Research & Insights

What if districts could significantly improve student outcomes by moving around the teachers they already have?

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.

Five steps every school district should take to get the most bang for the buck with student teachers

Of the 24 states that have released guidance on teacher evaluation for SY20-21 thus far, 21 are still requiring summative evaluations for all teachers.

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.

Science has taken some really hard knocks in 2020. Over the past week, however, science had a couple of well-needed wins within the world of education—both in reading instruction and classroom management.

Teacher preparation is a delicate balance between having a broad enough lens to account for the multitude of contexts those new teachers will find themselves in, while also being specific enough to those contexts to actually be helpful.

In the absence of a federal protection, it becomes the jurisdiction of individual districts to lay out protocols. 

Of all the parts of teacher education, none is more important than clinical practice—also known as student teaching. In this report, NCTQ rates teacher prep programs on how well they prepare aspiring teachers against two, distinct but complementary standards to better understand the quality of clinical practice:

1. The Clinical Practice standard, which addresses three elements of clinical practice that have an outsized effect on its overall value (the length, the number of times the aspiring teacher is observed and given feedback, and whether the teacher prep program ensures the candidate is match with a highly-qualified cooperating teacher), and
2. The Classroom Management standard, which examines whether teacher candidates are expected to demonstrate skills such as establishing rules and routines, and reinforcing positive behavior during clinical practice.

The analysis offers clear recommendations for how to strengthen teacher preparation in these areas and highlights examples of programs who are leading the way.

Some excellent recent research and analysis from William Furey and Education Next exposes that more than half of states continue to endorse learning styles by including them in licensure tests for aspiring elementary teachers.

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.

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.

Although districts reopening schools virtually may have less need for substitute teachers due to teachers’ reduced exposure to illness, districts reopening in-person need more substitutes than normal, as social distance measures reduce class sizes and teachers may be absent more often due to increased exposure to illness.

Unlike any other state, the majority of Texas teachers
are prepared by non-traditional programs.

What is it going to take for teachers to enter the classroom ready to close the opportunity gap, rather than to perpetuate it?

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.

Never much a defender of local control in education, I now think we have nothing to lose by shifting some authority to local communities to put a plan in motion for educating kids.

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.

New analysis from Chelsea Coffin and Tanaz Meghjani at the D.C. Policy Center explores some of the teacher workforce data from D.C. public schools, and reports on how key education officials and educators there are thinking about teacher retention and recruitment during the COVID-19 crisis.

As school districts work out next year’s instructional format and take stock of their teacher workforce, districts in a position to hire are also readying themselves for a potentially unprepared influx of novice teachers.

We must recommit ourselves, examine our own practices, and disrupt the insidious barriers that have plagued our education system and negatively impact our students, families, and staff.