Research & Insights

With health insurance coverage making headlines in both national and local news, this month’s Trendline examines health insurance premiums for teachers and their dependents in the largest districts across the country.

Can schools make teachers more effective? In
thinking about that question, your mind probably goes to professional
development or other training activities. But Matthew Kraft and John Papay from Brown University took that query in a different direction, looking
at whether differences in school settings
make teachers more or less effective. 

Combining student achievement data with
teachers’ responses to North Carolina’s biannual survey of working conditions, Kraft
and Papay investigated if teachers who worked in higher-rated Charlotte-Mecklenberg schools could
overcome the well-established pattern of poor returns to teaching experience—findings
repeatedly showing that growth in teacher effectiveness is limited largely to
the first few years of teaching.
And guess what? Working conditions do matter—at least in the Charlotte-Mecklenbergschool district.  It stands to reason that teachers will
continue to grow and get increasingly effective in orderly buildings with
strong leadership and collaborative environments.
But it’s the magnitude of the difference that is
the real eye-opener. By the end of the first 10 years of a teacher’s career,
there’s a 38 percent gap in student achievement between a teacher at a highly-rated
school and a teacher at a low-rated school.

Unfortunately, the study doesn’t shed any
light on just what the ‘secret sauce’ is in the highly-rated schools, the
qualities about these schools that somehow make it easier for teachers to
continue to grow. The results were based on composite ratings; the specifics of
the working conditions as captured in the survey didn’t seem to matter. And we
can’t help but wonder which is the chicken and which is the egg: Do the working
conditions help teachers get better or does the presence of more effective
teachers impact the professional environment?
Furthermore, would these results hold in
another district, given that Charlotte-Mecklenburg
is well known for its turnaround efforts that have moved effective leaders and
teachers into high-needs schools? 
Another recent study makes us think maybe
not. 
Zeyu Xu, Umut Özek and Michael Hansen from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) looked at the effectiveness
of teachers who work in high-poverty schools versus those in low-poverty schools
(working paper available here).  Tracking the performance of 4^th
and 5^th grade elementary teachers in North Carolina and Florida
at intervals over ten years, they found no systematic relationship between
schools’ poverty status and teacher performance. 
Of course, poverty is a very imperfect proxy
for the working conditions explored by Kraft and Papay above; there are no
doubt high-needs schools that would score well on a teacher survey and
lower-needs schools that teachers would rate poorly. But were Kraft and Papay’s
findings to be generalizable, we’d expect to see some sort of relationship in
the AIR study. 
It just may be that the secret sauce is a Charlotte-Mecklenburg local recipe, but
one certainly meriting a closer look.

Are two student teachers better than one?

Just do the
math and it is clear that things don’t add up for teacher pension policies.
NCTQ calculates that state teacher pension systems are a half trillion dollars
in debt for 2014. Across the states, an average of 70 cents of every dollar
contributed to state teacher pension systems goes to ever-increasing unfunded
pension liabilities – and not to teachers’ future retirement benefits.
Further, 38 states
continue to cling to defined benefit pension systems that have become
increasingly inflexible and unfair to teachers.
In our new
report, Doing the
Math on Teacher Pensions: How to Protect Teachers and Taxpayers, NCTQ provides report cards on teacher
pension policies for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We
challenge the claims of pension boards and other defenders of the status quo
about the cost-effectiveness, fairness and flexibility of the traditional
teacher pension plan.
Overall,
states earned a C- grade for teacher pension policies. Alaska earned an A for providing teachers with a fully portable
retirement plan similar to a 401(k) as is commonplace in other professions.
Five other states—Florida, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina and
Utah—offer teachers the option of a
defined contribution plan.  But offering
a defined contribution plan is not a prerequisite for a high grade.  South
Dakota earned a B+ for a defined benefit plan that provides portability and
flexibility, while maintaining a healthy funding level.
In fact, we
find that only nine states have well-funded teacher pension systems, and even
some of these may not be as well-funded as they appear. State efforts to
improve the fiscal health of their pension systems have generally been at
teachers’ expense. Since 2008, more than half of the states have increased the
amount teachers must contribute. To make matters worse, many states are also
making it harder for teachers to receive benefits. Nationwide, fewer than half
of teachers stay long enough in the state and districts where they teach to
become eligible for retirement benefits. And 15 states make teachers wait 10
years to vest into their pension systems, resulting in too many teachers being
cheated out of the opportunity to build an adequate retirement nest egg.
To learn more,
download the report, see your state’s report card, or search our dashboard.

