Research & Insights

Here’s
a question which (as far as we know) no one has asked before: are new teachers who graduate from more elite
colleges more likely to quit?

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.

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 11^th 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. 

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., 2^nd to 3^rd grade) generally fared better than those who made a nonadjacent grade switch (e.g., 2^nd grade to 4^th 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.

Student
teaching is intended to be the culminating experience of a teacher’s
preparation. It’s typically a fall or spring semester commitment. Over the last
few years, there’s been a steady drum beat for turning it into a full year.
And, as I’ve witnessed numerous times, it’s an idea that plays very well with all
sorts of audiences, and is met with the same
approving nods and applause as smaller class sizes.  What’s
not to love?
Except at
scale it’s not a particularly practical idea nor is it even a good one.
Let’s
examine its practicality. Requiring a full-year of high quality student teaching effectively means placing far too
many student teachers in less-than-ideal classrooms.  Just as California and Florida learned when
they reduced class sizes, the supposed learning benefits are quickly undermined
when the classroom teacher is weak.  There
is nothing magic about spending a full year instead of a half year under the
tutelage of a weak teacher.
We
estimate that of the nation’s 3+ million classroom teachers, only about 1 in 25
is likely to have all of the qualifications needed to mentor a student teacher:
has the necessary experience (at least 3 years by most state laws), is highly
effective (in the upper quartile among their peers), has the ability to mentor
an adult (lots of great teachers make poor mentors), and, most importantly, has
the willingness to take on the
responsibility of a student teacher year in and year out.  For many teachers, particularly great
teachers, having a student teacher in their classroom is disruptive to the real
work at hand. A 1:25 ratio adds up to about 120,000 qualified, willing teachers
across the nation.
That’s
not even enough qualified teachers to cover a semester’s worth of student
teaching, 30,000 short of the current level of 150,000 placements.  No wonder so many student teachers don’t get
the high quality experience they need.  Double
the length and the quality deficit is irremediable.
But what’s
more important—and ironic—than
the impracticality of the year-long push is that its implementation means that
teacher candidates will be even less likely to get the foundational training
they need.
For as
valuable as student teaching is, it should only come after teacher candidates
have first had lots of time and practice without
real children serving as their guinea pigs. Think of the piano student who
must practice scales, or the football player who does the same drills over and
over, or the medical student who learns from simulations or cadavers before
encountering real live patients. Why would teaching be exempt from this kind of
mastery building, in which teachers must practice the instructional strategies
most likely to lead to success?
I
recently shared a podium with SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, once the education
dean at Ohio State. She also rejects this push for a full year of student teaching,
vehemently insisting that programs should instead require advanced skills
building before placing student teachers in front of real children.
Some
teacher prep programs, both traditional and non-traditional, are ramping up
just such practice opportunities using video, virtual classrooms, role playing or simulations.
Candidates who emerge from these intense practice sessions in which individual
skills are rehearsed to mastery will arrive at student teaching far more
competent and ready to teach children. 

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. 

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 7^th 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! 

This month’s Trendline examines how much sick and personal leave the nation’s biggest districts give each year and also how they incentivize their teachers, through leave carryover and buyback policies, to encourage the highest possible teacher attendance.

“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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

In June’s special anniversary edition of the Trendline we explore how much time teachers get for planning and collaboration, the same topic of our first post three years ago.

In this month’s edition of Catching up on Contracts, we look at two districts, Portland Public Schools in Oregon and the Fresno Unified School District in California. 

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.

Raising standards is hard. But as painful as it is to
decide that not everyone is cut out to teach or that some candidates aren’t
prepared well enough to do so, the alternative is a travesty. Letting weak
candidates into teaching robs the profession of its integrity and can cheat
children for a lifetime.

Earlier this month, Manhattan’s U.S. District Judge
Kimba M. Wood ruled that a general knowledge test that New York formerly required
teachers to pass was discriminatory toward minorities. A previous test suffered
the same fate; a third one could be thrown out next.
Though many teacher candidates of all races struggled to pass
the disputed test, minorities failed at a higher rate than whites and that continues to be
true with the new test. Unfortunately, this pattern is reflected on virtually
every achievement test, a tragic testament to this country’s long and
unconscionable history of delivering inferior education to people in poverty
and particularly people of color.
Even though the deliberate discrimination of Jim Crow and “separate
but equal” have ended, as a country, we’ve replaced those overt policies with
more subtle but still shameful practices.
Almost as a matter of course, new and weak teachers continue to
be assigned to schools with large concentrations of high-needs children.
Disadvantaged children of all races, but especially African-American and
Hispanic students, pay the price of a system that encourages and rewards our
best teachers for working with the most privileged children.
Raising expectations for aspiring teachers while simultaneously
increasing the number of teachers of color are not mutually exclusive goals – though
they are often painted as such. But it does require us to recruit reasonably
strong candidates, training them well and – importantly – rewarding and elevating
them and the profession for doing relentlessly demanding work.
In her decision, Judge Wood conceded that the test in question does
“not
appear to require any significant outside knowledge.” Rather, it tests for such
abilities as “reading comprehension, logical thinking, and problem solving.” Curiously,
this important judgment has not gotten a lot of attention – and it should.
Of
course, every student needs and deserves a teacher who has these skills, and it
goes without saying that if a teacher doesn’t have these abilities, she’s unlikely
to be able to impart them to her students.
In an illogical turn, Judge Wood then went on to say that it’s
an “unproved assumption that specific facets of liberal arts and science
knowledge” are important for teachers to know. Many teachers are undoubtedly
insulted by that reasoning, and, if presented with it, many parents would be
outraged. Why shouldn’t they be?
For many children, the U.S. education system is providing a
first-class education that is preparing them to compete and succeed in an
increasingly hyper-competitive world. Expectations for these students and for their teachers continue to ratchet up.
Meanwhile, though, judges, lawmakers and policy makers are
wringing their hands about whether what’s good for these kids is good for all children.
Their hesitation, agonizing, and rationalizing are profoundly handicapping
thousands upon thousands of children – some of whom surely could have become great
teachers.

