this study from the attentionit
received as a working
paper
back in 2012) report it is difficult to
attribute swings in teacher effectiveness to the institutions which prepared
teachers and that big variations exist among teachers who graduated from the
same institution. Of differences noted among teachers from different
institutions, only one to three percent of that variation was explained by
which institution the teachers attended.
What might explain this breach in logic?
It could be that institutions' approaches to
teacher preparation are more similar than their numbers suggest or common sense
would presume. NCTQ's analysis in the Teacher
Prep Reviewbacks up this hypothesis, finding the vast
majority of institutions (81 percent) in the United States can be classified as
"weak" or "failing." If an overwhelming number of
programs are not providing what teachers need to be moderately successful when
they walk into a classroom—essentially not adding value to their candidates'
own preparation—then teachers will be only as effective as the raw attributes
they bring to the table. No wonder Koedel et al were unable to capture
institutions which have a meaningful and consistent impact on their teacher
candidates: too few of them do.
The authors provide some evidence for this
hypothesis. None of the 11 institutions in the sample demonstrated much
selectivity in their teacher prep program admissions process, and notably less
so than other programs of study on their campuses. This practice of
setting a very low floor for entry (widespread
across the country) results in huge differences—at least in terms
of academic ability— in the quality of teacher candidates attending the same
program. Overall, selectivity did not appear to be as important in admission to
teacher preparation programs as it was in other programs of study at these
institutions.
As an aspiring elementary teacher, my goal has been to obtain the
best possible training to prepare myself for my future classroom. I put full
faith in my university's teacher preparation program and its professors to
expose me to all of the various instructional strategies that I should know and
be able to implement. It was only after reading NCTQ's Learning About
Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know that I learned that textbooks
used in teacher preparation programs generally lack information on the six instructional
strategies identified by the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as
having the strongest evidence of being impactful on student learning. In
fact, the sample of textbooks NCTQ evaluated for
the report includes some of the textbooks I've used!
Needless to say, this concerns me. In many classrooms, professors
rely on textbooks and I've paid considerable amounts to buy them and have them
available for assignments and reference. While the books can and should contain
valuable information on other topics, these six instructional strategies should
be front and center in the chapters on instruction if I am to understand these
effective strategies and their importance.
Now that I've had these six strategies pointed out, I realize that
I've seen some of them in action. For example, the strategy of
"distributing practice" helps retention because students are exposed to
information more than once, with spacing between exposures. As a college
student, I've experienced the difference between teachers who touch on a topic
once versus teachers who reiterate information, increasing my depth of
understanding and my ability to remember. I want to learn how to best do
the same for my students.
Important as NCTQ's efforts to raise this issue are, teacher candidates
can also help to raise awareness. For example, sharing the report with
deans is one possible step forward. We can also take the initiative to
write reviews on textbook websites whenever it's clear that textbook content is
not adequate—or when books fail to cite the same sort of specific articles
we're required to cite to support our own research papers. If textbooks don't
improve, we can support production of an open source textbook on evidence-based
teaching practices, which would be both valuable and help reduce the heavy burden
of purchasing expensive college textbooks.
With the facts in front of us, how can we not do our part to
tackle this issue?
- Sarah Rahimi
Sarah is preparing to
be an elementary teacher at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas) and is a member of the NCTQ Teacher Candidate
Advisory Group
We've all been there. A teacher asks a class to answer a
simple question with a show of hands. You're not sure of the answer—but
lucky for you, the top student was first with her hand up—so
there's not much to lose by following suit. The teacher, satisfied by the sea
of hands all in agreement, moves on.
It turns out that relying on an age-old practice of a show
of hands to check whether students understand what's being taught can be
misleading—and can also discourage students
from thinking too hard about the answer.
A new working paper from Levy, Yardley, and Zeckhauser
of Harvard University showed the influence of "herding" on students when asked
to answer a question. College students' responses to simple questions varied
depending on the technique used: hand raising or the use of device that allowed
each student to answer a question in real-time without seeing others' responses
(often called a "clicker" because students click a button to respond).
For starters, students tended to give much different answers
to opinion questions on a sensitive topic depending on whether other students
in the class would know (and potentially disapprove) of their answer.
More concerning, the researchers found that students gave
different answers for factual questions with a right and wrong answer depending
on the method of responding.
Specifically, more students got the question right when
using hand raising, suggesting that some students follow the lead of the people
they assume know the answer. The hand-raising method allows students who mimic
others' answers to avoid thinking much about the question and gives teachers a
false belief that their students learned the material. When answering with
clickers, responses were less likely to be correct—but
researchers suspect they were more likely to reflect students' actual
understanding of a concept.
While the old ways are sometimes best, this research
suggests that using such devices may be a smart way to bring new technology
into the classroom—provided teachers recognize that
they are not appropriate for addressing more complicated "why" and "how"
questions.
For a closer look at what teacher candidates are learning
about asking deep questions, see NCTQ's latest report, Learning About Learning.
We know teachers are more than just the sum of their
students' test scores. That's why teacher evaluations don't just look to VAM
scores but also include observations—a measure which isn't actually all
that reliable but it's the devil-you-know syndrome at work.
Districts struggle with the desire to capture the many
positive influences teachers have on their students apart from learning,
influences which are much harder to quantify—such as
students' enthusiasm for coming to school each day, their willingness to behave
in some teachers' classrooms but not others, or their motivation to work hard
in a course.
Though it's early days yet, a newly-developed method may
offer some solutions. This method, called N-VAM (the "N" stands for
"non-tested"), is based on the same analysis framework as the more traditional
test-based value-added modeling (VAM). While not the first to experiment with
N-VAM, researchers Ben Backes and Michael Hansen of the American Institutes for
Research tried it out in a recent study of TFA teachers' impacts on
non-tested outcomes for students in the Miami-Dade County School District. The
non-tested outcomes included the number of students' absences, GPA and the
number of courses failed.
Notably, the N-VAM data proved to correlate little with VAM
scores, showing that a teacher's effectiveness on academic outcomes did not
always correspond with her effectiveness for non-tested measures. This gives
credence to the argument that measuring a teacher's effectiveness using test
scores may overlook other key ways that teachers benefit their students, a
finding that other studies support.
In any case, while this new methodology may not be ready for
prime time, Backes and Hansen believe the results are suggestive and merit
future research into this analysis framework. They express some concerns over
the statistical validity of the results (identifying some areas in which the
forecast bias was too great, meaning that the actual results and predicted
results were too different for them to have confidence in their model). They
also decline to make claims that the teachers caused their students' non-tested outcomes in this study.
Perhaps the N-VAM will turn out to be no more than a single
shot across the bow, but the idea has so much merit, we're eager to see more.
Over the holidays, I ran into an old colleague from back when I
was doing a lot of work in Baltimore during the 1990s. The conversation turned
to NCTQ's work in teacher preparation. Perhaps half kidding, he accused me of
being a turncoat, referring to my newfound commitment to traditional teacher
preparation. "Whatever happened to you?" he launched in. "You
used to know that teacher prep was a total waste of time. Now you're such a
booster!"
"Twenty-five years ago, that position may have made some
sense," I retorted. "It's just not a defensible position any
longer."
What this guy didn't realize—nor perhaps do a lot of people—is
that over the last couple of decades there's been a boon in all sorts of
knowledge, much of it highly relevant to teaching. Unfortunately, little of
this knowledge has been integrated into teacher preparation. If it were,
we might see a big reduction in the all-too-steep learning curve experienced by
most novice teachers.
For starters, there's the rock-solid science on how to teach
reading, which didn't just end with the National Reading Panel in 2000, but has
continued to grow, particularly including the roles of oral language and
building broad content knowledge. There have also been advancements in basic
principles of instruction and managing human (e.g. classroom) behavior.
In a report NCTQ released yesterday, we again find
little evidence of these advancements making their way into mainstream teacher
education, specifically by means of the textbooks programs require for
coursework. This time, the field of study is human learning, our collective
knowledge of which, resting on a foundation laid over a century ago, has gone
into warp speed over the last few decades. And, we would contend, there is no
other subject that could benefit struggling new teachers more.
To determine the presence of this beneficial knowledge in
teacher prep programs, we analyzed the textbooks required in courses purporting
to teach how children learn (generally ed psych and methods courses), assessing
if any home in on the research-proven strategies that teachers can use to
help children learn as well as retain what they learn. Those very practical
strategies, some of which are supported by research going back decades, were neatly packaged and tied with a bow for an
audience of educators in 2007 by the Institute for Education Sciences, the
research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
In an exhaustive analysis, our experts were not able to
identify a single textbook in our representative sample of 48 textbooks which
would be suitable for teaching this essential group of strategies. The majority
of texts adequately cover only a single strategy. None in the sample covers
more than two.
We wondered then if perhaps
programs worked around the deficiencies found in textbooks, supplementing them
with other resources. Looking for references to supplemental readings (hoping
one might be the IES guide itself), lecture topics and student assignments, we
found nothing. Further, since publishers generally only publish texts which are
likely to meet consumer demand, it seems unlikely that teacher educators are
clamoring for content they're not getting. And the fact that the newly formed
Deans for Impact made the "science of learning" its opening salvo also suggests that this material
has yet to be embraced by mainstream teacher ed.
One explanation for the absence of these strategies from
textbooks and coursework is that the field of teacher education is more likely
to ignore research, not just because it sometimes comes from other fields, but
because it counters the prevailing views of teacher educators. That hypothesis
might explain why one of the six strategies (the one which also happens to be
backed up by the most science) receives such short shrift. That would be the "testing" strategy which
advises frequent quizzing to help students remember what they learn. Testing
is a dirty word these days. But it doesn't explain the indifference on the part
of teacher education to the other strategies, such as teaching about the
importance of teachers distributing review or practice of new material across
weeks to promote retention of new material.
Another hypothesis might point to teacher education's
unwillingness to put down its collective foot once and for all, rejecting much
of the current "research" which would more aptly be termed thought-pieces, non
generalizable case studies or small-sample investigation. That kind of culling,
by our estimation, would reduce the average ed psych textbook's 2,200
references by about 90 percent—with most of the reduction due to the common
practice in these textbooks of citing a whole book as the supporting evidence
for this or that practice without even identifying the page number (imagine a
medical textbook accepting as adequate support a citation such as "Your Spine and You, 2000, Chicago:
Doubleday").
The market for substandard textbooks has got to dry up. There
is simply no defense for using textbooks so untethered from the emerging
research about what works in practice. We look forward to working with
publishers and prep programs to ensure these books are pulled from the shelves.
See NCTQ's latest report, Learning About Learning,
for a closer look at the research-proven instructional strategies teacher
textbooks leave out.
Public School Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the First
Five Years: Results From the First Through Fifth Waves of the 2007–08 Beginning
Teacher Longitudinal Study from NCES
To round out our research recap,
everything you know about teacher turnover is wrong. For years, we've heard
that half of all new teachers leave teaching in the first five years.
Principals and HR directors despaired—all those great new teachers they hired
will be gone just as they're hitting their stride. Turns out the real number is
way less than half of that—about 17 percent in the first four years (and we'd
bet money there's not a big exodus of teachers in the fifth). Like your data
disaggregated?
Get detailed findings here: TQB
A Foot in the Door: Exploring the Role of Student Teaching
Assignments in Teachers' Initial Job Placements by Krieg, Theobald, &
Goldhaber
Every district wants to get a leg up on
hiring the best new teachers. Want a tip? Get your pick of the teachers by
starting before they even finish training. While teachers are likely to get
their first job near home, they're even more
likely to get their first job near their student teaching placement—and 15
percent get their first job in the same building as where they student taught.
Left wanting more? Find it here: TQB
Productivity Returns to Experience in the Teacher Labor
Market: Methodological Challenges and New Evidence on Long-Term Career Improvement
by Papay & Kraft
Back in the day, we thought that teachers stopped
improving after their first few years in the classroom. Turns out, a few gray
hairs don't signal the end for professional improvement. This myth may have
been more a reflection of imperfect statistical models, rather than a product
of any reality about teachers. Even after more than a decade, more experience
can mean better teaching.
Can't get enough statistics? Read more here: TQB
Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap
Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students by Goldhaber, Lavery, &
Theobald
Looking for a bright spot? This isn't it.
New research confirms that disadvantaged students (whether defined as being
part of an underrepresented minority, free and reduced lunch status, or last
year's test scores), tend to get lower-quality teachers (whether defined by
experience, licensure test score, or value added measure). No witty remark
here. We're too depressed.
Feel like you could use a tiny glimmer of
hope? See this: TQB
The Mirage by TNTP
Just make sure you leave before they read the headline findings. TNTP estimates that, on average, districts spend a whopping $18,000 on professional development per teacher per year (cue coffee spit-take). One would think all that spending would provide some decent returns. Not so—few teachers showed improvement, and no clear connections emerged between professional development and teachers' improvement. When planning next year's budget, districts may want to think about whether all this cost is going to result in much benefit.
Want our take? Find it here: TQB
As eternal optimists, we're choosing to look on the bright side
of a disheartening new study.
Researchers Jennifer Steele, Matthew Pepper, Matthew Springer
and J.R. Lockwoodprovide additional evidence of educational inequities, finding that teachers with lower value added
measurements (VAM) are more likely to teach at schools populated by mostly
minority students—the same schools that also house a higher rate of more novice
teachers and teachers with lower college GPAs.
This graph depicts how the distribution of teachers
dramatically changes as soon as one turns from a school with a mostly white
population to one with a mostly minority population. The change is so sudden
it's like a switch goes off.
However, the same study finds that once a teacher with a high
VAM score starts teaching in a
high-minority school, he or she is not more likely to leave—a trend
inconsistent with the popular belief that once teachers prove themselves in
urban or high-minority schools, they move on to suburban or lower-minority
ones.
Though the high-minority schools in the study reported
relatively high teacher turnover rates, as is the case with most schools
serving high numbers of minority students, the turnover is not due to an exodus
of high-VAM teachers. The better teachers were no more likely to leave the
school than other teachers. Some (non-statistically significant) numbers even suggested
the opposite—higher VAM teachers were more
likely to stick around in these
high-minority schools once they got there. And even those high VAM teachers who
did leave didn't go teach in lower-minority schools any more or less frequently
than other teachers (though the researchers lost track of any teacher who left
the district—which is whybroader administrative data sets are very helpful
in examining these questions).
Of course, these data come from a single unnamed school
district, so it remains to be seen if these results are replicable. Count us
excited, however, if this study is replicated and confirms that once we get
highly-effective teachers into high-minority schools they are likely to stay.
Upon the release of our first comprehensive Yearbook
that included state grades in 2009, the headline read: "Taken as a whole, state
teacher policies are broken, outdated and inflexible."
After six more annual encyclopedic
reviews of just about every policy states have on their books that impact the
teaching profession, the 2015 State Teacher
Policy Yearbook reaches a decidedly more positive conclusion. In
fact, we think 2015 may just be a tipping point year for teacher effectiveness
policy in the United States.
Across the nation, the average
state teacher policy grade for 2015 is now a C–. Thirteen states earned grades
in the B- to B+ range. Not a single state earned higher than a C in 2009.
While the C- average is a mark
that is still far too low to ensure teacher effectiveness nationwide, it is a
very real improvement over the D average earned by the states in 2009. If
an increase from a D to a C- doesn't strike you as overly impressive, bear in
mind that we continue to raise the bar on certain topics as we see states
exceeding our original expectations.
This year, we scored for the first time states' alignment of their
teacher preparation policies with the instructional shifts required by college-
and career-readiness standards, a policy area in considerable need of
attention.
A tipping point is defined as the
point at which an issue or idea crosses a certain threshold and gains momentum.
In the 2015 Yearbook,
we see the tide changing on elementary teacher licensing and prep program
admission, with more than half of all states improving for teacher preparation
requirements. In addition, 27 states now require annual evaluations for all
teachers, 16 states include student achievement and growth as the preponderant criterion
in teacher evaluations, and 19 others include growth measures as a significant
factor.
This year, an all-time high of 23 states now require that
tenure decisions are tied to teacher performance. Not a single state had such a
requirement in 2009. Importantly, 28 now
articulate that ineffective teaching is grounds for teacher dismissal,
something only 11 states permitted in 2009.
The Yearbook documents
good state teacher policy progress to be sure. But there's no coasting to the
finish line on the other side of this tipping point. On several critical fronts
there are still only a precious few state leaders paving the way forward.
Secondary teacher licensing, for example, is simply out of sync
with the adoption of college- and career-readiness standards. Just five
states—Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, South Dakota and Tennessee—require
secondary teachers to demonstrate their knowledge of the subjects they will
teach without any loopholes in the disciplines of general science or social
studies. Most states still turn a blind
eye to the fact that just because someone knows some biology that doesn't make
them qualified to teach physics.
Special education remains a huge black mark for teacher policy,
with 37 states still permitting special education teachers to teach any grade
level K-12, something they would never dream of allowing for general education
teachers. Just 14 states require elementary special education teachers to
demonstrate that they have the subject-matter knowledge they'll need, and only Missouri, New York and Wisconsin
require secondary level special education teachers to pass a test in each
subject in which they are licensed to teach.
Teacher compensation reform also remains a stubbornly
unchanging area of teacher policy. Only a handful of states have been willing
to take on the issue of teacher pay: Florida,
Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada and Utah all now
tie compensation to teachers' evaluation results.
Reflecting on a decade of tracking teacher policy, there is real
energy behind states moving down a reform path focused on teacher
effectiveness. Many states have taken just small steps while others have
enacted watershed reforms. But with a few stubborn exceptions, each year fewer
and fewer states remain out of step on numerous Yearbook goals. Given how
far they've come, NCTQ thinks states are better positioned than ever to make
meaningful reforms championing teacher effectiveness.
The national summary of the Yearbook and 51 state-specific
versions can be found here. The Yearbook dashboard provides easy access to graphs, infographics
and narratives for national and state-specific findings.
I am one of NCTQ's biggest supporters, but I am
very disappointed with the recent publication of The Good Behavior Game as a
means for improving classroom management. This is not a criticism of the
Good Behavior Game. There is also a Classroom Protocol Game produced by
the people at the Huberman Foundation. There are also discipline
programs—two popular ones are Restorative Justice and Positive Behavior
Interventions and Support (PBIS). And then there are behavior rubrics and
contracts, and every advocate swears that they have research to back their
game, program, rubric, and contract.