When I was in college, several of my courses
required the purchase of what the professors indicated were canonical texts.
Calculus required Apostol’s Calculus Volumes
1 and 2.
Electricity and magnetism used Jackson’s Classical
Electrodynamics. Computer science used Sedgewick’s Algorithms. 
In the field of teacher pre-service training,
Doug Lemov’s Teach
Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that put Students on the Path to College
(TLAC) should have similar stature.
Lemov and his team have built a taxonomy of
champion classroom practices by carefully observing (and recording) real teachers
who regularly achieve outstanding results for their students. A significant
update to the first edition (which we reviewed in
2010), TLAC 2.0’s revisions and organization—grouping the techniques into four
main classroom focus areas—challenge the (uncharitable)
opinion that it represents nothing more than a “bag of tricks.” It’s true that
Lemov has a bias to action: he introduces the text stating he “(has) tried to
describe the techniques of champion teachers in a concrete, specific, and
actionable way” with a focus on next-day implementation.  And it’s true that 62 techniques are detailed
in the text. But these techniques represent an early, on-going effort to
define, illustrate and develop the fundamentals of effective classroom
instruction. Rather than a “bag of tricks,” these are foundational skills, much
like arithmetic is a necessary precursor to algebra. 
An example is illustrative. Check for
understanding was a single technique in the first edition; it’s now a
critical area encompassing two chapters of the book (collecting data on mastery
and acting on the data/establishing a culture of error) and ten separate
techniques. One of those techniques—plan
for error—outlines specific planning a teacher can undertake in
anticipating and correcting student misunderstandings during instruction and
practice. For example, in planning for a lesson on the slope-intercept form of
equations, a teacher (in this case, Bryan Belanger from Troy Prep Middle
School) included more than 50 practice problems of increasing complexity: more
than any class could get through in a period. However, the expectation was not
that any single class would be able to get through them; rather, after
teaching, Bryan would give problems to the class as practice and decide to skip
ahead or loop back in the list of problems depending on his observations of his
students.

Lemov’s description of planning for error includes
two more ways of doing so: planning for specific errors (that is, thinking
through the most obvious misapprehensions for the most important points of a
lesson and specifically figuring out, beforehand, how you would respond) and
planning re-teach time (that is, setting aside blocks of time to loop back to
areas where your students are struggling or, happily, move ahead if there are
no such barriers to understanding).
The book also clearly mirrors the respect and
admiration Lemov has for the teachers he has observed and with whom he has
collaborated. This is not the work of an academic isolated from practice; this
is the work of someone with a deep respect of practice and practitioners, a
work written about, by and for them.
It is telling that we found the first edition of
Teach Like a Champion in the
classroom management courses in 7 of 122 programs in our 2013
report on classroom management .  To
be clear — that’s not a commentary on the text; rather, it’s an indictment of a
field that avoids the creation of a coherent theory of instruction, favoring
instead the idea that each teacher must find her own way with her
particular students.

After interning at the
National Council on Teacher Quality for a mere two weeks, I became acutely
aware of how little I knew about teacher preparation. As someone who wants to
be a teacher and has (or so I thought) done quite a bit of research about
preparation, I was startled by the gaps in my knowledge. After reflecting, I
believe that this resulted from a combination of factors: the first, that I
attend a small elite liberal arts college, and the second, that I want to
eventually be an elementary teacher. These factors shaped the way that I looked
at teacher preparation and meant that I simply did not know the information
about teacher prep that NCTQ has to offer in the Teacher Prep Review.
Let’s start with how my
college affected my thinking. Carleton,
like many highly selective liberal arts colleges, prides itself on its elite
status. Drawn to prestige, students of these colleges often overlook programs
that do not carry immediate name recognition. Around campus, saying you’re
attending a graduate teacher prep program just doesn’t carry the same weight as
law school or med school. The elite mindset that we carry renders us pretty
oblivious to the very valuable information NCTQ produces about graduate teacher
preparation schools.
In addition to that, because
I want to be an elementary teacher, I know firsthand that this area is too
often neglected at college campuses across the country; most liberal arts
colleges’ licensure programs only focus on secondary education. Of the top 10
liberal arts colleges as rated by US News, six have some sort of undergraduate licensure
program. That’s not too bad but only two have an elementary education option.
Additionally, the majority of these programs require advanced planning,
beginning during sophomore year, which ultimately rules out people who only
realize late in their college career that they might want to teach.
Where I see NCTQ’s work
making an impact on the thinking of students like me is through professors. The
elite attitude of campuses like Carleton
means that we are well exposed to highly selective programs, like Teach For America (TFA) or Boston Teacher Residency (BTR). These
programs recruit on campus and are well known by professors. The visibility of
these programs persuades applicants. If professors utilized NCTQ’s Teacher Prep Review, they would be able
to give more concrete advice about graduate education and perhaps this would
make a difference in students’ mindsets.
I wish there were an easy
solution to this problem—a way to alert education faculty at elite liberal arts
institutions to the gap in knowledge that students have about teacher prep.
Students should not feel that TFA or
BTR are the only options out there.
Information needs to be provided from sources such as NCTQ to fill in the
blanks and help guide students towards the best post-grad options for them.
Many students like me would be eager and grateful for this information.

