Research & Insights

In this edition of the District Trendline, we take a look at
the policies that govern voluntary and involuntary transfers, plus we take a
deeper look at districts that use mutual consent policies to assign
transferring teachers to new schools. 

Observations from a School Turnaround Leader

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.

Observations are an essential component of teacher evaluations that receive far less
attention than student growth, yet affect more teachers. This edition of Trendline looks at
how often teachers are observed, for how long and by whom.

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 that
life under “ESSA” will mean that states will no longer embrace the commitments
they only recently made to introduce more meaningful teacher evaluation
systems.

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.”

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. 

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.

With contract
negotiations in Chicago attracting national attention, this special edition
of the Trendline takes a look at how the Windy City compares to the 50
largest districts in the country and other Illinois districts on some of the
major points on the table, including teacher compensation and evaluation.

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.  

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.

What happens in DC has the potential to
impact districts across the entire nation. 

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

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. 

The first Trendline of 2016 takes a fresh look at our most popular topic from 2015: layoffs.

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. 

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.

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