The Good Behavior Game has nothing to do with classroom management; it has to
do with behavior management and the two are separate entities. As long as
we continue to subscribe to the notion that discipline is classroom management,
we will never attain improved student achievement, which is the goal of
NCTQ. The purpose of classroom management is to maximize student learning
with a well-organized classroom, not to minimize student misbehavior.
Classroom management is the most misused term in education. Classroom
management has to do with managing or organizing a classroom for student
learning. Effective teachers MANAGE their classrooms, whereas ineffective
teachers DISCIPLINE their classrooms. So many teachers have the mistaken
belief that classroom management has to do with discipline; thus, every day is
a self-fulfilling prophecy of going into battle with the students, because that
is the expectation. Teachers who incorrectly define classroom management
as discipline are likely to join the ranks of the thousands who quit the
education profession after their first few years on the job.
Classroom management is not about discipline. It is about organization
and consistency. Store managers manage a store; they do not discipline
the customers. Team managers manage a team; they do not discipline the
players. Likewise, effective teachers have a classroom management plan
consisting of a series of practices and procedures that are used to organize an
environment in which instruction and learning can take place.
Can you imagine asking a store manager what she does and she responds, "I was
hired to discipline the customer," or a stage manager says, "I was hired to
discipline the actors." Yet, when you say classroom management to people
in (and out of) education, they invariably equate this with discipline.
I do not deny that discipline is an issue that must be addressed, and if The
Good Behavior Game helps, that is great; however, no learning takes place when
a teacher disciplines. Learning only takes place when a classroom is
organized so the students know how to do things (procedures) correctly in the
classroom. The reason behavioral problems occur in the classroom is
because there is no organized management plan in place so the students know
what to do.
Regretfully, the great majority of teachers think that classroom management is
synonymous with discipline, so they spend their days looking for games or programs
to solve their behavior problems. To tell me that a game helps classroom
management is not classroom management. My question is, "How do YOU
manage a classroom, and can you teach someone else how to manage a classroom?"
The GBG cannot succeed on its own any more than a diet book can succeed on its
own. As Kate Walsh so wisely states, "The GBG serves to keep students
focused on learning by promoting appropriate and on task behavior, but the game
is more effective in an environment where the essential components of classroom
management are already in place." So I ask again, "Where is your
classroom management plan?"
Teaching classroom management has been our forte for well over 35 years, over
the course of which thousands of teachers have told us, "Thank you for teaching
me the difference between discipline and procedures." Procedures range
from how to head a paper, how to begin class on time, and how to write an
essay. When students know how to run a classroom, you not only minimize
misbehavior, you have a class that can function on its own, and can even run
itself in the teacher's absence. Simply put, when you teach students how
to do things, then they won't do what you do not want them to do.
We teach teachers how to be proactive, not reactive. A proactive teacher
has a plan to prevent problems; a reactive teacher has no plan, and when a
problem occurs, they react from one problem to another, looking for a game, an
activity, or a threat. To be effective and successful, all a teacher
needs is a classroom management plan.
Effective teachers prevent problems with a plan that keeps their students
focused and on task, from the moment the opening bell sounds, until the end of
each day. This is done with procedures, which simplify the tasks students
must accomplish to increase learning and achieving. Once taught,
procedures become the responsibility of the students to carry out the
appropriate tasks. A well-managed classroom is safe, predictable,
nurturing, and focus-driven. A classroom management plan ensures learning
takes place efficiently, with minimal stress. When you have an organized
classroom, you avoid the pitfalls of becoming a disciplinarian.
Students want a plan, too. It is extremely important to realize that many
students come from disorganized, unstructured home environments, where chaos
abounds. Neglected children crave structure and guidance. Give them
a well-managed, organized classroom with clear daily practices and procedures,
and they will respond positively.
Chelonnda Seroyer, a high school English teacher in Atlanta, says, "My students
enjoy having a predictable classroom. They feel safe because they know
what to expect each day. They like consistency in a world that can be
very inconsistent."
Amanda Brooks is a teacher in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Upon completing her
first year of teaching, she said, "With procedures that organized my class, I
never had to waste time repeating what they should be doing or reprimanding
them for bad behavior. I created an environment where students could just
learn. I simply taught and enjoyed my students."
At the end of her second year of teaching, Amanda said, "My state test scores
just came back and my class had the highest test scores in my school, and I am
only saying this to encourage new teachers to get it right on the first day of
school and then enjoy the rest of the school year."
A veteran teacher of 40 years, Audrey Lowery of Irvington, Virginia, says, "If
our new teachers would implement classroom procedures and keep them separate
from rules, they would be in education for the long haul."
I trust that those who read about The Good Behavior Game will not misconstrue
it as a panacea for classroom management, because the mission of NCTQ is to
promote teacher quality and quality teachers, such as Chelonnda Seroyer, Amanda
Brooks, and Audrey Lowery know the difference between classroom management and
behavior management.
*Dr. Wong is the author of several popular books used in teacher education.
Results are in for the first full year of implementation of a new teacher evaluation system in Dallas, a system that the district claims to be "the most rigorous teacher evaluation system in the nation." Given the initial results, perhaps it is.
Many districts undertake what appear to be strong eval systems only to, disappointingly, end up reporting little differentiation among teachers. Not so in Dallas.
Among the system's seven possible teacher effectiveness ratings, about a third of the district's 11,000 teachers were assigned to one of the three lowest. Around 40 percent received a middle-of-the-road rating. Only 22 percent received one of the highest three ratings.
Further, Dallas reported a fairly typical turnover rate for an urban district of 16 percent, suggesting that teachers weren't all that fussed about the new system (which wasn't the case for Washington, DC's first year of implementation, though that could have been because of all the national attention). Those Dallas teachers who did choose to leave were likely the ones the district would have chosen to go anyways: over half rated "unsatisfactory" did not return and a quarter of teachers who performed just marginally better did not return. Conversely, only a small percentage of higher performing teachers chose to leave.
Why is the Dallas approach off to such a positive start?
We think the use of seven ratings—versus four or five in most other states—has something to do with it, allowing for more fine-grained distinctions among teachers. The district also carefully defined what it took to fall into each of the seven categories, field testing a rubric that measures in detail a teacher's performance across nearly 20 different performance indicators. The result is an instrument that is much more successful at actually grouping teachers into the different rating tiers.
Also, the system relies on more than just a formal
observation and written summary—school leaders conduct a minimum of ten spot
observations per year to provide teachers with regular instructional feedback.
Spot observations (only 10-15 minutes each) appear to be a more palatable
choice to school leaders, and their very nature may be a much better match with
the generally frenzied pace of running a school.
The most significant reason the Dallas system might have met with such early success is that it was so carefully piloted for a number of years in a much smaller school district, which allowed the kinks to be worked out. Dallas's superintendent, Mike Miles (who recently left) had been previously posted in the Harrison School District in Colorado Springs, Colorado where he developed the rudiments of the Dallas system. (N.B. Mike Miles sits on NCTQ's Board of Directors).
Perhaps what's most interesting about the Dallas system is its impact on teacher pay. A highly effective teacher can now earn quite a bit more in the new regime, e.g. an "Exemplary" teacher earns a minimum of $74,000 per year, compared to $56,000 for a teacher rated "Proficient 1." Still Dallas did not pay out a single dime more in salaries this year. While most returning teachers (71 percent) received a salary increase, the additional expense was offset by the sizeable group of teachers who did not qualify.
In striving to achieve valid teacher evaluations, schools often overlook those who spend the most time observing teachers in action: students. As the 2013 MET study reported, student surveys are a critical tool for effective teacher evaluation. By our calculations, a classroom of 30 students might clock about 27,000 hours observing a single teacher over a school year. It's no wonder students are more likely to arrive at a more accurate assessment than a single principal who reaches his or her conclusion on the basis of a few hours of observation.
New findings from a Dutch study not only reinforce these groundbreaking MET findings, but also add some intriguing nuance to our understanding of what students are able to discern about their teachers.
Some 5,000 students were asked how their teachers performed across six areas, including classroom management and clarity of instruction. Because students rated teachers over three years, their perception of a teacher's development from one year to the next could be captured. Adding even more evidence that student surveys are as accurate as any evaluation tool, they reached the same conclusion so many other kinds of research have consistently reported—that new teachers steeply improve for the first few years of teaching before leveling off.
The study also explores new territory. Because the sample of teachers included both teachers who had entered the classroom with formal preparation as well as those who had not, researchers probed to see if students could decipher any differences between the two groups. They could.
Across all areas, students gave consistently higher marks to teachers who had been formally trained than they did their walk-on counterparts. Given that most studies in the US have not been able to discern such differences (though no study that we know of has asked students to answer this question), this new finding suggests that either student surveys are more accurate than any measure that's previously been considered—or that the Dutch just do a better job of preparing teachers.
If the latter is the case, what might be the secret sauce of Dutch teacher prep? The central features of its preparation look like the American system—at least on the surface. New teachers must have demonstrated content proficiency in language and mathematics exams and have completed structured clinical practice, exactly the bones of what happens in the US. But in the Netherlands, practical experience is more extensive. Teacher candidates must complete 12 to 18 months of student teaching, typically in a school connected to the university.
In any case, the study builds the case for using student survey data in teacher evaluations, if not a closer examination of how the Dutch prepare their teachers.
Four teachers'
use of a self-monitoring checklist that successfully helped them use the Good
Behavior Game is reported in a new study.*
We perked up when we saw attention paid to the Good Behavior Game (GBG)
because we've previously commented on this classroom management practice:
unlike virtually every other classroom practice in vogue or out, the GBG's
effects have been replicated in over 50 studies between 1969 and 2015. Each
study has proven the GBG's effectiveness in reducing disruptive behaviors in
pre-K through 12th grade and in producing longer-term positive effects on
academic performance. Nonetheless, our
regular readers won't be surprised to learn that we estimate that only two percent of teacher candidates are even exposed
to any information about the GBG in their preparation, much less taught to use
it. That's why we were heartened to see
this study: four more teachers out of
the nation's 3.5 million classroom teachers now know something to help their
classroom management - something that they should have learned long ago.
*Four subjects is usually a pretty small "n" size for a credible study, but this research actually does meet Institute of Education Sciences' pilot design standards for single-case studies, no small feat.
During a late night drive through the streets of Newark, two rising political stars—Democrat Cory Booker, then mayor of Newark, and Republican Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey—hatched a plan to transform the Newark school system. And so begins Dale Russakoff's The Prize, telling the story of an unlikely partnership to close failing schools, expand charter school options and weaken labor agreements they saw as barriers. Within a year, Booker had caught the attention of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who agreed to donate $100 million to the cause. As Russakoff writes, "Their stated goal was not to repair education in Newark but to develop a model for saving it in all of urban America."
Many have already written excellent summaries of the book (see here and here), so it will suffice to say that implementing a reform plan in Newark was more difficult than expected, and the money went fast. The spending led to mixed results. Some newly minted charters have been successful, while others have not. Graduation rates have increased, but test scores have decreased. To date, the investment has not produced the model of education reform that its dreamers envisioned.
We'll leave it to others to parse whether or not Russakoff's take on the cost of politics, personal ambition and implementation missteps to education reform in Newark is right. NCTQ's lens is squarely focused on her characterization of the district's teachers. Throughout the book, Russakoff includes stories from on-the-ground teachers who were at the heart of many of the city's successes. Russakoff profiles Princess Lee, a kindergarten teacher, as an example: She's hard working, knows how to manage a classroom and can deliver content to students in ways that they understand. But these skills are presented as accessories; in the picture Russakoff paints, the key to Lee's success is that she herself grew up poor and survived dysfunctional schools in Newark. According to Russakoff, the children in Lee's class respect and respond to her because she is able to relate to the poverty and violence that dominate their lives, and she provides a model of how they too can be successful.
Narratives like these perpetuate the idea that the best teachers arrive to their work with certain innate qualities and life experiences that make them more effective with specific types of students. While shared life experiences can lay the foundations for meaningful classroom relationships, many successful teachers of disadvantaged students do not fit this mold. Moreover, this assumption does little to professionalize teaching, nor does it encourage districts to design a roadmap for recruiting and retaining the teaching force they need.
How can school districts get more teachers like Lee into the classroom? Great teachers aren't just born; they are trained. We should certainly work harder to recruit talented people of color and those from low income communities to join the profession, but this has to happen in conjunction with higher expectations of teacher preparation. To begin, districts can identify the skills and knowledge necessary to teach successfully in their schools. From there, districts must convey these requirements to prospective teachers and teacher preparation programs and vet potential hires for them.
The real prize in the American education game is highly effective teachers—and school districts need to be strategic about how to capture that prize for themselves. They can start by abandoning the narrative that great teachers are created only through context and not training.
NCTQ has been tracking teacher policy for a decade. Over these years, no policy has seen such dramatic transformation as teacher evaluation. It hasn't been an easy road for states. The simultaneous implementation of teacher effectiveness policies and the Common Core, along with the transition to new college- and career-ready assessments, have almost every state in the country in flux. The pressure is on to curb state testing and roll back teacher evaluation policies.
But for now, we remain optimistic that states will stay the course and build on their efforts around teacher effectiveness. NCTQ's new report released this week, State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning, presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date information on how states are evaluating teachers and using those results to inform policy and practice. The report also breaks new ground by providing a first look at the policy landscape on principal effectiveness.
What is clear is that teacher effectiveness policy has a strong foothold in state policy – and that's important to its endurance. In 2015, 43 states require that student growth and achievement be considered in teacher ratings and in 35 states evaluations of teacher effectiveness are significantly or mostly informed by student growth and achievement. Twenty-three states require districts to factor teacher performance into tenure decisions.
Only three states NCTQ once recognized for having developed teacher effectiveness policies (South Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin) no longer appear to require student growth and achievement to be a significant factor in teacher ratings. Today there are just five states (California, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska and Vermont) that have no formal state policy requiring that teacher evaluations take objective measures of student achievement into account in evaluating teacher effectiveness. ESEA waivers haven't been the policy driver some think they've been; most state action happened before waivers came on to the scene. And most later on the scene states have enacted state policy too. In fact, only Alabama, New Hampshire and Texas have teacher evaluation policies that exist only in waiver requests to the federal government.
In our first survey of the principal evaluation landscape, we identified 34 states that require annual evaluations of school leaders. In most cases the requirements for how student achievement and other factors are weighed in principal ratings mirror the requirements for teacher evaluations. Still, principal effectiveness seems often to be an afterthought in many states. Many states do not specify who is responsible for conducting evaluations of principal effectiveness, don't require observations of school leaders doing their jobs and don't require training and/or certification for principal evaluators. New Jersey is a notable exception in requiring principals to be evaluated on the quality of the teacher evaluations they oversee.
While the evaluation policy landscape has been transformed, much work remains on implementation. Some states and districts have had and are continuing to learn the hard way that some practices are ill advised (Using schoolwide data only to measure student growth for teachers of non-tested grades and subjects and requiring tests that serve no instructional purpose but to provide teacher evaluation data are two that readily spring to mind). As we've argued all along, the real power in performance-based evaluations lies in using the results to recognize and encourage effective instruction as well as to prepare and value highly-effective teachers and leaders. And states are increasingly making some of these critical links, turning what was once a bureaucratic exercise into a more meaningful process with the potential to continually improve teaching and learning.
NCTQ is
thrilled to announce the arrival of Barbara R. Davidson as our new Senior Vice
President for Teacher Preparation Strategies. In addition to overseeing
the work of the Teacher Prep Review,
Ms. Davidson will direct our newly launched website Path to Teach, our new Pipeline initiative and our growing consultation
practice with school districts and higher education institutions. Ms. Davidson
comes to NCTQ with a terrific background in management of nonprofit education
organizations, having served both as the President of StandardsWork and most
recently the Deputy Director of Great Minds (formerly Common Core). As
our teacher preparation work is rapidly expanding into new territories and
reaching new audiences, Ms. Davidson's experience and skill sets, particularly
in organizational growth and educational marketing, provide a welcome addition
to our leadership team.
When most companies are handing out
more pink slips than paychecks, getting a job in teaching starts to look
awfully attractive—including to people who hadn't initially planned on a career
in the classroom. But a teaching degree
may not seem as good an option to those seeking challenging and lucrative
careers.
Looking at recessions dating back to
the 1970s, a new study
from Markus Nagler, Marc Piopunik and Martin West found that teachers who begin
their careers during recessions were more effective than teachers who begin
teaching at other points in the economic cycle.
Using the value-added scores of
Florida teachers (where a teaching degree isn't required to enter the
classroom), they found that teachers starting their careers during a recession
were, on average, better at raising their students' math and reading scores
than teachers who began teaching in a stronger economy. The effect was evident
across teachers at all levels of ability, but particularly striking was that
the effectiveness of top teachers outpaced the top performers of non-recession
years by an even greater margin. The trend toward more effective teaching was
more pronounced for men than women, minorities compared to whites, and those
who were older when starting to teach compared to those who were younger.
What might cause this pattern? The
authors suspected that the effect came from a group of people entering teaching
who otherwise would not have. People choose their careers based largely on
expected earnings. In a recession, teaching appears better-paid and more stable
than many other jobs, so as other job prospects shrink, teaching looks more and
more attractive. The improvements in test scores were visible for teachers
entering in most recessions since 1970. The pattern held even in the Great
Recession of 2008, when teacher layoffs occurred but were far rarer than
private sector layoffs. The fact that teachers who enter during recessions are
higher performing gives credence to the theory that highly skilled people who
would usually choose another job are more likely to become teachers in such
conditions.
Of course, creating recessions for
the sake of raising the quality of the teacher corps isn't sound public policy.
Instead, the researchers offered a more feasible lesson: raise teacher pay to
attract high-performers into the classroom, even when there aren't layoffs in
other fields. While this policy suggestion ignores the appeal of job stability
and availability, it fits with the study's compelling case that people do
consider how teaching stacks up against other career choices. Moreover, the
findings suggest that districts should recognize recessions as potential
opportunities to find some great teachers.
But another recent
study complicates the picture. Erica
Blom, Brian Cadena and Benjamin Keys found that those who experienced poor
economic conditions at age 20 (when they were choosing their college major)
were less likely to major in education than those who chose their major in good
economic times. The authors suggested that students in recessions will pick
majors that they think will lead to high-paying jobs and will be seen as
rigorous. Since fewer students choose to major in education at such times, this
suggests that it's not perceived as lucrative or challenging (see our findings
on the lack of rigor in teacher prep here).
The two studies are not
contradictory—they consider different choices (job vs. college major) and
different populations (teachers vs. all undergraduate students). Taken
together, they suggest—unsurprisingly—that people consider much more than just
their passion for the work itself when choosing a major and a career.