Our Trendline series kicks off 2015 with a look at teacher layoff policies in the largest districts across the country.

Way back
in 2010, NCTQ released Human Capital in Boston
Public Schools: Rethinking How to Attract, Develop and Retain Effective
Teachers in partnership with the Massachusetts
Alliance for Business Education. The typical life span of such a report
might be about a year or two— yet five years later, we’re learning it still has
considerable legs, largely due to the leadership of Boston’s top-notch interim superintendent, John McDonough. 
While the
report found many strengths in the district, it raised real concerns about such
areas as teacher evaluations and transfer and hiring processes. Evaluations were
inconsistent and the district’s professional development was not aligned with
evaluation outcomes. In 2012-2013, Boston
not only revised the instrument (which every school district loves to do) but
also the training and the frequency of evaluations. In the first year of the
new system, 93 percent of teachers received an evaluation compared to less than
23 percent in 2009. The district continues to analyze patterns in evaluation
outcomes and provide more support where needed, refining the system each year.
 The district didn’t stop there. It no longer
requires principals to hire teachers who have transferred from other schools,
giving principals the autonomy to hire teachers they believe will best serve
students. Excessed teachers who don’t find a position are given a coach and assigned
to a co-teaching position with an exemplary teacher in a high-performing
school. The roughly $6 million required to pay for these teachers is considered
part of the cost of doing business.
In
addition, Boston now has a goal of
hiring 75 percent of its new teachers in March and April, rather than hiring
the bulk of new teachers in the summer months. This earlier hiring timeline
gives the district access to a larger group of prospective teachers in a
particularly competitive hiring environment and allows them to hire
highly-sought-after candidates before other districts. In 2013, Boston hired just 9 percent of teachers
by the end of June. For the 2014-2015 school year, the district reports hiring
83 percent of new teachers before July 1. In addition, they report that
early hiring has allowed them to employ the most racially diverse cohort of
effective educators in more than six years.
This
winter, the district worked with the Boston
Teachers Union to reach an agreement to extend the school day by 40 minutes,
giving both teachers and students more time and putting another NCTQ
recommendation into place. In addition to providing students the equivalent of
an additional month of school, the extra time nearly doubles the amount of
planning and development time available to teachers.
Boston, you are making us proud. 

An NCTQ follower on Twitter, @mescamilla1980, recently challenged our take on what’s
behind the disproportionately high grades earned by teacher candidates,
suggesting that only those majors which will lead to highly paid jobs can
require a lot of challenging work. At least that’s what we think he was
intimating – 140 characters leave little room for nuance. While a cynical
hypothesis, it’s a fair one. Is there a
relationship between working hard in college and earning higher future pay?
To get some idea of the answer, we reached
back into our dataset of 40 institutions for which we have identified which
majors were consistently the hardest or easiest.
Looking at the five majors with the lowest
proportions of students earning honors – that is, the hardest majors on their
campuses— we learn that @mescamilla1980’s theory is, thank goodness, off base.
As shown below, some of the majors that top the
list are in fact likely to lead to higher salaries. For example, marketing
majors can expect mid-career earnings around $80,000, information systems
majors – about $87,000, and computer science majors – just over $100,000. However,
no one would expect to make big bucks by turning to some of these other majors:
Art? History? (For salary data on more majors, see here).

