Math skills are critical for students’ success in other subjects and later in life, yet far too many teacher prep programs fail to give aspiring teachers the essential knowledge they need to be effective math teachers—undermining student learning before the first lesson even begins.
What can California, Texas, and Washington, D.C. teach us about how to diversify the teacher workforce?
Nationally, the diversification of the teacher workforce is slowing compared to the diversification of college-educated adults, but California, Texas, and Washington, D.C. are bucking that trend. Explore what factors contribute to their relatively high rates of teacher diversity and how their policies and practices will likely affect teacher quality.
Districts are facing hard choices: How can teacher evaluation help?
Teacher evaluation systems—if implemented well—can help districts make better workforce decisions. We examine whether large districts’ policies align with the research on what will likely make for effective and impactful evaluation systems.
In this week’s TQ News Extra we have a special Election 2014 edition to take stock of races that are sure to influence education policy in the coming years.
October’s Teacher Trendline focuses on teacher leave. We take a close look at sick and personal leave, as well as policies allowing teachers to carry over leave and those that differentiate the amount of leave teachers receive depending upon their experience.
Today’s latest installment in our series on new contracts and other policy changes in NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database, will highlight a few of the changes that jumped out at us in six districts: Indianapolis, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Rochester, Anchorage and Christina (DE).
A call to higher educators: Let’s have an honest debate about teacher prep
Most people who took
the time to read NYT Motoko Rich’s article about the training methods used by Aspire
charter schools in its teacher residency probably reacted with a
“makes-sense-to-me” shrug of their shoulders. Of course it’s a
good idea to tear down teaching’s inherent complexities into manageable chunks
and have novices practice each to mastery. After all, it’s what other
professions do when they train their apprentices.
If that was your reaction, maybe you would be surprised to learn that such
methods ignite passionate, even vehement, disapproval in much of the teacher
preparation field.
Many years ago, it was decided that teacher education was about forming teachers – not training them. In
other words, the job of the true teacher educator was to hone a young teacher’s
intuitions so well that she could somehow walk into any classroom anywhere and
immediately intuit how to teach.
There’s little evidence that such an approach works, judging by new teachers’
complaints and the learning loss that takes place in most new teachers’
classrooms. The reality is, we need a world-class teacher training system in
this country and it has to be premised on more than a 22-year-old’s intuition,
however sharp. We have to provide training that gives teachers what they
need to lead their classrooms the moment they graduate. We know that there
are many proven, research-based tactics that are not being implemented
systematically in our teacher prep programs. We need to change that thinking — and
we need to shift the “intuitive” approach to the “training”
approach.
How do we do that? It starts with asking aspiring teachers, school
districts, taxpayers, public school educators and parents their
opinion. And it requires those in the teacher prep field to acknowledge
that it is indeed their responsibility to train teachers.
Higher education leaders, opinion makers and policymakers should be having a
fair, honest academic discussion about how best to train teachers. That will
require all parties coming together and listening to each other about what
teachers truly need. We can and must do better when it comes to preparing
teachers for the classroom. It is not too late to make it happen.
Benefits of ambivalence: A new tenure policy holds promise for student gains
Policy fixes are necessary to lay the groundwork for change, but it’s
in the implementation of those policies where the rubber meets the road.
Since 2009, a lot of states have made changes to their tenure laws,
including New York. In that state, new policy changed what happens after new
teachers complete the three-year probationary period, requiring school leaders
to review the “candidate’s effectiveness over the applicable probationary
period in contributing to the successful academic performance of his or her
students” before tenure is granted. Did that new law and its dogged
implementation by Joel Klein, et al., in New York City make any
difference?
Perhaps so. Research released by Susanna Loeb, Luke Miller and James Wyckoff found not only that the district currently
awards tenure to far fewer teachers than it once did, but also that the quality
of the overall teacher applicant pool showed a marked improvement: a struggling
teacher who left the system after the district decided to delay its tenure
decision was, on average, replaced by a measurably better teacher.