At this point, we figure that everyone else has already written about the more interesting and insightful takeaways about TNTP's latest report, entitled The Mirage (see here and here). (That's what we get for putting out a newsletter only once every two weeks). No question that the results were depressing, finding that school districts are spending about $18,000 per teacher on professional development that isn't developing anyone.
One explanation we liked for PD's lack of an impact didn't seem to get much of a bounce around the echo chamber. On the day of the report's release, Washington, DC's Chancellor Kaya Henderson observed that the biggest "bang for the buck" in teacher PD might lie in teachers' study of curriculum (see above!)—hashing through standards, joint unit and lesson planning, sharing resources and materials—and that is something American school teachers just do not seem to get to do a lot, at least compared to other countries.
As if to confirm our hunch, shortly after The Mirage was released, we stumbled across an even more depressing example of How Bad PD Is in the USA, and which illustrates the disconnect between professional development and curriculum.
Two Florida State University researchers describe how school districts there essentially squandered a generously funded opportunity to allow teachers to spend a lot more time on curriculum. While roughly half of all Florida districts signed up to use dedicated Race to the Top funds to implement a Japanese Lesson Study,mostnever followed through.
No question that Lesson Study involves a significant amount of time and resources. Groups of teachers must meet regularly to set goals, review content and plan and practice lesson delivery. Doing Lesson Study right requires a hefty budget for training on how to implement the PD, devoted planning time and substitute teachers to cover classes while teachers observe each other's lessons. When it came down to making the changes that Lesson Study requires in schedules and spending, not only did districts fail to benefit from the money they were slated to receive, most never even requested the money.
Motoka Akiba and Bryan Wilkinson never were able to pinpoint why exactly the money wasn't spent. We could posit a few guesses, but then so could our readers, we imagine.
Professional development that dives deep into curriculum, where content and pedagogy intersect, may not be simple, but it is, in our humble opinion, the Holy Grail.
Today's TQB features commentary from Melody Arabo, Michigan's 2015
Teacher of the Year.
Imagine a hybrid role
that allows teachers to take on leadership initiatives in a supported
environment, and stay connected to students in the classroom. Would teachers
and administrators be interested? Would people see the value in it? Michigan's Walled Lake Consolidated School
District is looking to find the
answers as they implement an innovative teacher hybrid role during this school
year.
Being in a classroom
every day is exhilarating, but also very limiting. Teachers often feel
overwhelmed and disconnected from the outside world. Many would like to
collaborate and influence decision-making, but they aren't given the chance. In
the rare instances leadership opportunities do arise, they come packaged with
extra responsibilities tacked on to an already overflowing teacher workload.
This is one of the reasons why, in an effort to make a greater impact or
further their careers, effective teachers leave the classroom and move into
other positions.
Unfortunately, not long after
an educator leaves the classroom to serve in other roles, other teachers are
not as receptive to what they have to say. That's understandable—things
change so quickly in teaching and it is hard to fully understand the day-to-day
dynamic unless you are actually experiencing it. While this may not be the
right attitude to have, it is the nature of our profession. On
the opposite end, because school structure can be so limiting, administrators
and policy makers rarely have the opportunity to get input from teachers, at
times resulting in well-intentioned but uninformed decisions that can
negatively impact teachers' work. The transition from theory to practice gets
lost in this shuffle.
As the 2015 Michigan
Teacher of the Year, I stepped out of my classroom for a year to travel around
the state and nation and explore all aspects of education. Professionally, my
biggest takeaway from that experience was that there is a massive disconnect
between those that are in the classroom and those who make decisions for the
classroom. I was shocked by the lack of teacher voice in the places it is
needed most and am desperate to find a solution. Personally, my biggest
takeaway was that I had reached a crossroads in my career and felt pressure to
decide the path I would take. I spent 12 years in a classroom working directly
with kids and the last year immersed in the world of teacher leadership working
with adults, all work which I loved. I became determined to find a way to
incorporate the best of both worlds. These factors became the driving force
behind an idea that I developed with my great friend and talented colleague,
Angela Colasanti.
The idea is simple: a
Co-Teacher/Leadership Development Hybrid Role where two teachers share one
classroom and all teaching responsibilities. How teachers are paired in this
role is key; the two must have a strong level of trust and comfort with one
another, along with a similar classroom management and teaching style. Both
would work in the classroom together on a regular basis, but having two
teachers provides flexibility for either to be elsewhere when needed. Even
while in the classroom together, one teacher can focus on instruction and the
other can be implementing new initiatives.
It is important to note
that this is not a 50/50 shared time position. This differs from a
typical half-classroom, half-instructional coach position because it offers a
fluid structure, allowing teachers to work together, collaborate and implement
ideas while sharing the same space. Their classroom would be up-to-date on all
current best practices and can be used as a lab class for professional
learning.
This hybrid role aims to
serve as a bridge between all levels of the school system in order to
strengthen each of them. By providing teacher perspective in places where it
has been missing, it will create more balance and impact in policy because
teachers should be at the table anytime the conversation is about
education. At the same time, teachers will gain a better understanding of the
dynamics that occur beyond our classrooms. This position is meant to tap into
leadership potential, increase teacher efficacy, strengthen instructional
practices, provide opportunities to connect and learn from one another and
build capacity for sustainable change. All of these things will result in
positive changes that will benefit educators, students and the community as a
whole.
The more we move towards
hybrid roles, the more we professionalize the profession and see teachers as
the valued experts they are. We hope you follow along in Walled Lake's journey
as "The Hybrid Teachers" develop new career pathways for educators!
Schanzenbach's
thesis is that too often, education research only assesses an intervention's
immediate or intermediate outcomes without capturing its full long-term
benefits. This may be particularly relevant, she asserts, when judging the
impact of early childhood investments.
Schanzenbach
offers the example of two studies (both of which she co-authored) on the famous
1990s Project STAR class size experiment in Tennessee. That well-known
experiment assigned students randomly to either regularly sized classes or
small classes. Researchers behind both papers (the first from Dynarski,
Hyman and Schanzenbach, 2013,
and the second from Chetty, Friedman, Hilger, Saez,
Schanzenbach and Yagan, 2011)
found that the smaller kindergarten classes yielded an immediate bump in
students' test scores for that year—but both papers report that this bump faded
as students entered middle school.
But
that's not the end of the story. When the students became adults, clear
positive impacts reemerged, so to speak, for those students who had been placed
in the smaller classes. Schanzenbach concludes that "we find that the actual
long-run impacts were larger than what would have been predicted based on the
short-run test score gains."
The
failure of test score gains to endure and carry through to what later turn out
to be positive outcomes may confirm public skepticism about test scores as an
accurate indicator of long-term achievement.
But not
so fast.
Schanzenbach
is right in noting that the fade-out of higher test scores two to six years
after the intervention did not correlate with more positive life outcomes.
However, the immediate test score gains from the year of the intervention, when
students were in kindergarten, were
highly predictive of students' college attendance and degree completion.
Schanzenbach admits as much, stating with her colleagues that "the short-term
effect of small classes on test scores, it turns out, is an excellent predictor
of its long-term effect on adult outcomes," (Dynarski et al., 2013).
Schanzenbach's
theory finds stronger footing in her second paper, Chetty et al. This paper
looked at both kindergarten class size and each student's kindergarten
classroom quality (as measured by the average test scores of his classmates at
the end of kindergarten—a proxy for a combination of peer effects, teacher
effects, and other classroom characteristics). Again, small kindergarten
classes correlated with higher kindergarten test scores and higher college
attendance.
Moreover,
while the higher kindergarten test scores were correlated with higher earnings
at age 27, they provide a statistically significant explanation for only a
small portion of the difference in earnings. Thus, the short-term test score
bump can barely begin to explain the benefits students derived later on in life
from having been assigned to a smaller or higher-quality class.
The
missing piece of the statistical puzzle was students' non-cognitive skills. When the STAR students were in 4th
and 8th grades they were assessed on non-cognitive outcomes, with
results finding stronger non-cognitive outcomes but faded test-score gains for
the students who had been in the small class sizes.
Furthermore,
these non-cognitive measures seem to explain a much greater share of future
earnings than do the academic outcomes. Teasing apart the positive impact of
higher test scores and stronger non-cognitive skills achieved in a one-standard
deviation higher-quality kindergarten classroom, the higher 4th
grade test scores would predict an
additional $40 of income at age 27 but, the non-cognitive
skills would predict an additional $139 in earnings.
Although
we think Schanzenbach's characterization of the findings in Dynarsky et al.
undersells the predictive power of immediate test score gains, she does raise
several critical points. The first is that early childhood interventions may foster outcomes that most strongly
emerge long after the initial study period has ended, thereby eluding
researchers who only measure immediate and intermediate
outcomes for a few years. The second is that interventions may yield effects
that cannot be evaluated purely by measures of academic skills and content. As
our understanding of the importance of grit and executive functioning grows, so
too should our measures of the impact of classroom experience on these skills
alongside standardized test scores.
Sean
Kelly and Laura Northrop of the University of Pittsburgh ask and answer this
question, reporting that teachers who attend highly
selective institutions are more likely to leave the profession than their
peers.
However,
we're crying foul.
State
Kelly and Northrop: graduates of highly selective institutions have an
estimated "85 percent greater likelihood of leaving the profession than less
selective graduates in the first three years of teaching" (p. 25). Wow. That's bad, right?
Before
districts start turning away any applicants from the Ivy League, read the fine
print. The researchers used data from a sample of teachers (via the federal
government's Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Survey) to estimate that across all
teachers, about 15 percent of graduates from highly selective colleges are
likely to leave the profession within three years, compared to eight percent of
graduates from less selective institutions. True, that roughly seven percentage
point difference (15 percent minus eight percent) does represent an 85 percent increase, as Kelly and Northrop
claim, but, also true, it's a distinction without a difference.
First,
a little about statistics. An increase
from 10 to 15 percent or from 90 to 95 percent is, in both instances, a five percentage point increase. However, in
the former, it's a 50 percent
increase; in the latter, it's only a 5.5 percent increase. Clearly, choosing to
use percents (as Kelly and Northrop
do) rather than percentage
points is
misleading…while still technically accurate.
Second,
and more to the point, while the different attrition rates were not negligible,
they also weren't statistically significant. Kelly and Northrop attribute the
lack of statistical significance to the small sample size (160 graduates from
highly selective colleges, and 1,350 graduates from less selective colleges), but
that doesn't tamp down their enthusiasm for repeatedly referring to the difference
in attrition rate—even though it was statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Less
time was spent on findings that were statistically significant. For example, we
also learn that teachers who started their teaching career later in life were
found to be more likely to leave the profession within three years. Teachers
who were earning relatively higher salaries were found to be less likely to
leave.
Rather than looking for the next big reform to improve teacher quality, a new study considers whether it's time for things to stay the same. Researcher David Blazar of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard recently looked into what happens when we play musical chairs with teachers' grade assignments.
For starters, teachers switching grades happens more often than you may think, ranging from about one in five teachers in any given year in some studies to more than one in three in others.
What Blazar finds is that this constant switching is not good for students. Using teachers' value-added estimates, Blazar compared the average returns to experience (the measure of how much a teacher improves due to more years in the classroom) for teachers who do and don't switch grades. Unfortunately, switching grades was almost never for the better.
For example, a teacher who switched grades between her second and third year of teaching generally reported 20 percent lower gains than teachers who had the same amount of experience but remained in the same grade. At some points in a teacher's career, the learning losses associated with switching grades lingered for at least two years.
The type of switch matters too. Those teachers who switched to an adjacent grade (e.g., 2nd to 3rd grade) generally fared better than those who made a nonadjacent grade switch (e.g., 2nd grade to 4th grade). This makes sense: a teacher faces a steeper learning curve, in terms of classroom management techniques, curriculum, etc., when she switches to a grade very different than the one taught before, compared to what she has to learn when teaching a similar grade.
Given that changing grades means that the teacher is likely to be less effective than she would have been had she stayed put, it's disconcerting that these grade changes were more common for less experienced and less effective teachers. Making matters worse, teachers in schools with low student achievement and higher proportions of low-income students and students of color also had higher rates of grade switching.
As Blazar makes clear, this all must be looked at in context. Grade assignments can be made for positive reasons. For example, it could be forced or chosen (a factor Blazar was unable to control for), and that intent could potentially make a difference in how well a teacher performs the following year. Nevertheless, there's enough evidence here to suggest that a principal should think twice about changes in teacher assignment.
Almost 6.4 million students—about 13% of students overall—receive special education services. Meanwhile, nearly the same percentage of the teacher workforce works in special education classrooms. Considering the need for these professionals and the specialized skills required of them, you'd think expectations for preparing and licensing special education teachers would be at least as high as they are for other teachers, if not higher.
In fact, states set an appallingly low bar for licensing special education teachers– a categorically lower bar than for general education teachers. How is it that less is required for the very teachers whose students need more?
Nearly two thirds of all states do not sufficiently differentiate between the knowledge and skills needed to teach elementary grades versus secondary grades. These states send a loud and clear message that, when it comes to special education, the knowledge and preparation a teacher needs for a first grade classroom is similar to what's needed for an 11th grade classroom. Would this be an acceptable premise for general education? Of course not.
State requirements are even more dismal when it comes to content knowledge preparation. While it has become commonplace for states to require general education elementary teachers to pass a content knowledge test, only 14 states require the same of special education elementary teachers.
At the secondary level, the problem is even worse. Unlike their counterparts in general education, they are usually generalists rather than single-subject teachers. Only three states—Missouri, New York and Wisconsin—require grade-appropriate tests in all core subjects for a secondary special education license. Five other states require tests in at least one subject. That means that the overwhelming majority of special education high school math teachers, for example, may know shockingly little math.
How can we expect our special education students to meet the same standards as general education students when we have a double—and decidedly lower—standard for their teachers?
For decades, districts have been unable to find enough special education teachers, explaining but not excusing states' unwillingness to raise standards.
But some are willing. New York, for example, has done more than any other state to raise expectations for special ed teachers, raising the bar for content knowledge and preparing teachers to be effective reading teachers, an area of particular need for special education students. Indiana, Missouri and Rhode Island are also on the right track. These states have recognized that the real problem goes well beyond recruitment. Special education teachers also have to be set up for success during their training and preparation. Special education students deserve well-trained teachers, and aspiring special education teachers deserve to be adequately prepared to successfully do their jobs.
Welcome
to a new school year! A chance to learn new subjects, make new friends and be reminded
anew of the disparities in education.
We've
written a lot (see here,
here, and here)
about the mounting evidence of a particularly pernicious element of the
achievement gap—that the quality of the person at
the head of the classroom often varies depending on who's sitting in the desks.
Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald of American Institutes for Research and Lesley
Lavery of Macalester College analyzed data from Washington State to take a more
comprehensive look at whether disadvantaged
students are being taught by the cream of the crop—or
the bottom of the barrel. Unlike past studies, which generally only looked at
one facet of teacher quality, this study is the first to include multiple
measures of teacher quality and student disadvantage across districts, schools
and classrooms.
Goldhaber,
et al. found that no matter how they measured student disadvantage
(free/reduced price lunch status, underrepresented minority status (defined as
American Indian, black, or Hispanic), or scores in the lowest quintile of the
previous year's state assessment), disadvantaged students lost out. They were
more likely to have a teacher who had fewer years of experience, a lower
licensure score and a low prior-year
value added measure (VAM). The most consistent and significant gaps were at the
district level, but some noteworthy gaps showed up among schools within a
district and occasionally even between classes. The most pronounced difference
was in 7th grade, where underperforming disadvantaged students were
significantly more likely to be assigned the least effective teachers.
There is
hope though—most of the significant
disparities were at the district level, where policymakers have more leverage
than schools to enact changes to attract more experienced and more effective
teachers, especially in their hardest-hit grades. While the districts may never
woo teachers as if they were top-tier athletes, incentives such as leadership opportunities,
hybrid teaching roles, consistent effective leadership, job-embedded
professional development and pay increases could entice highly effective
educators to teach in high-needs districts.
Jessica teaches Latin in the DC
Public Schools and spent her summer vacation as a Fellow at NCTQ. Thank you, Jessica!
Want to
increase mathematics achievement for all first grade students? Focus on
teacher-directed instruction.
That
takeaway is from new research by Paul Morgan and Steve Maczuga
of Penn State University and George Farkas of the University of California that
quantifies the impact of different instructional activities on student
performance. While teacher-directed instruction was beneficial for students of
all ability levels, the authors found that student-centered activities (group
work, solving real-life math, using manipulatives) were only helpful to
students already performing well in mathematics, even though those
activities were more often used in classrooms with greater numbers of
struggling students.
As
intriguing as these findings are, they are not without caveats. As the authors
note, the classroom activities were self-reported by teachers, leaving room for
error in how activities were coded. Also, the study only measured how
frequently teachers employed different types of activities, with no measure of
how well they were implemented. The data were collected in 1998-1999, which
predates the common use of most computers in classrooms; how this technology
might affect student-centered learning is unknown. Nevertheless, the findings
are by no means irrelevant.
Racial
disparities have long been observed in school discipline records. Stanford
University researchers Jason Okonofua and Jennifer Eberhardt shed new light on teachers' own perceptions about
race and the role those perceptions play in who gets disciplined.
Researchers
recruited about 250 K-12 teachers from across the U.S. to participate in an
online experimental study. They were
asked to review student discipline records, enabling researchers to distinguish
those students perceived as serial "troublemakers" from those only
guilty of some routine hi-jinks. While the race of the students was not
identified, the researchers assigned each either a fake and stereotypically Black
name (e.g., DeShawn) or a White one (e.g., Jake). Most of the participating
teachers were female, White, around 40 years of age and fairly experienced.
Each
student had committed two minor infractions. After reviewing a student's first
infraction, teachers' assessments were similar regardless of the student's
presumed race. However, following the
second infraction, teachers viewed the (presumably) Black students' misbehavior
as significantly more serious, warranting more severe discipline. They were
more likely to label those students as "troublemakers"—more likely requiring future
discipline.
Prejudice
runs deep and solutions to racial biases in education may not be any clearer
than racial biases in policing. As with most problems, admitting that there is
one (e.g., having teachers confront their own biases) is a good starting point.
Recall this popular riddle from the 1980s with an answer that seems obvious
now, but wasn't then:
A man and his son were in a
horrible car accident. The man
died. The son was taken to the hospital
and immediately taken into the operating room.
The doctor took one look at the boy and said "I can't operate on this
child. He's my son."