                                      
We did not find
teacher prep to be among the top five toughest majors at any of the 40
institutions. Only one institution, University
of Maryland College Park, came close, with teacher prep coming in at 8th
most difficult major on that campus. We hope to soon see more appearances of
teacher prep on the “toughest majors” list. As the presence of some other
majors on the list proves, lower pay doesn’t have to mean easier coursework.
Still, seeing education majors move up the salary
rankings might make tougher
coursework more palatable.

Every district HR department looks to find
ways to limit the number of time-consuming interviews of new teacher
applicants. A few weeks ago, Politico
ran a story about “Big Data” tools
designed to give districts a better idea of who is “interview worthy”
based on the perceived skills of candidates (e.g., Teacher Match) and next gen
versions of the old school questionnaires that attempt to elicit the
“attitudes” of teacher applicants (e.g., Gallup’s TeacherInsight
Assessment and the Haberman Star Teacher).
An encouraging new study from Dan
Goldhaber and colleagues examines the Spokane
School District’s home-grown, skills-based screening process. It argues
that by using a two-stage evaluation process that relies heavily on data
generated from letters of recommendation, principals are able to limit precious
interview time to only higher-caliber applicants, resulting in better hiring.                  
The process seems to be working: scores on
the second stage of the pre-interview screening positively (and with
statistical significance) predict value-added measures of effectiveness. Also,
teachers hired by Spokane School District showed higher rates of
retention as opposed to those not hired by Spokane
who were teaching elsewhere in Washington
State.
Ratings on
applicants’ classroom management skills stand out as having the most predictive
power, piquing our interest in what exactly Spokane principal/supervisor screeners are looking for in
applicants with regards to classroom management. The bottom line: even though
the district’s rubric related to classroom management is fairly cryptic (i.e.,
“effective[ly] handl[e]… large/small, ethnically/sociologically diverse
groups”), it appears that screeners are still able to zero in on enough in
the letters of recommendation to identify candidates who are most likely to be
effective.
Given how unsystematic Spokane’s protocol appears to be— screeners receive no training on
how to apply the rubric—it probably helps that 71 percent of hired teachers
have had some previous experience in Spokane
as an employee, a student teacher or both; the study’s authors note that
“screeners may be familiar with those who are writing the letters of
recommendation.”
We have one minor quibble. We wonder how much
better Spokane could do in hiring if
it tightened up the protocol for evaluating classroom management skills and
used more structured interviews to evaluate applicants.

Do higher scoring students get assigned
higher value-added teachers? Maybe— but more work is needed to really tell.

Early in 2014, Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff published a study based on New York City data that found that
value-added (VA) models which control for the previous years’ test scores can
accurately predict teacher impacts on current year student test scores. Along
the way, the team demonstrated the viability of a quasi-experimental design
that most districts— with student test and teacher assignment data— could use
to validate district VA calculations.

In the past several months, two studies have
replicated the Chetty et. al.’s
methodology and key results in two different samples: a study using data from Los Angeles by Bacher-Hicks, Kane and Staiger and one using data from North Carolina by Jesse Rothstein, who has been academia’s most
vocal critic of value-add methodologies.

Following the specifications and techniques of
the original paper, the two newer papers find little evidence of bias in
teacher VA measures (with the typical controls) and show that there are
differences in teacher VA across students and schools.

All three studies found a significant,
positive relationship between a student’s prior year test score and teacher VA.
In other words, higher-scoring students do get assigned to high VA teachers, on
average, with only some disagreement over what happens to special education
students.

Rothstein (North Carolina) found that minority students (Black or Hispanic)
and schools with higher fractions of minority students have higher VA teachers,
on average.  Chetty et al. (New York City)
found no such relationships. Bacher-Hicks
et al. (Los Angeles) found
significantly negative relationships at the student and school levels for
African-American and Hispanic students. In other words, in Los Angeles, African-American or Hispanic students or schools with
higher fractions of these students have teachers with lower VA, on average.

A key benefit of replicating research (which
happens much too rarely in education research) is that in addition to
comparing results in different locales, researchers can identify potential
weaknesses in a study’s design. While Rothstein
replicated the Chetty et al.’s
results using their techniques and specifications, he also went on to
demonstrate two potential flaws that should be the subject of future work: (a)
the results change depending on how one makes up for missing classroom or
teacher data; and (b) the “random” teacher moves— from classroom to
classroom or school to school— required for the quasi-experiment’s validity are
not so random after all. Taking these into account, he finds significant bias
in teacher value-added calculations: for some teachers, the models predict
better performance, on average, than they should, while for other teachers, the
models go the other way.