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 month’s installment of Catching up on Contracts brings news of contract changes in three school districts in NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database: Clark County (NV) School District, Kansas City (MO) School District and Portland (ME) Public Schools.

In May’s edition of the Trendline we explore substitute teacher policies, including education and licensing requirements, pay and health benefits.

Today, a test of your
policy chops.
What do the following
three statements have in common?
1.  It’s
been X years since A Nation at Risk
and we still haven’t solved [fill
in blank];

2. The medical profession would always/never
do [fill in blank]; why not the same for the teaching profession?

3. The sky is falling! Over the next X years,
unprecedented numbers of teachers are quitting/retiring!  Who will replace them?

The answer: They each
are about equally likely to be used in the opening paragraph of most teacher
quality reports.
These statements are
not just ubiquitous and unimaginative. They tend to play into our fears and
biases.
Take teacher
shortages. 
For as long as I can
remember, we have been standing on a cliff about to fall off into a massive
teacher shortage.
Don’t get me
wrong.  There are real
shortages of ELL, special ed and secondary STEM teachers.  Some rural
schools also face serious staffing problems—even when it comes to elementary teachers.
But the truth that the
headlines bury is that we have been systematically overproducing
teachers in most subject areas for years.  Here’s some of the supply
and demand data we have collected for the most recent year available (2012-13),
comparing the number of elementary teachers who are prepared with how many are
needed (for the full table, see here).
                                     

In the past few
months, there have been new reports that there’s a big drop in enrollments in
teacher prep programs, causing a lot of people to worry that we won’t be able
to fully staff schools in a few years. 
Nothing good happens when fear drives our decisions. In this case,
institutions will be encouraged to keep admission standards low and states will
toy with lowering the rigor of their licensing tests.
If government
projections are even remotely accurate, the drop in teacher prep enrollment
isn’t likely to lead to general shortages, not at their current rates. Further,
a decline is not necessarily a bad
thing, provided it isn’t the better prospective candidates who are making other
career choices.  While universities might
like the resulting tuition revenue, it’s not healthy for a profession to
systematically overproduce, and not only because it suppresses wages. 
The reality is that
there is not going to be a single solution to real shortages.
For instance, teacher
prep programs weren’t attracting enough candidates for STEM or ELL or SPED even
at the peak of their enrollments, so declining enrollments are not going to
create a new problem and will hardly exacerbate an old one. 
When it comes to
finding qualified STEM teachers, districts and states must be willing to pay
some teachers a lot more than others, depending on the value of their skills in
the marketplace, something which most have refused to do, at least in a
meaningful way. Also, let’s not discount the importance of removing those
policies which discourage qualified persons from teaching, such as putting up roadblocks
to people who have real content expertise but have not completed the state-mandated
coursework or requiring any new teachers to start at the lowest step on the
salary schedule no matter what their backgrounds. 
Special education and
ELL shortages will only be solved when institutions start capping the
number of candidates admitted to oversubscribed elementary programs and divert
eager aspiring teachers to these areas—made
all the more eager because their pay is also higher.
We know that the solution
to the rural problem is not to double or triple the number of statewide
candidates.  What have those practices
gotten us? Just double or triple the number of candidates who still have no
interest in living in a remote area.
The key to addressing
rural shortages lies in increased investments in technology so districts can
“pipe” in specialized teaching rather than trying to staff each
position. And of course pay is a factor too. Forget those nominal stipends. We
need to pay these teachers enough money to serve as a real incentive to
relocate somewhere for a couple of years. The only other permanent fix to rural
shortages is a common solution in other countries but probably a nonstarter
here in the US: require all teachers to serve a few years in hardship areas.
Let’s
close as we opened:

1. 
In
the 32 years since A Nation at Risk,
we’ve been unable to solve specialized shortages through generalized
overproduction.

2. 
The
teaching profession would do well to take a page from the medical profession
which consistently, systematically aligns supply with demand.

3. 
And
last but not least, let’s remember that doomsayers have found it really hard to
make the sky fall.

Let’s show some imagination
and courage as well, crafting real solutions to solve real problems.

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:

We
then expanded our search to review articles from nine other teacher ed journals,
although we limited this search to only those articles published in the last
two years.  Again, we found few instances
of articles dedicated to building classroom skills. Five of the nine failed to
publish a single such article.

Whether
you agree or disagree with how we categorized the articles, the evidence is
overwhelming that education journals are not pushing for, or focusing on, any research
that might help teacher educators do a better job building the specific skills
necessary to be a more effective instructor.
It’s hard not to conclude a
more troubling truth, that such research may not even exist–or else why
wouldn’t it be getting published? Speculation aside, it’s clear that teacher educators
can’t count on their professional publications to focus on increasing their
knowledge about the nuts-and-bolts of successful preparation and teaching.

---

[1] A
ranking of the 100 top journals in education research, including teacher
education, puts the Journal of Teacher Education as the highest ranked
(19th) in terms of its “five-year impact factor.” The “five-year
impact factor” is calculated on the basis of citation counts. Makel, M. C.,
& Plucker, J. A. (2014). Facts are more important than novelty: Replication
in the Education Sciences. Educational
Researcher, 20(10), 1-13.
[2] As troubling, even this group
contains articles of uncertain value: Three of the 15 studies involve three or
fewer subjects, designs that do not inspire confidence that results can inform
best practice. We suspect that a full-scale review of methodologies of all 15
articles would reveal other weaknesses common to teacher prep research.