If
you're scratching your head, you've got some work to do.
People have offered many reasons for the inequitable distribution of teacher talent
and experience across schools: salary, the desirability of the
locale, recruitment, the student teacher pipeline, to name some. A new study that has gotten a lot of
attention from the Center for Education Data & Research by Dan Goldhaber,
Lesley Lavery and Roddy Theobald adds to the log pile: the seniority rules
spelled out in collective bargaining agreements.
The
central question: are teachers (especially experienced ones) more likely to
leave high-minority schools
if the
district's collective bargaining agreement (CBA) has strong seniority
protections?
Districts generally pick one of four options for the role of
seniority in transfer decisions: 1) prohibiting it from being used, 2) allowing
it as one of several factors to consider, 3) letting it serve as a tiebreaker
and 4) making it the only factor that can be considered.
Tracking
some 60,000 teachers' transfers, Goldhaber et al. find what we're used to
seeing, that more teachers transfer out of high-minority schools and it's the
teachers with more seniority who are most likely to leave those schools (see
Figure 1).
But then
new ground gets plowed. Contracts specifying that seniority must be the
tiebreaker make the pattern
illustrated in the graph all the more pronounced. Novice teachers are more likely to transfer
out of low-minority schools and even less likely to transfer out of those with
large populations of minority students (see Figure 2). In other words, factoring in seniority means
that novice teachers have less leverage to transfer out of high-minority
schools.
For
voluntary transfers (those requested by a teacher), novice teachers are 50
percent more likely to transfer out of those schools with large proportions of
minority students, all else equal, if they teach in a district that does not
address seniority than if it is a tiebreaker. We see a similar pattern for
teachers who are involuntarily transferred out of their schools.
Some
possible solutions? Obviously, districts
can work to remove seniority as a factor from transfer decisions and instead
base decisions on merit and fit for the position, rather than only years of
service. Or, some districts have
implemented an interview process to help with matching teachers to schools
during the transfer process. Finally, in order to incentivize senior teachers
to stay in disadvantaged schools, districts can also offer leadership positions
or other rewards to those teachers.
To learn
more about how seniority factors into district policies, see NCTQ's
Teacher Trendline on the topic and take a look at the school
districts in your state in our
Teacher Contract Database.
"It should not take this long."
A simple sentiment, but one that likely resonates with almost any teacher who has ever moved to a new state only to then engage in a head-spinning exercise to receive the state's permission to practice.
Interviewed in EdWeek, Michelle Hughes knows about her state's "reciprocity" labyrinth. She's among 10 teachers who sued the Minnesota Board of Teaching in April, arguing that out-of-state teachers are required to jump through many confusing hoops before they can be licensed in the North Star State.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of Minnesota's new law designed to streamline the out-of-state teacher licensure process. Teachers in the lawsuit want to cement the change in Minnesota's reciprocity statutes because the state has passed legislative reform before that hasn't fixed the problem.
Minnesota's changes—both legislative and those being discussed in court—are a step in the right direction, but enough of these baby steps. There is still much more the state can do.
In fact, while we've seen a lot of action around teacher evaluations and other personnel policies, licensure reciprocity remains a neglected problem across the country—with states generally showing a remarkable hostility to teachers who try to transfer a license from another locale.
Only six states (Alabama, New York, Texas, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming) have reciprocity rules with no strings attached, meaning there are no cumbersome mandates requiring out-of-state teachers to complete additional coursework or to have taught a certain number of years within a recent time period. Of those states, only two—Texas and West Virginia—treat out-of-state teachers equally regardless of whether they trained in traditional or alternative teacher prep programs.
Considering the fact that several states are facing worsening shortages in specific areas (i.e., STEM, English Language Learners and rural districts), you'd think more would be focused on how to get effective teachers from out-of-state through their reciprocity red tape and into the classroom.
Lawsuits like this one are a practice to watch. While public education is no stranger to the courtroom, it increasingly seems as though critics of teacher policies are not settling for legislative or regulatory action as the only pathways for change. Last year, Vergara v. California made huge waves when a trial court ruled that the state's teacher policies failed kids. Since then, others are proposing bypassing state legislatures to move similar policy changes through state courts.
Is the licensure reciprocity case in Minnesota a signal that broader teacher quality policy, beyond tenure and layoffs, could get increased judicial scrutiny? Perhaps just the threat will spark action from the more traditional teacher policy makers.
Imagine that you're trying to
teach a lesson on cell division, and one student will not pay attention. Even
worse, she keeps talking back to you. The interaction is starting to distract
other students, too. Finally, you snap. You yell. And you realize that it will
be hard to rebuild rapport with the student at whom you yelled.
"Pause." Like the deus ex machina in a Greek play, your
instructor freezes the action and asks you what went wrong and what you could
have done differently. Then you and your students return to the beginning of
the lesson as if you had never lost your temper—and you try a new strategy for
keeping the student's attention and keeping your cool.
This scenario (and ones like it)
are playing out in roughly 75 teacher prep programs across the country as they
employ a new tool in teacher training: virtual students. TeachLivE, created by the University of
Central Florida, allows real teacher candidates to teach a class of student
avatars. These avatars are controlled by an "interactor" who gives voice to the
student avatars and manipulates their movements with the push of a button—all
in real time as the candidate teaches the class.
This new technology could offer
teacher training the capacity to satisfy the classroom equivalent of medicine's
Hippocratic Oath: when aspiring teachers test their skills on virtual students,
they can "do no harm." Of course, TeachLivE is not meant to take the place of
student teaching—it's intended more as a practice tool.
The potential uses for TeachLivE
could include an introduction to teaching, an opportunity to practice skills
and a summative assessment of teaching skills:
·
Several
institutions are already using TeachLivE to give aspiring teachers a taste of
classroom interaction that goes well beyond customary visits. The experience of
being in front of the room rather than on the sidelines will help them decide
if the job is right for them.
·
A
second use of TeachLivE involves using it as a stage to rehearse teaching.
Preparation programs' presentations at a recent TeachLivE conference suggest
this is the most prevalent use. A few examples of skills candidates have
practiced with avatars' help include asking deep questions, delivering lessons
to ELL students and addressing student misbehavior. Preparation programs often
find that TeachLivE practice sessions are more effective when teacher
candidates are told what to teach—so that their focus is on how to teach. (This mirrors our thoughts
about anchored assignments in Easy A's.)
· As
for TeachLivE's use as a summative evaluation, the Educational Testing Service
(ETS) is piloting a new performance assessment, NOTE, which will employ TeachLivE in
three of its four performance tasks. Intriguing as the concept it, this will be
a very heavy lift for an April 2016 roll-out.
With its potential to give
candidates more opportunities to hone their craft before they enter the
classroom, TeachLivE is a technology with a great deal of promise.
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. Justice Brandeis' famous dictum for disclosure may have a limit: the public release of teacher performance data.
A new study from researchers Peter Bergman of Teachers College, Columbia University and Matthew J. Hill of RAND makes a cogent case for caution by detailing what happened to teachers and students after the 2010 publication of teacher value-added measure (VAM) data by the Los Angeles Times.
The researchers cleverly exploited a decision by the Times to only publish data for teachers who taught at least 60 students, in order to judge the impact of having one's performance data published for the entire world to see.
The idea is straightforward: Create two groups of teachers and compare what happened to them after the Times' 2010 publication: those slightly above the 60-student threshold (whose VAM scores were published) and those slightly below (whose scores were not published). Teachers within those groups should not differ—and the authors ran some checks to make certain this is so—except that some were published and some were not.
The result? High VAM teachers whose results were published were more likely to be assigned students who do better on state tests (likely because parents pressure schools for such assignments or principals proactively try to head off complaints from such parents).
Further, on average, the test scores produced by published teachers were no better or worse than what was produced by unpublished teachers. However, this average obscures a significant difference: after publication, the highest VAM teachers did worse while the lowest VAM teachers improved.
Recently, the Washington Teachers' Union, representing District of Columbia teachers, urged that the DC City Council not restrict public access to teacher evaluations. They should review the cautionary lessons of this study.
Back in 2007, the National Center for Education Statistics began collecting data for a study that would, for the first time, give us better data on new teacher mobility. This is a big deal because most studies lose sight of a teacher once she moves out of the study's district or state—with the result that retention rates have been misreported for years.
Substitute teachers have been in the news frequently as of late. In our most recent Teacher Trendline we laid out what we know about substitute teacher policies from the Teacher Contract Database. One thing is clear: there's a wide range in district policies.
The minimum education requirement for substitute teachers ranges from a high school diploma or GED in 11 percent of districts to a Bachelor's degree in 41 percent of districts. Licensing requirements also run the gamut. While eight percent of district policies require full teacher licenses for regular daily substitutes, 44 percent have no licensing requirements. When it comes to compensation, Portland (OR) leads the way, paying substitutes a minimum of $182 per day. On the other end of the pay scale are 16 percent of districts that only pay a minimum of $70 per day or less.
What else can we say about most districts in the database? Seventy-seven percent do not address health care coverage for substitute teachers in their contracts, board policies, or substitute teacher handbooks. Of the 28 districts that do address the issue, 14 provide health care only to long-term or full-time substitute teachers.
Read more about substitute teacher policies across the districts in our Teacher Contract Database here.
Things that get better with time: fine wines, first edition books and even teachers in spite of prevailing wisdom. That's the claim of a new study that asserts that there is in fact "returns to experience" for teachers (the technical term for the improvement teachers experience due to more years in the classroom).
It's not that this new study disagrees with previous research that teachers tend to improve rapidly their first few years in the classroom, with growth tapering off somewhere around years three to five. But most studies have found that by year five (or at the most year 10), teachers have hit a plateau, and if they get better after that point, it's due to some external forces ("year effects") like a new professional development or curriculum, and not just because they've spent more years in the classroom. These academics, John Papay and Matthew Kraft of Brown University, beg to differ.
Papay and Kraft analyze the econometric models used in previous studies and identify some biases that might have led to the findings. They also take another look at these existing models to tease out whether any growth in effectiveness is due to "year effects" (external forces) or "experience effects" (as suggested, time clocked in a classroom)—an issue of collinearity, for the statisticians in the audience.
Papay and Kraft's conclusions read like Goldilocks. This one's not just right because it assumes that returns to experience stop after 10 years, so it underestimates the effect of experience; this one's not just right because it puts teachers into buckets of experience that are too wide, also underestimating effects; the third one's off because it compares teachers who work continuously with teachers who take a year or more off from teaching and return, and ignores that these groups' effectiveness might be quite a bit different.
The authors then offer their own model, but this too has some acknowledged problems. Their "two-stage" model proposes using teacher fixed effects (comparing each teacher to his/herself) to calculate returns to experience,but it assumes that novice teachers now entering the profession are about the same as novice teachers a decade ago, which is probably not the case, as different generations of teachers differ in meaningful ways. Here though, their model finds that while teachers' return to experience still slows after 5 years, it never flatlines completely—teachers continue to improve after more than a decade of teaching.
Estimated productivity-experience profiles in mathematics using versions of the Censored Growth Model, Indicator Variable Model, and Two-Stage Model that they have tweaked to reduce sources of bias in each model
So is this study enough to upend prior assumptions about teacher improvement over time? Probably not. It's one study up against many and the results aren't all statistically significant (for math, moderately significant only until the 15-year mark, and for reading, not significant for the past 5 years).
What would it take to get a model that is close to "just right"? According to the Center for Education Data & Research's director Dan Goldhaber, we'll need patience, about 30 years with a large group of teachers who stay in the classroom that whole time and a solid data set with which to evaluate them. We're glad we already know that wine and a good book can age gracefully while we wait.
As a group, teachers tend to defy the old adage "you can't go home again," usually taking jobs within 50 miles of where they went to high school and making that choice at a much higher rate than other professionals. A new study from John Krieg of Western Washington University, and Roddy Theobald and Dan Goldhaber, from the Center for Education Data & Research, may have turned up an even more powerful predictor of where teachers end up working than their home address: where they complete their student teaching.
Looking at where teachers end up working after finishing their preparation at one of six Washington universities, the location of the student teaching placement turned out to be a much stronger predictor of teachers' first jobs than where they grew up or went to high school. This relationship held strong even when the researchers excluded teachers who were lucky enough to land a job where they student taught. Surprisingly, even teachers who completed their student teaching relatively far away from campus and/or home (though still in the state, an important caveat of this study) were more apt to land in the school district where they had student taught.
This newly discovered relationship should grab the attention of school districts having a tough time finding new teachers. By arranging student teaching partnerships with programs which may not even be anywhere nearby, districts might still be able create a stable and steady pipeline of new teachers.
The study also turned up some disquieting evidence of inequities, with more-qualified student teachers (as measured by student teachers' GPAs and first-time scores on a credentialing test) being placed disproportionately in more-advantaged schools—and therefore more likely to land their first job in those advantaged schools.
But let's look at the bright side here. IF teacher prep programs more proactively placed the better student teachers in less advantaged schools, those teachers might be more likely to work in such schools. No new law or reg needed—just recognition by teacher prep of the importance of placing their superstars in the classrooms where they are needed the most.
This
year, Clark County School District in Las Vegas started the year in
a pinch: district-wide, there were over 600 teaching vacancies and student
enrollment continued to grow. In response, the district pulled out all the
stops to recruit new teachers (see ads in
airline magazines and a zip-lining superintendent) and is now rethinking how to deploy
existing staff.
Taking
lessons from Public Impact's Opportunity Culture program as well as other
school districts and charter management organizations, Clark County is piloting
two staffing models in which effective teachers take responsibility for an
expanded group of students. They've launched a pilot program that includes a
blended learning model and a "teaching and learning model" in which
excellent teachers are responsible for their own classrooms as well as leading
other teachers. Clark County School District is applying the same principle to
their principals. Next year, two excellent principals will be leading two
schools each in an effort to "franchise" their approach to
leadership.
We expect that there will
be tweaks to the models for both teachers and principals, but we applaud the
Clark County School District's effort to take risks, try new ideas and learn
from other systems. Watch this space in the coming months to see what we can
learn from them.
Do
teacher education journals seek to help teacher educators do a better job?
It seems
like a fairly silly question. Nevertheless, we reviewed 10 prominent teacher ed
journals and learned that, for the most part, they provide pretty weak gruel
when it comes to publishing articles intended to build teacher skills. They may dedicate quite a bit of content to
how it feels to be in teacher prep or the characteristics of a good teacher–but
in terms of getting down to the nitty gritty of developing essential skills,
there's a notable vacuum.
We
started with abstracts from the last five years (2009-2014) for the Journal
of Teacher Education, the most influential education journal focusing
exclusively on teacher education.[1]
Only 17 of the 153 articles in this period (11 percent) covered core
techniques and skills (e.g.,The Effect of
Content-Focused Coaching on the Quality of Classroom Text Discussions and Teacher Questioning to
Elicit Students' Mathematical Thinking in Elementary School Classrooms).[2]
What
kinds of articles fill the remaining publication space?
The
clear majority have nothing to do with teacher training, further evidence that
the field of teacher education, writ large, eschews not only a 'training' role
but, like many academic journals, avoids any topic which runs the risk of being
classified as a "how-to manual" or even sensible guidance. There were
a few articles (10 percent of the sample) dealing with skills that would be
classified as important for a novice teacher to develop, but were not directly
related to classroom instruction.
Here's a full
categorization of all content, 79 percent of which avoids anything having to do
with what some might see as the day-to-day work of the teacher educator:
Some
students are more apt to be assigned better or more experienced teachers than
other students. That's not news. Past studies have found that lower-income and minority students tend to be assigned to
teachers with less experience than their peers.
A new study by Rebecca Wolf of SRI
International plays this pattern out but goes a step further to see whether
some schools or, more intriguingly, grades within schools get a larger share of
novice teachers.
Wolf
finds that the biggest apparent driver of differences in who gets the newest
teachers within a school was the student's grade level—not whether students were high or low performing. While the level
of student achievement played some role, the effect size was relatively quite
small (students who scored basic on the state math test were about only one
percent more likely to be taught by a new teacher than a higher-achieving
student was). However, a 9th grade student was 10 percent more
likely than a 12th grade student, regardless of her academic
standing, to be taught by a novice math teacher. Sixth grade was the exception
to this finding, with student achievement having a bigger impact than grade
level. A low-achieving 6th grade student (the first grade of middle
school for most schools in the district) was much more likely to have a novice
teacher than other 6th grade students.
So
why does assigning the newest teachers to the lowest grades in a school,
especially to the lower-performing students in those grades,
matter? The problem is that success in 6th and 9th
grades, the years referred to as "transition grades," has significant
implications for students' long-term educational attainment and engagement.
Studies show that student experiences during these years have a relationship to
drop-out and student achievement rates that can persist for years into
students' academic careers.
Wolf's study may mean that
principals should think twice about where they're placing their newest
teachers.
The
surprising news about Russ Whitehurst's departure from Brookings Institution's
Brown Center on Education Policy, a center he had ably led since 2009, has us
scratching our heads as much as anyone else in the DC policy community.
As an
organization, NCTQ is very grateful to Whitehurst for his continuing work on
NCTQ's Audit Panel, where he's helped make sure the ratings processes for the Teacher
Prep Reviewmeet
the highest standards. But of course his justly earned claim to fame is his
having founded the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Education
Sciences. And it was as director there that he helped lay the intellectual
foundation for far stronger teacher preparation and classroom instruction than
we have today.
One of the
main obstacles to improving teacher effectiveness has long been the meager
research base on what teachers should
be trainedto be able to do. The
relative paucity of research in what works in teaching as compared to, for
example, medicine, has paved the way for the field's abdication of training
altogether.
But while
there remains much we do not know about what constitutes good teaching, there
in fact is a core set of strategies, identified through high-quality research,
that every teacher should master. Russ had the IES assemble and pressure-test
this research, and then put out highly readable practice guides highlighting the teaching strategies that have the
greatest demonstrated impact. Thanks to him, teaching and teacher prep now have
some of the blocks around which the profession could be built.
Unfortunately, as we've found in our own past
research on training in classroom management and our upcoming report on the fundamentals of
instruction, these practice guides have gone largely ignored by teacher
educators. But by publicly rating programs on how well they train teachers to
use the strategies in the practice guides, we aim to draw the field's attention
back to the strong research contained in the practice guides and firmly
ensconce Whitehurst's legacy in the training of new teachers.