What’s the bottom line of these studies? There
seems to be clear evidence that in New
York City, Los Angeles and North Carolina, higher-scoring students
are assigned to higher VA teachers, on average. There is significant variation
across the three jurisdictions in the relationships between a student’s special
education or minority status and average teacher VA scores. Finally, Rothstein raises significant questions
about validity with respect to resolving missing data and the independence of
teacher turnover. All of these require further hypothesis testing— and more
replication studies.

When we
first began analyzing teacher prep programs for the Teacher Prep Review, we were surprised to find some really big
differences in how well programs housed on the same campus did on NCTQ’s
standards. An undergraduate program might score quite high while the same ed
school’s graduate program got a low score.
We decided
to back out our standards and simply tally what teacher prep programs are
actually teaching. No value judgments. No commentary. No rankings. Just the
bare facts.
What are the
topics covered by teacher preparation programs and in what span of coursework?
Apparently
each can be up for grabs in elementary programs—even when talking about
undergraduate and graduate programs housed in the same ed school on the same
university campus.
In a new
NCTQ brief, Incoherent by Design: What you should know about differences between undergraduate and graduate training of elementary teachers, we
quantify the fundamentally chaotic nature of elementary teacher prep for
initial certification, which is by far the most popular choice of individuals
who consider teaching.
For example,
at DePaul University (IL), the graduate
elementary program requires 56 credits and the undergraduate program requires
69 credits, almost a quarter more. Moreover, courses (or large parts of
courses) in the undergraduate program pertain to five topics not apparent in
graduate program coursework (children’s literature, classroom management,
special education, health, and elementary math content), whereas the graduate
program requires a research course.
What
explains the divergence? There are a number of reasons, but we believe that
foremost is teacher educators’ focus on development of a professional identity
and a capacity for lifelong professional learning centered on self-reflective
practice. Unlike training on defined content and skills, development of an
identity and the capacity for self-reflection can be cultivated equally well in
a variety of coursework configurations.

When it comes to their pay and benefits, will
teachers always go with the bird in the hand no matter how many birds may be in
the bush?

Apparently
that is the case in Illinois, where
teachers proved remarkably immune to a pretty generous pension deal, as
documented in a new study by Maria
Donovan Fitzpatrick. While previous research has shown that all workers, not just
teachers, have a clear preference for a higher paycheck over the opportunity
for greater retirement benefits, Fitzpatrick provides striking new evidence
of just how little of their paychecks teachers are willing  (or able) to redirect in order to achieve
greater pension wealth. 

Back in
1998, Illinois gave teachers the
opportunity to upgrade their defined benefit plans and purchase extra
retirement benefits. At most, teachers were only willing to redirect 21 cents
of their current salaries for every dollar they would receive later.

Even more noteworthy, Fitzpatrick’s estimations may
still not paint an accurate picture of just how little teachers are willing to
invest: she focused on Illinois Public
School (IPS) employees with 22-28 years of experience. These veterans would
not have to wait very long to receive the extra benefits, so one might have reasonably
assumed that they were a lot more mindful about their pensions than the average
recent college grad. While ability to pay is a real concern, teachers in the
sample were already likely earning salaries on the higher end of the pay scale and
were given five years to pay for the upgrade. What’s more, they were
well-informed of the costs AND benefits of upgrading, and the Illinois
pension system was well-funded at the time (so Doomsday scenarios that the
system would be bankrupt by the time they retired were less likely).

While this may be a classic example of
“irrational default behavior,” (going with a default decision even if
a different option may be in one’s best interest), the findings still provide
strong evidence for states to consider as they tackle pension reform. In
debates around pension reform, one of the running themes is just how satisfied
teachers are with the status quo. Yet if teachers really do put a higher
priority on what’s in their wallet today over tomorrow, that’s evidence of a
preference that’s actually at odds with the current system—one which
decidedly  tilts  towards tomorrow. 

For more on teacher pensions, NCTQ will be out
with its latest analysis of state teacher retirement policies on January 27.

This month’s installment of Catching up on Contracts covers the new contracts in three  districts in NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database:  Minneapolis Public Schools, Granite School District and  Bridgeport Public Schools.