Given the
general direction of federal and state policy over the past few years, one
could easily think most large districts include, or have set plans to include,
some measure of student growth in teacher evaluations. But, as our latest Teacher Trendline
shows, 28 percent of districts in NCTQ's Teacher Contract Database still do not
include such measures.
When it
comes to evaluation frequency, the majority of districts in our database do evaluate all their teachers annually,
both tenured and non-tenured. Nearly 77 percent of districts evaluate
non-tenured teachers once a year. Clark
County (NV) stands out,
formally evaluating non-tenured teachers three times a year. Far fewer
districts (54 percent) evaluate tenured teachers annually. Nearly a quarter
only do so once every three years. Worse, in five California districts—Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, teachers are only evaluated only once every
five years after they've taught ten years.
Read more about teacher evaluation trends across
the districts in our Teacher Contract database, here.
For as long
as NCTQ has been tracking teacher policy, states have overwhelmingly set a
lower bar for licensing new special education teachers. This is especially troubling now, as most
special education students are expected to meet new college- and
career-readiness standards.
Consider
this: 35 states still offer or exclusively grant K-12 special education teacher
licenses, sending an unequivocal message that the content knowledge and
pedagogy needed for an elementary and secondary special education classroom are
interchangeable. Just 15 states require special education teachers to even pass
a content knowledge test.
Of the 18
states that require general ed elementary teacher candidates to pass an
adequate test of the science of reading, only 11 also require special education
teachers at the elementary level to pass the same test. Considering that
reading difficulties are the primary reason for referrals to special education,
the absence of a requirement should trip some alarms. The remaining seven
states, Alabama, Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Ohio, all need to close this loophole.
There are notable exceptions. New York, in particular, stands out. In
addition to requiring special education teachers to pass content tests that
appear to be as rigorous as what is required of other teachers, New York is the only state that
requires secondary special education teachers to demonstrate content knowledge
in all subjects they are licensed to teach.
As I
think about my career plans for next year when I will begin work as a first-year
high school math teacher, I am both excited and nervous about taking on
teaching's many demands. Managing a classroom full of twenty students will be a
challenge which I would like to prepare for as much as possible. So when I was
asked to research a classroom management strategy for NCTQ, I jumped at the
opportunity.
During
my research, I came to learn of a classroom management strategy called the Good
Behavior Game (GBG); it was developed in 1967 by a novice fourth grade teacher
named Muriel Saunders. The GBG creates a functional, engaged classroom by
rewarding groups that best exhibit defined behaviors, such as following
classroom rules.
Education
is a field in which only one in 1,000 studies is replicated even once (Makel and Plucker). In contrast, the effects
of the GBG have been replicated in over 50 studies between 1969 and 2015. Each
study has proven the GBG's effectiveness in reducing disruptive behaviors in
pre-K through 12th grade and in producing longer-term positive effects on
academic performance.
After
doing my own research on the GBG, I set off to determine how many of my future
colleagues will likely have learned about the strategy as they enter classrooms
around the country. The results were surprising. Of the 12 classroom management
textbooks evaluated in NCTQ's classroom
management report,
including popular texts such as Marzano's Classroom
Management that Works and Wong's The
First Days of School, not a single one mentioned the Good Behavior Game.
While
I didn't have ready access to a larger sample of textbooks, I was able to
estimate that approximately two percent of teacher candidates are exposed to
the GBG in their preparation courses. To arrive at this estimate, I looked
through all of the citations of Barrish (the seminal study of the
GBG) to find 16 classroom management textbooks published in the last 10 years
which reference the GBG. I then developed an inventory of the textbooks used in
90 classroom management courses. Of those 90 courses, only two use one of those
16 textbooks.
Why is
the GBG ignored in teacher prep when classroom management is so critically
important for novice teachers? NCTQ's classroom
management reportprovides a full discussion, but in short, teacher educators promote
engagement as the be-all and end-all of classroom management. Approaches that
rely on behaviorist principles—such as the positive reinforcement at the heart
of the GBG—are belittled or ignored.
How wrong is it to deprive new teachers of an
approach that can allow them to be more effective instructors and their
students to be more successful learners? The Good Behavior Game is a useful, research-driven
strategy that I am fortunate to have learned before beginning my future
teaching career. The fact that so many of my peers will not have had the same
opportunity is an embarrassment for the field of teacher prep. Perhaps more
programs will benefit by adding this useful strategy in their preparation
curriculum.
As scarce as
international studies on teaching generally are, we were glad to see two new
studies looking at what it takes to be a successful math teacher. Both provide
more evidence that there are two distinct types of knowledge relevant to
teaching mathematics: content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. The
former is self-evident; the latter involves the capacity to understand possible
student misconceptions, to recognize alternative problem-solving approaches,
and so on.
One study looks at teachers in Belgium (Teachers' content
and pedagogical content knowledge on rational numbers: A comparison of
prospective elementary and lower secondary school teachers) while the other focuses on teachers in Taiwan and Germany
(Content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in Taiwanese and German
mathematics teachers). The studies share a few common and not wholly surprising
findings:
The two types of knowledge are definitely
different and, fortunately, both can be measured.
The fact that secondary teachers have greater
content knowledge than lower level teachers doesn't always imply that they have
greater pedagogical content knowledge.
Frankly, the
most interesting piece of information in the two articles is how poorly
Belgium's elementary and lower secondary teachers performed on a test of
pedagogical content knowledge involving fraction problems (even though Belgian
students outperform ours both as 9-year olds and
15- year olds). It's well established that American
elementary and middle school teachers are relatively weak in math, but it's an
eye opener to see that on a math problem involving division by a fraction, 86
percent of teachers in higher-ranked Belgium were incorrect.
In any case,
this revelation of the difficulty elementary and middle school teachers have
with fractions no matter what side of the pond they're on poses an excellent
opportunity to show very graphically the difference between two elementary math
textbooks we've evaluated and how each takes a very different approach to
developing both content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
First a bit of math on the topic of division by
a fraction: Teachers should most definitely not reinforce the idea that the basis for this operation is
a mystery. ("Ours is not to wonder why, just invert and
multiply!") A good teacher can demonstrate the two types of situations
modeled by this equation:
In the first
situation, we're finding out how many quantities of 1/4th are in 1/2 (there are
2); in the second situation, we're
finding out that if we did 1/4th of a job with 1/2 of a quantity, it will take
2 of the quantity to complete the job.
(Keep
reading. No one said this was easy!)
Here's how a
textbook to which we gave a low score (Mathematics
for Elementary School Teachers, Bassarear, 5th ed.) presents this topic on p. 280:
There's half a page of discussion that draws on the use of the multiplicative
inverse in an abstract way and provides no explanatory graphic. In fact, the
author explains, "Unlike most of the other algorithms we have examined,
[the invert-and-multiply algorithm] does not lend itself to a diagrammatic
representation."
Here's the final part of the explanation
offered:
Good thing
that Sybilla Beckmann (author of a textbook to which we gave a high score, Mathematics for Elementary Teachers with
Activities, 4th ed.) wasn't paying attention to that conclusion. She
provides three pages of discussion demonstrating both types of situation
described above, with no fewer than four explanatory graphics—exactly the types
of graphics elementary teachers can use in their own instruction.
Here's one
of the graphics (and
the full discussion can be found here):
The quality
of textbooks in both elementary math and early reading prep vary dramatically.
Since our first reports on the preparation of elementary teachers in math
and reading, we've invested a lot in textbook reviews (analyzing the several
dozen elementary math textbooks and close to 1,000 early reading textbooks).
Ratings are based on extensive textbook reviews done by experts; in the case of
math textbooks, reviews are done by mathematicians well versed in the art of
teaching mathematically-skittish elementary teacher candidates. We've posted
both the math
and reading textbook reviews; doing more to ensure that teacher prep
instructors hear about these evaluations the next time they choose a textbook
for their course is critical.
We were heartened to find not one–but two–education studies this month using data gleaned from twins to answer research questions about teacher quality and classroom performance. This is a novel approach for education research, although it's quite common in other kinds of social science research. The working theory is plausible (though not foolproof): by comparing how twins perform under different teachers, researchers can pull out real differences attributable to schools and not students' backgrounds.
A Netherlands studytakes advantage of a policy in Dutch schools where twins are always assigned to different classrooms to examine the impact of teacher experience on student achievement. Researchers were able to compare the academic outcomes for 495 twin sets in grades 2, 4, 6 and 8.
Early in their schooling, twins' scores in grade 2 show meaningful (and statistically significant) differences based on the experience of their teachers. For each additional year of experience one twin's teacher had over the other's, there was about 1.5 percent of a standard deviation's growth; that may sound small, but over time that difference adds up.
The researchers think that an examination of twins' performance is an especially robust idea for early grades because there's little chance that students would have been sorted into classes based on their academic abilities at so young an age.
That might explain why in higher grades, the impact of teacher experience decreases: the effect on students in grades 4 and 6 is only found in reading and all gains due to teachers' years of experience disappear in grade 8.
The most interesting finding here may be that there was no evidence of the 'plateau effect' from experience that American studies frequently find at about year five in a teacher's career. Rather, the effect of experience found in this study is linear, meaning that a 20-year veteran is consistently more effective than a 15-year veteran who is consistently more effective than a 10-year veteran, and so on.
Back in the U.S., another twin study also looks at the relationship between teacher characteristics and student outcomes. The research considers master's degrees (where no relationship with student outcomes has ever been soundly documented), national board certification (where a relationship has been found that correlates with increased student outcomes) and teacher experience. Of the three factors, teacher experience seemed to be the teacher characteristic most strongly related to student outcomes. Unlike the Netherlands study, though, the effect of a teacher working longer tapers off, as almost every American study has shown, after about a five-year career.
The myth: U.S. teachers spend upwards of 50 percent more time in front of their students than teachers in
other countries (see more examples of this myth here,
here
and here).
The
reality: They don't. A new studydigs into why survey data incorrectly suggest that our
teachers spend so much more time teaching a classroom of students (as opposed
to other kinds of activities such as
planning, classroom duty and tutoring students, which are counted
separately) than teachers in other countries.
The graph above depicts teachers' responses to the survey question used
to gather U.S. data on teaching time–notice a pattern?
The question intends for teachers to add up how much time they spend
teaching each week and then round to the nearest hour. The responses spike at
intervals of five, suggesting that teachers estimated the amount of time they
teach each day to the nearest hour and multiplied by five (for the five
instructional days in the week), leading to an inflated amount of teaching
time.
For example, teachers who teach five 45-minute classes a day should have
reported 19 hours of teaching per week, but instead reported 25 hours, rounding
a 45-minute period to an hour.
This error of rounding seems to explain why, year after year, the OECD's
Education at a Glance reports that U.S.
teachers spend significantly more time in front of their classrooms than do
teachers in other countries.
Another reason to
suspect the reported amount of teaching time is inflated? About a quarter of
the survey respondents reported teaching their students more hours than the
length of the school day itself.
The
lack of a major new teacher-related initiative in the Alexander-Murray ESEA draft doesn't have us especially worked up. It
shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that NCLB's highly qualified teacher (HQT)
provisions are nowhere to be found in the Senate draft, which does include some
nods to—but no requirements around—teacher effectiveness.
HQT
has been on a slow path to ignominy, with many viewing its focus on teacher
qualifications over performance to be an anachronism. But HQT deserves much
credit for shining a spotlight on teachers' need for subject-matter knowledge.
As a result, content tests are now a standard part of
teacher licensure and out-of-field teaching is much less common.
All
but four states now require all elementary teachers to pass a content test as a
condition of initial licensure. Forty-three states require content tests for
secondary teachers, and every state now requires secondary teachers to have a
major in their subject area. Just 24 states required majors for secondary
teachers in 2001 before the passage of NCLB, and only 13 did in 1991.
Call
us optimists, but we believe content testing is now so fully ingrained in the
certification process that states don't need federal carrots or sticks to make
sure teachers know the subjects they are licensed to teach. As for the very few
holdouts, if the feds didn't force compliance in the last dozen years, why
would anything change now?
On
another TQ front, we weren't expecting to see a teacher evaluation mandate, but
we're also not shedding any tears over its exclusion. This is another place
where states have come a long way over the life of NCLB. Actual state policy
that requires annual evaluations and evidence of student learning is preferable to vague promises to the feds
any day.
We
were pleasantly surprised to see a little gem that limits the use of Title II
Part A funds for class-size reduction to "evidence-based levels." With so much
of this funding currently supporting small reductions that, according to
research, make no difference in student outcomes, this nugget could
dramatically change how districts use these dollars.
With
the House not sharing the Senate's bipartisan approach to reauthorization, the
path forward for ESEA is far from clear. But another bill may have a greater
chance at moving soon, and this one—FERPA—has
us truly worried.
FERPA
is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act that gives parents protections
over their children's educational records. With so much focus on data leaks and
privacy rights, it's not surprising that a FERPA overhaul would be on Congress'
agenda.
Data
privacy is not really in NCTQ's wheelhouse, and parents are certainly entitled
to know that information about their children is safeguarded. We'll leave it to
those
with privacy expertise to
talk more about that.
What
has us so concerned are provisions in the draft currently circulating that
would allow parent opt-out of any use of student data by a third party. By our
read, this could not only devastate educational researchers' access to student
information, but could also wreak havoc on the use of performance data for
accountability purposes, if the state or district contracts any of that
analysis to a third party.
How
will we put stock in any research study when we won't know if the results are
skewed due to the exclusion of students whose parents opted out? How will we
know that school accountability or teacher evaluation results are
representative and accurate?
Surely,
we can protect parents and children without sacrificing our accountability
mechanisms and important research.
Are you worried, too? Let your friends on the
Hill know.
After interning at the
National Council on Teacher Quality for a mere two weeks, I became acutely
aware of how little I knew about teacher preparation. As someone who wants to
be a teacher and has (or so I thought) done quite a bit of research about
preparation, I was startled by the gaps in my knowledge. After reflecting, I
believe that this resulted from a combination of factors: the first, that I
attend a small elite liberal arts college, and the second, that I want to
eventually be an elementary teacher. These factors shaped the way that I looked
at teacher preparation and meant that I simply did not know the information
about teacher prep that NCTQ has to offer in the Teacher Prep Review.
Let's start with how my
college affected my thinking. Carleton,
like many highly selective liberal arts colleges, prides itself on its elite
status. Drawn to prestige, students of these colleges often overlook programs
that do not carry immediate name recognition. Around campus, saying you're
attending a graduate teacher prep program just doesn't carry the same weight as
law school or med school. The elite mindset that we carry renders us pretty
oblivious to the very valuable information NCTQ produces about graduate teacher
preparation schools.
In addition to that, because
I want to be an elementary teacher, I know firsthand that this area is too
often neglected at college campuses across the country; most liberal arts
colleges' licensure programs only focus on secondary education. Of the top 10
liberal arts colleges as rated by US News, six have some sort of undergraduate licensure
program. That's not too bad but only two have an elementary education option.
Additionally, the majority of these programs require advanced planning,
beginning during sophomore year, which ultimately rules out people who only
realize late in their college career that they might want to teach.
Where I see NCTQ's work
making an impact on the thinking of students like me is through professors. The
elite attitude of campuses like Carleton
means that we are well exposed to highly selective programs, like Teach For America (TFA) or Boston Teacher Residency (BTR). These
programs recruit on campus and are well known by professors. The visibility of
these programs persuades applicants. If professors utilized NCTQ's Teacher Prep Review, they would be able
to give more concrete advice about graduate education and perhaps this would
make a difference in students' mindsets.
I wish there were an easy
solution to this problem—a way to alert education faculty at elite liberal arts
institutions to the gap in knowledge that students have about teacher prep.
Students should not feel that TFA or
BTR are the only options out there.
Information needs to be provided from sources such as NCTQ to fill in the
blanks and help guide students towards the best post-grad options for them.
Many students like me would be eager and grateful for this information.
When I was in college, several of my courses
required the purchase of what the professors indicated were canonical texts.
Calculus required Apostol's Calculus Volumes
1 and 2.
Electricity and magnetism used Jackson's Classical
Electrodynamics. Computer science used Sedgewick's Algorithms.
In the field of teacher pre-service training,
Doug Lemov's Teach
Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that put Students on the Path to College
(TLAC) should have similar stature.
Lemov and his team have built a taxonomy of
champion classroom practices by carefully observing (and recording) real teachers
who regularly achieve outstanding results for their students. A significant
update to the first edition (which we reviewed in
2010), TLAC 2.0's revisions and organization—grouping the techniques into four
main classroom focus areas—challenge the (uncharitable)
opinion that it represents nothing more than a "bag of tricks." It's true that
Lemov has a bias to action: he introduces the text stating he "(has) tried to
describe the techniques of champion teachers in a concrete, specific, and
actionable way" with a focus on next-day implementation. And it's true that 62 techniques are detailed
in the text. But these techniques represent an early, on-going effort to
define, illustrate and develop the fundamentals of effective classroom
instruction. Rather than a "bag of tricks," these are foundational skills, much
like arithmetic is a necessary precursor to algebra.
An example is illustrative. Check for
understanding was a single technique in the first edition; it's now a
critical area encompassing two chapters of the book (collecting data on mastery
and acting on the data/establishing a culture of error) and ten separate
techniques. One of those techniques—plan
for error—outlines specific planning a teacher can undertake in
anticipating and correcting student misunderstandings during instruction and
practice. For example, in planning for a lesson on the slope-intercept form of
equations, a teacher (in this case, Bryan Belanger from Troy Prep Middle
School) included more than 50 practice problems of increasing complexity: more
than any class could get through in a period. However, the expectation was not
that any single class would be able to get through them; rather, after
teaching, Bryan would give problems to the class as practice and decide to skip
ahead or loop back in the list of problems depending on his observations of his
students.
Lemov's description of planning for error includes
two more ways of doing so: planning for specific errors (that is, thinking
through the most obvious misapprehensions for the most important points of a
lesson and specifically figuring out, beforehand, how you would respond) and
planning re-teach time (that is, setting aside blocks of time to loop back to
areas where your students are struggling or, happily, move ahead if there are
no such barriers to understanding).
The book also clearly mirrors the respect and
admiration Lemov has for the teachers he has observed and with whom he has
collaborated. This is not the work of an academic isolated from practice; this
is the work of someone with a deep respect of practice and practitioners, a
work written about, by and for them.
It is telling that we found the first edition of
Teach Like a Champion in the
classroom management courses in 7 of 122 programs in our 2013
report on classroom management . To
be clear — that's not a commentary on the text; rather, it's an indictment of a
field that avoids the creation of a coherent theory of instruction, favoring
instead the idea that each teacher must find her own way with her
particular students.
Sometimes there
just aren't
enough great teachers to go around.
Placing two, even
three student teachers in a single classroom is one way that teacher prep
programs are working around shortages of qualified cooperating teachers.
But is this a good
idea?
We thought we
might gain insight into the merits of this relatively new practice from a
recent study, which we won't name for reasons that will become quickly
apparent. We assumed it would investigate whether "paired placements"
(two student teachers in a single classroom) lead to demonstrable gains (or
losses) in candidate skills. Apparently, as we too often discover in education
research, what piques our interest bears no relation to teacher education's
interest.
So why write about
it here? Because it reveals a lot about the current priorities in teacher
education and helps to illustrate the deep divide between the issues which
concern P-12 educators and the issues which concern teacher educators.
Apparently, we can't even agree on the questions we should be asking, let alone
the answers.
Rather than
characterizing student teaching as an opportunity for an inexperienced teacher
candidate to learn from a pro, the article promotes the perspective that such
"hierarchical dispensation of wisdom" is less valuable than
"shared inquiries" of the student teacher and mentor – meaning that
the student teacher is there to both learn from and teach the mentor teacher. Apparently, the authors thought that when
a cooperating teacher is up against not one but two student teachers,
she might be more amenable to let the students be the teachers.
The author's interviews
with the student teachers and mentor teachers in the study lead the author to
three conclusions which we translate here.
The report laments
that unless mentors are willing to "challenge orthodoxies"
(specifically, their own beliefs), they are able to resist the ideas of any
number of student teachers. To which we respond, providing that mentors are
effective teachers, shouldn't student teachers believe that the purpose of the
placement is to absorb instructional practices, not to challenge them? To
practice and get feedback, however painful it may be, from an expert and not
just a peer?
(Note that because
our comments pertain to the field and not the article or author, we haven't
identified either.)
Can schools make teachers more effective? In
thinking about that question, your mind probably goes to professional
development or other training activities. But Matthew Kraft and John Papay from Brown University took that query in a different direction, looking
at whether differences in school settings
make teachers more or less effective.
Combining student achievement data with
teachers' responses to North Carolina's biannual survey of working conditions, Kraft
and Papay investigated if teachers who worked in higher-rated Charlotte-Mecklenberg schools could
overcome the well-established pattern of poor returns to teaching experience—findings
repeatedly showing that growth in teacher effectiveness is limited largely to
the first few years of teaching.
And guess what? Working conditions do matter—at least in the Charlotte-Mecklenbergschool district. It stands to reason that teachers will
continue to grow and get increasingly effective in orderly buildings with
strong leadership and collaborative environments.
But it's the magnitude of the difference that is
the real eye-opener. By the end of the first 10 years of a teacher's career,
there's a 38 percent gap in student achievement between a teacher at a highly-rated
school and a teacher at a low-rated school.
Just do the
math and it is clear that things don't add up for teacher pension policies.
NCTQ calculates that state teacher pension systems are a half trillion dollars
in debt for 2014. Across the states, an average of 70 cents of every dollar
contributed to state teacher pension systems goes to ever-increasing unfunded
pension liabilities – and not to teachers' future retirement benefits.
Further, 38 states
continue to cling to defined benefit pension systems that have become
increasingly inflexible and unfair to teachers.
In our new
report, Doing the
Math on Teacher Pensions: How to Protect Teachers and Taxpayers, NCTQ provides report cards on teacher
pension policies for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We
challenge the claims of pension boards and other defenders of the status quo
about the cost-effectiveness, fairness and flexibility of the traditional
teacher pension plan.
Overall,
states earned a C- grade for teacher pension policies. Alaska earned an A for providing teachers with a fully portable
retirement plan similar to a 401(k) as is commonplace in other professions.
Five other states—Florida, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina and
Utah—offer teachers the option of a
defined contribution plan. But offering
a defined contribution plan is not a prerequisite for a high grade. South
Dakota earned a B+ for a defined benefit plan that provides portability and
flexibility, while maintaining a healthy funding level.
In fact, we
find that only nine states have well-funded teacher pension systems, and even
some of these may not be as well-funded as they appear. State efforts to
improve the fiscal health of their pension systems have generally been at
teachers' expense. Since 2008, more than half of the states have increased the
amount teachers must contribute. To make matters worse, many states are also
making it harder for teachers to receive benefits. Nationwide, fewer than half
of teachers stay long enough in the state and districts where they teach to
become eligible for retirement benefits. And 15 states make teachers wait 10
years to vest into their pension systems, resulting in too many teachers being
cheated out of the opportunity to build an adequate retirement nest egg.
To learn more,
download the report, see your state's report card, or search our dashboard.
Way back
in 2010, NCTQ released Human Capital in Boston
Public Schools: Rethinking How to Attract, Develop and Retain Effective
Teachers in partnership with the Massachusetts
Alliance for Business Education. The typical life span of such a report
might be about a year or two— yet five years later, we're learning it still has
considerable legs, largely due to the leadership of Boston's top-notch interim superintendent, John McDonough.
While the
report found many strengths in the district, it raised real concerns about such
areas as teacher evaluations and transfer and hiring processes. Evaluations were
inconsistent and the district's professional development was not aligned with
evaluation outcomes. In 2012-2013, Boston
not only revised the instrument (which every school district loves to do) but
also the training and the frequency of evaluations. In the first year of the
new system, 93 percent of teachers received an evaluation compared to less than
23 percent in 2009. The district continues to analyze patterns in evaluation
outcomes and provide more support where needed, refining the system each year.
The district didn't stop there. It no longer
requires principals to hire teachers who have transferred from other schools,
giving principals the autonomy to hire teachers they believe will best serve
students. Excessed teachers who don't find a position are given a coach and assigned
to a co-teaching position with an exemplary teacher in a high-performing
school. The roughly $6 million required to pay for these teachers is considered
part of the cost of doing business.
In
addition, Boston now has a goal of
hiring 75 percent of its new teachers in March and April, rather than hiring
the bulk of new teachers in the summer months. This earlier hiring timeline
gives the district access to a larger group of prospective teachers in a
particularly competitive hiring environment and allows them to hire
highly-sought-after candidates before other districts. In 2013, Boston hired just 9 percent of teachers
by the end of June. For the 2014-2015 school year, the district reports hiring
83 percent of new teachers before July 1. In addition, they report that
early hiring has allowed them to employ the most racially diverse cohort of
effective educators in more than six years.
This
winter, the district worked with the Boston
Teachers Union to reach an agreement to extend the school day by 40 minutes,
giving both teachers and students more time and putting another NCTQ
recommendation into place. In addition to providing students the equivalent of
an additional month of school, the extra time nearly doubles the amount of
planning and development time available to teachers.
Boston, you are making us proud.
Do higher scoring students get assigned higher value-added teachers? Maybe— but more work is needed to really tell.
Early in 2014, Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff published a study based on New York City data that found that value-added (VA) models which control for the previous years' test scores can accurately predict teacher impacts on current year student test scores. Along the way, the team demonstrated the viability of a quasi-experimental design that most districts— with student test and teacher assignment data— could use to validate district VA calculations.
In the past several months, two studies have replicated the Chetty et. al.'s methodology and key results in two different samples: a study using data from Los Angeles by Bacher-Hicks, Kane and Staiger and one using data from North Carolina by Jesse Rothstein, who has been academia's most vocal critic of value-add methodologies.
Following the specifications and techniques of the original paper, the two newer papers find little evidence of bias in teacher VA measures (with the typical controls) and show that there are differences in teacher VA across students and schools.All three studies found a significant, positive relationship between a student's prior year test score and teacher VA. In other words, higher-scoring students do get assigned to high VA teachers, on average, with only some disagreement over what happens to special education students.
Rothstein (North Carolina) found that minority students (Black or Hispanic) and schools with higher fractions of minority students have higher VA teachers, on average. Chetty et al. (New York City) found no such relationships. Bacher-Hicks et al. (Los Angeles) found significantly negative relationships at the student and school levels for African-American and Hispanic students. In other words, in Los Angeles, African-American or Hispanic students or schools with higher fractions of these students have teachers with lower VA, on average.
A key benefit of replicating research (which happens much too rarely in education research) is that in addition to comparing results in different locales, researchers can identify potential weaknesses in a study’s design. While Rothstein replicated the Chetty et al.'s results using their techniques and specifications, he also went on to demonstrate two potential flaws that should be the subject of future work: (a) the results change depending on how one makes up for missing classroom or teacher data; and (b) the "random" teacher moves— from classroom to classroom or school to school— required for the quasi-experiment's validity are not so random after all. Taking these into account, he finds significant bias in teacher value-added calculations: for some teachers, the models predict better performance, on average, than they should, while for other teachers, the models go the other way.
What’s the bottom line of these studies? There seems to be clear evidence that in New York City, Los Angeles and North Carolina, higher-scoring students are assigned to higher VA teachers, on average. There is significant variation across the three jurisdictions in the relationships between a student's special education or minority status and average teacher VA scores. Finally, Rothstein raises significant questions about validity with respect to resolving missing data and the independence of teacher turnover. All of these require further hypothesis testing— and more replication studies.Every district HR department looks to find
ways to limit the number of time-consuming interviews of new teacher
applicants. A few weeks ago, Politico
ran a story about "Big Data" tools
designed to give districts a better idea of who is "interview worthy"
based on the perceived skills of candidates (e.g., Teacher Match) and next gen
versions of the old school questionnaires that attempt to elicit the
"attitudes" of teacher applicants (e.g., Gallup's TeacherInsight
Assessment and the Haberman Star Teacher).
An encouraging new study from Dan
Goldhaber and colleagues examines the Spokane
School District's home-grown, skills-based screening process. It argues
that by using a two-stage evaluation process that relies heavily on data
generated from letters of recommendation, principals are able to limit precious
interview time to only higher-caliber applicants, resulting in better hiring.
The process seems to be working: scores on
the second stage of the pre-interview screening positively (and with
statistical significance) predict value-added measures of effectiveness. Also,
teachers hired by Spokane School District showed higher rates of
retention as opposed to those not hired by Spokane
who were teaching elsewhere in Washington
State.
Ratings on
applicants' classroom management skills stand out as having the most predictive
power, piquing our interest in what exactly Spokane principal/supervisor screeners are looking for in
applicants with regards to classroom management. The bottom line: even though
the district's rubric related to classroom management is fairly cryptic (i.e.,
"effective[ly] handl[e]... large/small, ethnically/sociologically diverse
groups"), it appears that screeners are still able to zero in on enough in
the letters of recommendation to identify candidates who are most likely to be
effective.
Given how unsystematic Spokane's protocol appears to be— screeners receive no training on
how to apply the rubric—it probably helps that 71 percent of hired teachers
have had some previous experience in Spokane
as an employee, a student teacher or both; the study's authors note that
"screeners may be familiar with those who are writing the letters of
recommendation."
We have one minor quibble. We wonder how much
better Spokane could do in hiring if
it tightened up the protocol for evaluating classroom management skills and
used more structured interviews to evaluate applicants.
When it comes to their pay and benefits, will teachers always go with the bird in the hand no matter how many birds may be in the bush?
Apparently that is the case in Illinois, where teachers proved remarkably immune to a pretty generous pension deal, as documented in a new study by Maria Donovan Fitzpatrick. While previous research has shown that all workers, not just teachers, have a clear preference for a higher paycheck over the opportunity for greater retirement benefits, Fitzpatrick provides striking new evidence of just how little of their paychecks teachers are willing (or able) to redirect in order to achieve greater pension wealth.
Back in 1998, Illinois gave teachers the opportunity to upgrade their defined benefit plans and purchase extra retirement benefits. At most, teachers were only willing to redirect 21 cents of their current salaries for every dollar they would receive later.
Even more noteworthy, Fitzpatrick’s estimations may still not paint an accurate picture of just how little teachers are willing to invest: she focused on Illinois Public School (IPS) employees with 22-28 years of experience. These veterans would not have to wait very long to receive the extra benefits, so one might have reasonably assumed that they were a lot more mindful about their pensions than the average recent college grad. While ability to pay is a real concern, teachers in the sample were already likely earning salaries on the higher end of the pay scale and were given five years to pay for the upgrade. What’s more, they were well-informed of the costs AND benefits of upgrading, and the Illinois pension system was well-funded at the time (so Doomsday scenarios that the system would be bankrupt by the time they retired were less likely).
While this may be a classic example of "irrational default behavior," (going with a default decision even if a different option may be in one’s best interest), the findings still provide strong evidence for states to consider as they tackle pension reform. In debates around pension reform, one of the running themes is just how satisfied teachers are with the status quo. Yet if teachers really do put a higher priority on what’s in their wallet today over tomorrow, that’s evidence of a preference that’s actually at odds with the current system—one which decidedly tilts towards tomorrow.
For more on teacher pensions, NCTQ will be out with its latest analysis of state teacher retirement policies on January 27.An NCTQ follower on Twitter, @mescamilla1980, recently challenged our take on what's
behind the disproportionately high grades earned by teacher candidates,
suggesting that only those majors which will lead to highly paid jobs can
require a lot of challenging work. At least that's what we think he was
intimating – 140 characters leave little room for nuance. While a cynical
hypothesis, it's a fair one. Is there a
relationship between working hard in college and earning higher future pay?
To get some idea of the answer, we reached
back into our dataset of 40 institutions for which we have identified which
majors were consistently the hardest or easiest.
Looking at the five majors with the lowest
proportions of students earning honors – that is, the hardest majors on their
campuses— we learn that @mescamilla1980's theory is, thank goodness, off base.
As shown below, some of the majors that top the
list are in fact likely to lead to higher salaries. For example, marketing
majors can expect mid-career earnings around $80,000, information systems
majors – about $87,000, and computer science majors – just over $100,000. However,
no one would expect to make big bucks by turning to some of these other majors:
Art? History? (For salary data on more majors, see here).
We did not find
teacher prep to be among the top five toughest majors at any of the 40
institutions. Only one institution, University
of Maryland College Park, came close, with teacher prep coming in at 8th
most difficult major on that campus. We hope to soon see more appearances of
teacher prep on the "toughest majors" list. As the presence of some other
majors on the list proves, lower pay doesn't have to mean easier coursework.
Still, seeing education majors move up the salary
rankings might make tougher
coursework more palatable.
When we
first began analyzing teacher prep programs for the Teacher Prep Review, we were surprised to find some really big
differences in how well programs housed on the same campus did on NCTQ's
standards. An undergraduate program might score quite high while the same ed
school's graduate program got a low score.
We decided
to back out our standards and simply tally what teacher prep programs are
actually teaching. No value judgments. No commentary. No rankings. Just the
bare facts.
What are the
topics covered by teacher preparation programs and in what span of coursework?
Apparently
each can be up for grabs in elementary programs—even when talking about
undergraduate and graduate programs housed in the same ed school on the same
university campus.
In a new
NCTQ brief, Incoherent by Design: What you should know about differences between undergraduate and graduate training of elementary teachers, we
quantify the fundamentally chaotic nature of elementary teacher prep for
initial certification, which is by far the most popular choice of individuals
who consider teaching.
For example,
at DePaul University (IL), the graduate
elementary program requires 56 credits and the undergraduate program requires
69 credits, almost a quarter more. Moreover, courses (or large parts of
courses) in the undergraduate program pertain to five topics not apparent in
graduate program coursework (children's literature, classroom management,
special education, health, and elementary math content), whereas the graduate
program requires a research course.
What
explains the divergence? There are a number of reasons, but we believe that
foremost is teacher educators' focus on development of a professional identity
and a capacity for lifelong professional learning centered on self-reflective
practice. Unlike training on defined content and skills, development of an
identity and the capacity for self-reflection can be cultivated equally well in
a variety of coursework configurations.
Dr. Selma BotmanDr. Botman has dedicated her career to higher education. She previously served as the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Massachusetts, the president of University of Southern Maine, and the provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at The City University of New York. Dr. Botman has also taught at the College of the Holy Cross where she was involved in international programs and promoted Middle Eastern studies.
In her current role as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Yeshiva University, Dr. Botman is working with faculty and deans to expand curricular offerings for both undergraduate and graduate students. Along with her administrative responsibilities, Dr. Botman continues to teach undergraduates in the area of her academic specialty, modern Middle Eastern history and culture.
Dr. Botman holds a BA in Psychology from Brandeis University, a BPhil in Middle Eastern studies from Oxford University, and an AM in Middle Eastern Studies and PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.
John ConnollyJohn R. Connolly is the
co-founder and executive director of 1647, a non-profit start up that partners
with schools to implement effective family engagement strategies including
training teachers to conduct home visits.
Prior to founding 1647, John spent six years as a Boston City Councilor
where he chaired the Committee on Education and co-chaired the annual review of
the Boston Public Schools' budget.
During his time as a City Councilor, John led the effort to reform the
Boston teachers contract, lengthen the school day, and fully staff school-based
social and emotional health services.
John also led a Council investigation that exposed rampant mismanagement
of the Boston Public Schools' food services department. From 1995-1998, John taught seventh and
eighth grade at the Nativity Mission School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
and taught sixth grade at the Boston Renaissance Charter School. John has also worked as an attorney at Ropes &
Gray and Hanify & King, P.C. from 2001 – 2007.
John currently serves on the
board of FUEL Education. He formerly
served on the board of Meridian Academy and Action for Boston Community
Development (ABCD).
Hugh NorwoodHugh has been in and around
the education industry as a professor, administrator, marketer and serial
entrepreneur since 1995, with successful tenures at Emerson College, Lesley
University and Laureate Education, Inc., (home of Walden University, Kendall
College, National Technological and others). In 2007, he formed
Trinity Education Group, Inc. as a Maryland S-Corps, and has served as its
President and General Manager since. Hugh is a frequent presenter at
professional education conferences such as NAGAP, AACRAO SEM, SXSW Interactive,
SXSWedu and Connexions. He has held several board positions for corporations,
including his current role as Board Chairman for InSync Education. He is a
founding board member of SXSWedu and held a board position on Rice University's
OpenStaxx OER Center until 2013. Hugh received his BA summa cum laude from Moravian College (1990) and his Master of Fine
Arts/Creative Writing from Emerson College (1995).
Dallas Independent
School District
hires approximately 2,000 new teachers each year. It is transforming the way
its human capital team works, adopting data-driven strategies for recruitment,
selection and hiring. One of the many sources of evidence Dallas ISD uses is the Teacher Prep Review.
The district first evaluated past recruitment
efforts based on NCTQ rankings to determine quality and whether they would have
a future presence for recruiting season at the previously considered schools.
Some schools have moved down or off of the list, while schools that previously
were not targeted in the recruitment plans will become more of a focal point.
The talent acquisition team travels near and far to find top talent to educate
students. The team analyzed the NCTQ rankings carefully identifying the standards
that best fit the districts needs and projected a strategic distribution for
early contracts.
The new recruitment plan this year will strategically include places
such as University of Houston , Arizona State University and Northwestern State University of
Louisiana based on their rankings from NCTQ. Top students at these
universities can look for early contracts from Dallas. These new teachers have had the training and preparation
that will prepare them to meet the district's needs and they'll be welcomed
into a district whose goal is to develop, support and reward their teachers for
effectiveness in the classroom.
The use of value-added models (VAM) to
evaluate teachers and schools has never been short on critics, but this year
the opposition has a few new leaders to rally behind. In April, the American Statistical Association (ASA) put out a statement of its
concerns with the accuracy and interpretation of VAM estimates. And recently,
the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Board of Directors
released its own statement condemning the use of the statistical tool.
Among its concerns, the ASA said VAMs only: measure correlation and not causation; don't
necessarily predict long-range student outcomes; can't attribute much variation
in student academic growth to teachers (between only 1 and 14 percent); and are
risky to use in high-stakes settings.
The NASSP
took a harder line, explicitly stating that VAMs should not be used for any
teacher personnel decisions and rather used only to measure school improvement
and program effectiveness and to inform teachers' professional development.
Economists in the field of education Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff have responded at least to the earlier
statement: in November they published a statement addressing the ASA's concerns point-by-point. In
response to the argument that VAMs do not measure casual impacts of teachers on
student academic growth, Chetty et
al. cite a number of studies that find when VAMs control for students' previous
test scores, the models do capture direct effects from teachers. The
researchers also note that while VAM can't predict every important long-range
outcome, there are several it can predict, including college attendance,
earnings and teenage pregnancy. And while not all
variation in student achievement can be attributed to teachers, Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff
argue that what can be attributed to teachers is absolutely worth paying
attention to and measuring because of teachers' direct impact on student
outcomes, both immediate and long-term (i.e., an increase in lifetime
earnings).
The researchers do seem to agree with the ASA's concern about VAM in a
high-stakes setting— but only to say that there is not enough evidence to make
a judgment on this point either way.
Each of these statements is worth a read. No
matter what your opinion of VAM is, this debate increasingly matters as states start to link student academic growth to teacher
evaluations.
Over the
years, there have been a gazillion studies examining the relative merit of
different pathways into the teaching profession. Almost all come up short,
often because the studies do not clearly define the type of pathway being
analyzed (i.e., just what does it mean to be alternatively certified?)
A new study from Gary T. Henry and his colleagues at Vanderbilt does not
disappoint, breaking down the
definitions of assorted pathways into more meaningful categories as well as
examining the results of only new teachers (those with less than three years of
experience). After all, should we really judge a preparation program by the
teachers who graduated from Ol' State U. in 1980 or by those who graduated in
2014?
Henry et al. disaggregate teaching
pathways into multiple distinct categories: out of state, in state, graduate,
undergraduate, public, private, Teach
For America and lateral entry (North
Carolina's own alternative entry).
As always, the researchers find more
variation within the groups than across; there are some notable differences in
this study from what previous research has found.There is
some limited evidence of a "home team" advantage for specific teachers; teachers who were prepared in-state
were more effective than those from out-of-state programs in three of the eight subjects tested. Additionally, teachers prepared in private
institutions were no better than those from public institutions, a finding
we didn't find surprising given that we haven't found a discernible difference
between the two in the Teacher Prep Review.
One takeaway
consistent with other studies' findings: TFA
comes out looking great. Students instructed by TFAcorps members annually gain approximately 18 days of additional
learning in elementary math, 11 days in elementary reading and an astounding 73
days in middle grade math.
While there
aren't many TFA corps members in North Carolina, other alternatively
trained teachers (referred to as "lateral entry") have a much harder time
posting gains. Findings conclude they are less effective (especially in STEM
subjects) or, at best, average.Here's a finding
we've never seen before: in both middle
grade math and reading, teachers trained in graduate school aren't as effective
as teachers trained as undergraduates— though they do better in high school
science. This needs more research to figure out if those different outcomes are
due to the focus of masters' degrees, if they were content specific, or in
education.
How do academic research and world
exploration differ? In research, it's good to discover the same thing
twice!
Replication – research that repeats a
previous study – is a cornerstone of methodological rigor. But when was the
last time you read about a replicated education study? We won't judge you if
you can't remember. Turns out, few exist. Of those that do, their integrity may
be questionable.
In a recent study, Matthew Makel and Jonathan Plucker assess replication in education
science by looking into the publication history of the top 100 education
journals. When looking for replication reports specifically, their analysis
found that an infinitesimal number of the education articles published in these
journals were actual replications (221 out of 164,589). And while this may not
seem consequential at first, it matters. Even well-crafted experiments can find
anomalous results – replicating a study can confirm that the original findings
hold true or can turn up conflicting information that helps us better
understand the subject of analysis.
In nearly half of all replications, the same
research team that published the original article was also responsible for the
replication study. This is slightly worrisome given that the success rate (when
the replication has similar findings to the original study) is much higher (71
percent) when conducted by the original team than when there's no author
overlap (54 percent). Although same author replications are beneficial to the
field, it's clear that third-party authors are needed to increase reliability.
So why is replication not expected in
education research? The authors argue that social science publishers and
funders want new and exciting findings, so they're more likely to fund, hire,
publish and promote groundbreaking studies rather than those that seem like
"old news." Naturally, this kills any incentive to attempt replications.
Despite this unfavorable environment, some
researchers are bucking this trend. Check out Bacher-Hicks, Kane and Staiger (2014) and Rothstein (2014 working paper) – both of which
replicate an earlier study by Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff (2014)on the impact of teachers. Be on the lookout for a write-up on those
replication papers in next month's TQB.
Districts
often ask NCTQ to identify the preparation programs that produce teachers who
will stay in the classroom through thick and thin. So we eagerly dove into two
recent articles, one by Richard
Ingersoll and
colleagues, the other
by Matthew
Ronfeldt and colleagues,thatexamine which aspects of teacher
preparation predict persistence – and we emerged a little perplexed.
Despite
sharing the same data sources (the US Department of Education's School and
Staffing Survey and its companion Teacher Follow-Up Survey), the researchers
reach opposite conclusions. Ingersoll
et al. find "a large and cumulative relationship between pedagogy [i.e.,
methods courses, student teaching, etc.] and attrition." First-year teachers
with the least training were three times more likely to leave teaching than
those with the most.
By contrast,
Ronfeldt et al. find that the whole
can be less than the sum of its parts. True enough, teacher candidates who take
more methods courses or who have more
weeks of student teaching are more likely to stay. But teachers who get full
doses of both student teaching and methods courses are actually
slightly more likely to leave teaching than those who just get one or the
other. Puzzling? For sure.
The good news is that
both articles conclude that teachers who had a substantial stint of student
teaching are less likely to leave.
The bad news is that this finding doesn't help us all that much in identifying
programs that prevent attrition, as most traditional programs now require such
a stint (i.e., a full semester).
In the five
years since most states adopted Common Core State Standards or their own
version of college- and career-readiness standards, about one million new
teachers have graduated from teacher preparation programs in the United States.
With five years lead time, we thought the time was right to look at whether
states have aligned their requirements for teacher preparation and licensure
with the skills needed to prepare students for college and careers.
The 2014 State
Teacher Policy Yearbook finds that
most states have yet to make the critical changes this alignment necessitates.
With such profound changes occurring in K-12 standards, it would stand to
reason that requirements for new teachers would be changing, too. We looked
across states' requirements for teachers' subject-matter knowledge and skills
related to the instructional shifts demanded by the new standards— such as the
focus on the use of complex informational text across all subject areas, as
well as admission and accountability requirements for teacher preparation
programs. We found just five states – Indiana,
New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Texas – that are on the right track for ensuring new teachers are
ready.
In addition
to these five states, Arkansas is
also noteworthy, having done more than most other states to revise its
standards for teachers to reflect the instructional requirements of college-
and career-readiness standards.
Most states
have considerable work to do. An area of particular neglect is preparation of
special education teachers, where the findings are especially grim:
- 34 states
offer or exclusively grant K-12 special education teacher licenses that make no distinction between preparation
to teach elementary or secondary grades. This policy sends an important and
devastating message about special education: there is no need for any specific
subject or grade-level content or pedagogy knowledge for teachers of any
special education students ages 5-17.
- Just 15
states require any special education teachers to pass subject-matter tests. Although most special education students are
expected to meet the same high college- and career-readiness standards as other
students, too many states set a lower bar for licensing special education
teachers.
- Of the 18
states that require general education elementary teachers to pass a test of
effective reading instruction, seven do not require the test for elementary
special education teachers. Considering
that reading difficulties are the primary reason for referrals to special
education, the failure to transfer this important requirement to special
education teachers is nothing short of baffling
Search our dashboard or download a report here.
Earlier this month, the Missouri
Supreme Court declined to hear NCTQ's appeal of a lower court
decision, which
blocked our request that the University of Missouri turn over course
syllabi to us for the purpose of
assessing them for the Teacher Prep
Review. As is the custom of the
Supreme Court, no reason was given about its decision, but it came as a
surprise given the considerable support, including amicus briefs, from Missouri journalists. As UM Professor Mike Podgursky described, "The absurd
legal fiction that syllabi distributed to 35,000 UM students cannot be
disclosed" has been allowed to stand.
None of the legal decisions actually prevent us from traveling to Missouri and looking at syllabi, provided
no one has to copy them for us. That was
an option we had not wanted to pursue, because of the principle at stake here
and the cost involved in sending numerous analysts to multiple Missouri campuses.
Missouri's press association
rightly calls the Supreme Court's refusal to take up the case "devastating," as
Missouri public agencies can now
refuse to disclose any copyrighted document. The implication of this decision
has not fallen on deaf ears — Missouri's
legislature is now considering a bill on the matter to ensure that it continues
to live up to its reputation as the "Show-Me State."
A top-notch,
three-part series (here, here and here) running in
this week's Education Week sheds new light on one of the most
non-transparent of states' regulatory functions: their approval of teacher
preparation programs. Journalist Stephen
Sawchuk spent months doggedly investigating this largely dysfunctional
system, trying to figure out why states rarely yank program approval from any
of the nation's 25,000 programs. The pursuit may not rise to the level of who
really killed Hae Min Lee (surely you're listening to the hit podcast Serial)—but, in our view, it comes pretty close.
Sawchuk weaves a compelling narrative
about the reluctance of state officials to intervene (and how convoluted
intervention can become) by highlighting controversies involving programs in Michigan and New York. The third and last article grapples with the root
issue: a fundamental lack of agreement
about what teacher prep should be about. As a quote from Jim Cibulka, president of the national accreditor CAEP (the Council for the Accreditation of Educator
Preparation) puts it,
the curriculum for teacher preparation "has been largely driven by ideology and
tradition, rather than empirical knowledge and investigation...We have allowed
a thousand flowers to bloom, including weeds, because there was no empirical
basis on which to separate the wheat from the chaff."
The next piece on Sawchuk's list should be a cold, hard look at the way that many
states' oversight became so entangled with national accreditation, mostly
during the 1990s when NCATE was on a
roll. Only eight states now approve programs entirely independently of
accreditation. The arranged marriage certainly wasn't appropriate under the NCATE regime and there's a strong
argument to be made, no matter how weak or strong CAEP ends up being, that program approval should never be
intertwined with program accreditation. Sawchuk
references their entanglement, but it's a huge topic in and of itself that
needs exploring.
At least that is what I would like to believe.
This past September, America Succeeds hosted its inaugural conference in
Boise, Idaho. Actually it was billed as an "EDventure"— a thinly
veiled swipe at the typical conference fare we all know too well—involving
endless groups of panelists promising to limit their remarks to a few minutes
only to be shocked, just shocked, when the unfailingly polite (meek)
moderator suggests wrapping it up ("But I still have 10 slides to go!!").
Anyway, the wonderful Tim Taylor who
is busily growing America Succeeds asked me to come, so I happily signed up.
At some point at EDventure there was probably some
education talky talk, but I was more intrigued by the "Recess"
session, featuring our choice of fly fishing, mountain biking, rock climbing or
bird watching. (I was incensed to learn that my assistant signed me up for bird
watching and in a huff switched myself to rock climbing. For heaven's sake, I'm
not THAT old!)
Even more alluring was the Shark Tank Pitch. Head
honchos from Gates, Helmsley and Albertson foundations were on hand to hear and respond to anyone's
5-minute pitch for a great education idea and fund it on the spot. No
10-page proposal, no string of unanswered emails, no sucking up. Instead, an
instantaneous $50,000 grant! Take a look at the video. Awesome!
Anyway, I wasn't able to go because a very heavy
Adirondack chair dropped on top of my head, sending me out of commission with a
mild concussion. I lost my chance not only to rock climb (which, to be honest,
was a questionable choice), but also to pitch an idea which I had absolutely
no doubt NCTQ would have won, and we are now $50,000 poorer for it.
Who won my $50,000? Brenda Berg, who's leading America Succeed's newest affiliate, BEST NC.
Brenda isn't your typical TFA-Charter-Ed-Reformer, having recently sold
her own successful manufacturing company (baby furniture). If PIE had an award for "Most Likely to
Succeed" (take note, Suzanne
Kubach), Brenda would be
my bet.
Brenda won $50,000 even though not everyone on the
funders' panel was gung ho. In fact, Brenda was, as she put it, the only one to
get "shark bit" when Jamie
MacMillan from Albertson
summarily dismissed Brenda's idea. Brenda's pitch was about funding a
large-scale effort involving some 180 stakeholders in North Carolina, convening them to collaborate and reach a consensus
on a major comprehensive reform plan in the state. That's not an idea most of
us in the ed reform world love. As Michelle
Rhee famously said, "Collaboration is overrated." In declining to fund BEST NC, Jamie (likely
echoed by most everyone else in the room) said this: "... it's too nice
for me."
However, a few weeks ago, Brenda sold the ultimate
(albeit penniless) skeptic: me. I swear it was not the long-term effects of the
concussion. I was mostly just really impressed with her clearly capable persona
coupled with steely determination. She also reminded me of something we
reformers are too quick to forget —that consensus building has actually been
known to work and in some remarkable and sustainable ways, both in Massachusetts in the early '90s and Tennessee in this decade. Brenda with
her extensive staff of one, former CarolinaCan
director Julie Kowal, has put in
place a wildly ambitious, furiously paced timeline involving 54 subcommittee
meetings, which convene three times over three months. Ouch. They intend to
leave even these role models in the dust (okay on that point, I'll reserve
judgment).
So my bet is on Brenda. And I
can probably speak for Jamie that she would be more than glad to be proven
wrong.
We love this study for what it says about
great teachers.
People generally agree that an effective
English teacher may not make such a great Calculus teacher, or vice versa.
While people may assume that good teaching probably won't translate across subjects, few have considered whether
good teaching can translate across all students.
New research asks this very question, looking
specifically at whether teachers who have high scores on value-added measures
(VAM) with non-English learner (EL) students have similarly high VAM scores
with EL students. The study, by Susanna Loeb, James Soland and Lindsay Fox, finds that, yes, good teaching
for one group of students remains effective for another group with different
needs in the same class.
Examining seven years of data from teachers
who had both EL and non-EL students, the researchers found that consistency in
effective teaching holds true for both math and reading, although the
relationship is stronger with effective math teachers. More than half of the teachers
considered to be in the top-fifth of all teachers for non-EL students are also
in the top fifth for EL students. For reading, this overlap is slightly
lower: a little under half of the top teachers for non-ELs are also the top
teachers for ELs.
A few characteristics, however, are
associated with teachers being more effective with EL students. Specifically,
teachers who have a bilingual certification or are fluent in Spanish tend to be
more effective with their EL students relative to their non-EL students.
The implication for those hiring new teachers is
that their best option is to find a good teacher – period. However, if the
school system has lots of EL students, finding a good teacher who is also
fluent in Spanish (assuming that's the language commonly spoken by EL students)
or who has a bilingual certification may mean a bigger boost for EL students.
It's no secret that some elementary teachers
would rather walk across hot lava than teach a science lesson and that means
less science gets taught. A new study
shows that improving teachers' content knowledge may be the best way to
increase their students' science learning, suggesting that elementary teachers
should take more rigorous science classes.
That might sound like a no brainer, but it is amazing how often teacher
content knowledge has been missing from the nation's STEM conversation.
When Brandon S. Diamond, Jaime Maerten-Rivera,
Rose Elizabeth Rohrer and Okhee Lee examined teacher characteristics that influenced student science
learning, they found that teachers' science knowledge, measured by a test, was
the strongest predictor of student success in science.
Other measures were largely irrelevant,
including self-reported teacher science knowledge, highest degree obtained and
even the number of science courses that teachers had taken in college. The last
finding is particularly intriguing because one would think that more science
courses equal more science knowledge. However, there are two major shortcomings
in the courses elementary candidates do take
which perhaps go a long way to explain this finding.
First, candidates are often not required to
take basic courses that would give teacher candidates a breadth of knowledge
across important science areas. Second, elementary candidates frequently have
too many choices about which science courses they can take – meaning that they
may choose courses that are not relevant to teaching elementary students. So
instead of taking a relevant and basic course like "Introduction to Biology,"
they may take "Introduction to Astronomy" – a topic that comes up far less
often in elementary schools. Or, they may select a course like "Earthquakes and
Society" which, while fascinating, means that teacher candidates will be
unprepared to teach anything beyond this narrow topic scope. NCTQ's Teacher Prep Review has found that
almost 70 percent of undergraduate
programs do not
require that teacher candidates take even one basic science survey course.
The answer is not more classes, but more
comprehensive coverage of the science topics elementary teachers must be able
to teach. Shouldn't elementary students have the opportunity to learn science
from a teacher who knows about earthquakes AND the rock cycle, dinosaurs AND
the six kingdoms of life - and much more?
School leaders seeking to revamp their
teacher evaluation systems are biting into a meaty subject.
Behind the very public questions of whom to
evaluate and what to count is another layer most of us can overlook, but a
question school districts can't: how should
test score data be measured? Making the right decision requires an
understanding of different value-added models and how to pick a model that best
suits the needs of the school district.
There may not be one right answer. Darn.
A new study sets out to explain the
trade-offs of different value-added models. Mark Ehlert, Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons and Michael Podgursky explore different ways to build these models and find that some
of these variations make a big difference in teacher evaluations – and some
don't – though they leave the big decisions to education officials rather than
throwing their weight behind one model or another.
The most significant decision facing those who
develop teacher evaluations in a state or district is whether they want a
"one-step" or "two-step" model— a decision with big policy
implications. (See our explanation on the difference between the
two and how the one-step model tends to favor teachers in more advantaged schools,
while the two-step is more likely to recognize stronger teachers within
disadvantaged schools.)
Deciding which student characteristics to
include in the model (e.g., free/reduced lunch status, language status, race),
also doesn't seem to have a clear right – or wrong — answer. Different
combinations of these variables yield results that are highly correlated with
each other (in other words, removing or adding a variable does not drastically
change the outcome of the model). However, these changes do affect rankings.
So, for example, when two teachers have similar value added scores, one model
find that Teacher A is more effective, while a model with different
characteristics included may find that Teacher B is more effective – but, and
this is important, neither model is likely to see Teacher A go from highly
effective to ineffective.
Finally, these researchers also make the case
that using more years of previous test scores makes the data only a little more accurate; so little, in
fact, that it doesn't merit the trade-off of evaluating fewer grades. It seems
that one previous year of data is generally good
enough...so out the window goes some advice we've been freely offering
states over the years.
For nearly a decade, NCTQ has been trying to figure out how to
evaluate teacher prep coursework for its rigor. It's an endeavor to which both
of us brought no small measure of personal interest due to our own experiences
in teacher prep programs.
We think the wait was worth it. Our latest report, Easy A's and
What's Behind Them, is a twofer
that both addresses the grading standards in teacher prep and puts forward a
plausible theory for the high grades.
Our president, Kate Walsh, first hit on the novel idea of using
brochures from spring graduation ceremonies as the data source for teacher
candidates' grade point averages. (Grade-based Latin honors are often noted in
brochures.) We brainstormed any number of ideas for how to obtain those
brochures -- until we realized that they were readily available on websites and
from registrar's and commencement offices. The fact that it took over 5 hours
on average to wrestle into spreadsheets the data from each of over 500
brochures -- well, that's a mere technicality, not a deterrent.
The second prong of this two-pronged report is the categorization
of coursework assignments (be they in teacher prep or any other major) into one
of two types. One type (criterion-referenced) facilitates real learning by focusing on content and skills. The other (criterion-deficient) involves overly broad or subjective assignments that not only artificially raise grades but also seriously weaken the quality of training. The identification of these two
basic assignment types grew out of Julie's years of perusing coursework for our
teacher prep studies. Now she feels pretty stupid for not identifying the
distinction earlier. After all, it's so evident once it's explained that we've
included a do-it-yourself categorization quiz in the report.
One more note on the personal dedication our team brought to the
analysis for this report: our categorization of over 6,000 teacher prep coursework
assignments was done largely by Christina Perucci, a very clear-eyed NCTQ
analyst. The vacuous nature of the courses Christina took for her reading
specialist degree from Teachers College at Columbia University (historically the
premier teacher education institution in the nation) is still a sore point for
her.
Importantly, our work on improving rigor in teacher prep won't
stop with this report. The report has laid a foundation for a new standard — the
Rigor Standard — for the Teacher Prep
Review. We have first assessed teacher prep programs on the alignment of
their grades with the institution at large, but we will soon also be looking
for an adequate representation of criterion-referenced assignments—the
assignments which keep grades in balance and help to truly prepare teachers—in
a sample of program coursework.
We hope this is work that the field welcomes, having heard from
many deans over the years that they'd like to find some plausible ways to
reduce the high number of "A" grades their faculties award. We've
taken great pains in this report to provide resources for teacher educators on
how to easily transform a criterion-deficient assignment into a
criterion-referenced one.
We'll know we're having a real impact when the
litany of teacher candidate tweets at #edmajor which boast about the low-level
demands of teacher prep assignments (coloring assignments and making
marshmallow snowmen are now coming up) begin to change to boasts about meeting
its real challenges.
In last month's Teacher Trendline, we discussed a group of teachers who are often ignored in teacher quality discussions: substitutes. Given the increasing awareness of the importance of teacher attendance, it is valuable to know more about the policies affecting those teachers who fill in while students' full-time teachers are absent. Did you know, for example, that Portland, OR pays its substitutes just over $180 per day, the most of all the districts in the NCTQ Teacher Contract Database? And that about 50 percent of school districts require their substitutes to have at least a Bachelor's degree, while a third do not require any postsecondary degree?
Interested in looking at the data yourself? You can always browse any of these policies and more across 118 districts and two charter management organizations in the Teacher Contract Database.
Everyone says practice matters; but
the Match Teacher Residency provides a shining example of a rigorous, practice-permeated
approach to training designed to ensure that new teachers will hit the ground
running. It may serve as the uber example of Non-Traditional Teacher Prep.
As
part of a year-long residency, in conjunction with practice designing and
implementing rigorous classroom instruction, residents must master fundamental
classroom management "moves" involving scanning and making their
expectations clear. Residents learn how to receive and respond to feedback
before moving on to real classroom instruction.
Here
are some great materials, provided courtesy of Scott McCue, COO of Match Teacher Residency:
Advance
reading for candidates from Match's handbook
on classroom management.
A video of a candidate whose first attempts at scanning
requires explicit and targeted guidance from a coach.
A video of the same candidate at the end of training, when
her scanning is adequate to pass the relevant portion of the high-stakes
assessment used to screen for preparedness for classroom instruction.
We'd like to feature more
examples of rigorous teacher prep in this "From the Field" column and
we welcome submissions from teacher prep programs. Look for more discussion of
what we propose makes teacher prep assignments rigorous in our next report in
the "Training our future teachers" series.
Policy fixes are necessary to lay the groundwork for change, but it's
in the implementation of those policies where the rubber meets the road.
Since 2009, a lot of states have made changes to their tenure laws,
including New York. In that state, new policy changed what happens after new
teachers complete the three-year probationary period, requiring school leaders
to review the "candidate's effectiveness over the applicable probationary
period in contributing to the successful academic performance of his or her
students" before tenure is granted. Did that new law and its dogged
implementation by Joel Klein, et al., in New York City make any
difference?
Perhaps so. Research released by Susanna Loeb, Luke Miller and James Wyckoff found not only that the district currently
awards tenure to far fewer teachers than it once did, but also that the quality
of the overall teacher applicant pool showed a marked improvement: a struggling
teacher who left the system after the district decided to delay its tenure
decision was, on average, replaced by a measurably better teacher.
Interestingly, when the district told teachers it was not ready to make
a tenure decision (delaying for a year as the law allows), those teachers were
50 percent more likely to transfer schools and 66 percent more likely to leave
the system than teachers who were awarded tenure. These findings showcase that
just the act of delaying the tenure
decision can result in presumably weaker teachers self-selecting an option that
may be better suited for them (and consequently their students).
New York is particularly interesting because
districts in the state can keep delaying their tenure decisions for as long as
they like. Data below highlight what happened to the 1,369 teachers whose
tenure was extended in the 2011-2012 school year (623 had at least one
extension previously) in the following school year.
If one Teach For America (TFA) corps member can boost student
test scores at a higher rate than other teachers in the same school, would
multiple TFA corps members in the same school result in even higher student
scores?
New research by Michael Hansen, Ben Backes, Victoria Brady
and Zey Xu addresses this question by looking at Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where
TFA teachers are purposefully clustered into a targeted set of disadvantaged
schools.* This notion — that TFA's impact on high poverty schools could really
blossom if more corps members were clustered in a school — is one TFA has
suggested in the past.
This study, like those that come before it, finds that TFA corps
members pack a lot of punch in mathematics, consistently producing nearly three
months' more achievement in mathematics over a single school year than their
non-TFA peers. When it comes to reading
scores, though, the authors continue to find what other research has found: there
isn't much difference.
So, is their largely positive impact greater than the sum of its
parts? In a word, no. The study found no spillover effects on the performance
of non-TFA colleagues. Student achievement in math increased only by the amount
of each additional TFA teacher and no more. Clustering the corps members had
the effect of concentrating these gains in placement schools, but TFA's total
impact in the district would have been the same had the corps members been
dispersed evenly throughout the district.
*For more information on
teacher distribution in Miami-Dade
County Public Schools, be sure to read NCTQ's recent paper, Unequal
access, unequal results.
As states work to implement new evaluation systems,
the tenuous, if not ambiguous, relationship between value-added (VA) scores and
principals' observations will need to get nailed down and better understood. New
research by Douglas Harris, William Ingle
and Stacey Rutledge provides some insight, asking, "How consistent are principals'
impressions of their teachers with their value-added data?"
Researchers interviewed elementary and secondary principals
in one Florida school district and
asked them first to rate a sample of teachers on a number of different factors and
second to give each teacher an overall score. These ratings were then compared
with those teachers' value-added data.
Researchers found a positive but
quite weak correlation between the principals' overall rating and
their teachers' value-added scores. They also found that some principals perceived teachers with high VAM scores as working too often in isolation and participating too
infrequently in school extracurricular activities. As a result, these
principals often gave lower overall ratings to these
teachers. Notably, principals were not aware of teachers' VAM scores at
the time they rated teachers.
At least there was a strong, statistically significant
correlation where it would most be expected, that is, when principals were only
asked to judge teachers "teaching ability."
Most people who took
the time to read NYT Motoko Rich's article about the training methods used by Aspire
charter schools in its teacher residency probably reacted with a
"makes-sense-to-me" shrug of their shoulders. Of course it's a
good idea to tear down teaching's inherent complexities into manageable chunks
and have novices practice each to mastery. After all, it's what other
professions do when they train their apprentices.
If that was your reaction, maybe you would be surprised to learn that such
methods ignite passionate, even vehement, disapproval in much of the teacher
preparation field.
Many years ago, it was decided that teacher education was about forming teachers – not training them. In
other words, the job of the true teacher educator was to hone a young teacher's
intuitions so well that she could somehow walk into any classroom anywhere and
immediately intuit how to teach.
There's little evidence that such an approach works, judging by new teachers'
complaints and the learning loss that takes place in most new teachers'
classrooms. The reality is, we need a world-class teacher training system in
this country and it has to be premised on more than a 22-year-old's intuition,
however sharp. We have to provide training that gives teachers what they
need to lead their classrooms the moment they graduate. We know that there
are many proven, research-based tactics that are not being implemented
systematically in our teacher prep programs. We need to change that thinking — and
we need to shift the "intuitive" approach to the "training"
approach.
How do we do that? It starts with asking aspiring teachers, school
districts, taxpayers, public school educators and parents their
opinion. And it requires those in the teacher prep field to acknowledge
that it is indeed their responsibility to train teachers.
Higher education leaders, opinion makers and policymakers should be having a
fair, honest academic discussion about how best to train teachers. That will
require all parties coming together and listening to each other about what
teachers truly need. We can and must do better when it comes to preparing
teachers for the classroom. It is not too late to make it happen.
Americans increasingly agree that the gateway into teaching ought to be a whole lot tougher. Findings released this week from Gallup/ PDK's annual education poll indicate that six in ten Americans recognize that entry standards into teacher preparation aren't rigorous enough. Fully eight in ten think teachers should have to pass some sort of bar exam. That could be read as a public endorsement of AFT's 2012 testing proposal, except that sensible idea's only purpose was to serve as the guts of a fiery Weingarten speech.
The only time you find that kind of consensus is on the subject of ice cream, or maybe bacon. The message from these latest poll numbers is crystal clear: the public thinks teacher prep needs fixing. As NCTQ has been banging this drum for a decade now (and for many of those years, as a solo act), the numbers come as very, very heartening news. It's not good news that we have a teacher prep problem, but as we all know, the first step to fixing any problem is to acknowledge its existence. Can we agree to roll up our sleeves?
Other less heartening news earlier this month came from Missouri, when we asked the Show Me state to, "Show us their course syllabi" under the state's sunshine law, and the answer was an emphatic NO. To be accurate, the University of Missouri System said no and on August 26, an appellate court agreed that course syllabi are indeed exempt from the state's sunshine laws. The oddly reasoned argument concluded that the syllabi are copyrighted and don't have to be shown to anyone. "Huh?" we asked. Copyright or not, there's this thing called the "fair use" provision of American copyright law which allows someone to study copyrighted materials as long as they don't profit from them. Bad news for NCTQ, but worse news for a free press and public transparency.
So now we'll be heading to the Missouri Supreme Court. University of Missouri professor Mike Podgursky and long-time NCTQ booster was outraged by his own institution's obfuscation and bravely said so in an op-ed (he may have tenure, but he does have to share the Mizzou sidewalks). That led to another Missouri ed professor labeling our decision a "bully" move. I know I'm biased, but it seems to me an utterly reasonable act. The issue of NCTQ having the right to review course syllabi has been settled in our favor in eight of nine states, including by a Minnesota appellate court. There's nothing unique about Missouri in this case.
In any event, I'm not in a bullying frame of mind, nor even a litigious one. The whole business (even if reasonable) is distasteful. The problem we face is not of any single institution's making, but a systematic problem that needs to be acknowledged. We can all contribute to its solution.
As students settle into their first months of
the new school year, it's a good time to check in on the teacher policy
landscape governing the profession across the country. From new college- and career-ready standards to
changes in evaluation systems, many states are making progress towards ensuring
that all students have effective teachers. Currently,
all but ten states require that at least some
objective evidence of student learning is considered when evaluating teacher
performance. And with so many new
teachers just beginning their careers, it's good to see that 31 states require
mentoring for all new teachers and 26 have strong
overall induction
policies
, unless
of course you are a new teacher from one of the many that don't. For more
information on the national landscape, or to see how your state's policies are
doing, explore our
State Teacher Policy
Yearbook dashboard here
.
Along with Tom Loveless, Robert Pondiscio and David Steiner, count me among those who are less than enchanted by Elizabeth Green's new book. The journalist—who did such a fine job as a blogger about New York City education issues—has definitely written an engaging book. Unfortunately, it is in the service of a weak theory that may divert us from making the right changes in how teachers are trained.
In a nutshell, Green's argument is that two teacher educators, Deborah Lowenberg Ball and Magdalene Lampert (both very prominent in teacher ed circles), have perfected the student-centered, discussion-based instructional practices that parallel those in Japan's math classrooms. By contrast, Green argues that while the "teacher moves" developed by Doug Lemov (very prominent in the world of charter schools) bring order to often chaotic urban classrooms, they stifle student interaction and thought. (A more charitable portrayal, at least, than by those in teacher ed who view Lemov as promoting nothing more than a "bag of tricks.")
Nearly two decades into their work, neither Ball nor Lampert has yet to produce any research demonstrating that teachers who employ their methods produce greater learning gains than teachers who do not, a vacuum that may have passed muster years ago, but can't be tolerated any more. Ball has laid out an impressive research agenda into the relevant questions, but—to our knowledge—neither she nor anyone else has set about answering those questions. Nor, apparently, did Green demand that the heroines of her story show her the proof that their methods were effective, instead drawing parallels to Japan's classrooms.
Reviews to date of Green's book have also noted the lack of research evidence and the problems with drawing parallels between American and Japanese schooling. But they have missed another obvious weakness, which William Schmidt's studies about the self-professed teaching difficulties of our elementary teachers and the middling preparation of our middle school teachers internationally make quite clear: many of our teachers have a difficult time teaching math at even a procedural level. Whatever the pedagogical value of probing, student-centered discussions of math concepts, ignoring the fact that Japanese teachers can orchestrate such discussions because they are better-versed in math ignores a critical factor in improving the preparation of U.S. teachers. What's missing from the Green story is a simple, matter-of-fact observation: teachers can't teach what they don't know. Any discussion of the pedagogy of math instruction that doesn't explicitly address the issue of content preparation is deficient on its face.
More teacher experience may have a few more benefits than the research has been touting (not that we really think it didn't). A new study by Helen "Sonny" Ladd and Lucy Sorenson finds a positive relationship between a teacher's years of experience in the classroom and students' achievement and non-cognitive behavioral skills, into at least a teacher's 12th year of teaching, far surpassing the 5th-year crest that most research is telling us represents the end of the climb.
Using a sample of about 250,000 students in North Carolina (a state known for its robust data system) over five years, the researchers find that years of experience are positively related to student test scores, especially in math. The effect is not insubstantial: the positive impact on student achievement from a teacher with five years of experience is about twice as much as the disadvantage presented by a student's race or family income. Those benefits from experience continue to grow until a teacher has about 12 years of experience. The study also found positive (albeit weaker) correlations with students' non-cognitive and behavioral skills, including student absenteeism, disruptive classroom behaviors, time spent completing homework and time spent reading for pleasure.
Notably, Ladd and Sorenson found that "high ability" teachers leave the profession more often than those of lower ability.
There are a few methodological concerns to keep in mind: non-random assignment of students to teachers (which happens often when principals reward veteran teachers with higher-ability classes or parents request certain teachers) could throw off estimates. Also, because the data set only includes five years of data, even with the use of teacher fixed effects, no teacher is compared to herself across 12 or more years (for example, the data set does not show Ms. Smith's effectiveness as both a first-year and a 15th-year teacher). To sum up, while this research finds a relationship between experience and efficacy, it cannot conclude that experience causes teaching efficacy.
While the recent landmark Vergara v. California court case focused on teachers who are or should be dismissed, the greatest portion of teachers are still those who don't stick around to collect their gold watches (er, engraved pencil boxes), but leave voluntarily.
Annual teacher turnover leaves principals scrambling to fill classrooms and get new staff up to speed. This turnover costs school districts money (roughly an estimated $9,000 per teacher according to a study by Gary Barnes, Edward Crowe and Benjamin Schaefer) and hurts students' academic achievement. While no principal knows for sure whether the teacher being interviewed will stick it out or not, new research by Dan Goldhaber and James Cowan suggests that tracing teachers back to where they were prepared may contain a few hints. Using Washington State data, they found that the variance in teacher attrition by preparation program was about 5-7 percent each year.
Put in clearer terms, at the 10-year mark, 73 percent of teachers who graduated from the prep program with the highest "survival rate" were still teaching, while only 34 percent of teachers from the program with the lowest survival rate remained. That's remarkable.
It's unclear if this variance is due to what the prep programs are teaching future teachers, or because of differences in who attends these programs. But it does suggest districts and principals ought to be collecting and using such data for decision making.
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