Interestingly, when the district told teachers it was not ready to make
a tenure decision (delaying for a year as the law allows), those teachers were
50 percent more likely to transfer schools and 66 percent more likely to leave
the system than teachers who were awarded tenure. These findings showcase that
just the act of delaying the tenure
decision can result in presumably weaker teachers self-selecting an option that
may be better suited for them (and consequently their students).
New York is particularly interesting because
districts in the state can keep delaying their tenure decisions for as long as
they like. Data below highlight what happened to the 1,369 teachers whose
tenure was extended in the 2011-2012 school year (623 had at least one
extension previously) in the following school year.
Questions remain about how multiple tenure extensions will affect the
overall quality of the teacher pool. Do teachers who receive a second or a
third extension leave at even greater rates than those here did after receiving
a first? Are they continually being replaced by more effective teachers, as happened
in this instance? While a seemingly never-ending extension policy is not a good
idea (at some point you have to cut bait), if teachers choose to leave at
greater rates every time they get another extension and are consistently
replaced by more effective teachers, then the city’s overall teacher quality
should increase – unless a law of diminishing returns is at work.
With these questions in mind, initial data certainly suggests some real
benefits for the quality of the teacher workforce.
However, an earlier policy change complicates this picture, perhaps
amplifying the positive outcomes that may be tempting to attribute only to the
change in the tenure policy and Klein’s implementation. At the same time, New York City also stopped the practice
of force placing teachers who had been “excessed,” allowing
principals the right to refuse to take in a displaced teacher. Since the excess
pool is (by reputation, at least) a dumping ground for low-performing teachers,
their absence from the teaching pool may also contribute to the finding that
new teachers are more effective than those they replace. But given other
factors at play (including a hiring freeze that took effect the same year as
the new tenure policy, in which Chancellor Klein required principals to hire teachers
from the Absent Teacher Reserve Pool), it seems fair to say that this policy does
not wholly explain the positive change in the applicant pool. Timeline
of major teacher quality policies in New York City, 2005-2006 to 2014-2015
It’s unlikely that the
new union-friendly NYC schools administration will continue Klein’s tenure and
excess policies, as neither was something the union favored. In any case, this study
is especially timely as two lawsuits (modeled after the famous Vergara v. California case) that attack
teacher policies such as tenure and last in, first out layoffs, have been filed
in New York. One side or the other
is bound to bring up this research– but oddly enough, it’s not clear which
side it helps.
Disconnected? Comparing principals’ values with value-added measures
As states work to implement new evaluation systems,
the tenuous, if not ambiguous, relationship between value-added (VA) scores and
principals’ observations will need to get nailed down and better understood. New
research by Douglas Harris, William Ingle
and Stacey Rutledge provides some insight, asking, “How consistent are principals’
impressions of their teachers with their value-added data?”
Researchers interviewed elementary and secondary principals
in one Florida school district and
asked them first to rate a sample of teachers on a number of different factors and
second to give each teacher an overall score. These ratings were then compared
with those teachers’ value-added data.
Researchers found a positive but
quite weak correlation between the principals’ overall rating and
their teachers’ value-added scores. They also found that some principals perceived teachers with high VAM scores as working too often in isolation and participating too
infrequently in school extracurricular activities. As a result, these
principals often gave lower overall ratings to these
teachers. Notably, principals were not aware of teachers’ VAM scores at
the time they rated teachers.
At least there was a strong, statistically significant
correlation where it would most be expected, that is, when principals were only
asked to judge teachers “teaching ability.”
In last month’s Teacher Trendline, we discussed a group of teachers who are often ignored in teacher quality discussions: substitutes. Given the increasing awareness of the importance of teacher attendance, it is valuable to know more about the policies affecting those teachers who fill in while students’ full-time teachers are absent. Did you know, for example, that Portland, OR pays its substitutes just over $180 per day, the most of all the districts in the NCTQ Teacher Contract Database? And that about 50 percent of school districts require their substitutes to have at least a Bachelor’s degree, while a third do not require any postsecondary degree? Interested in looking at the data yourself? You can always browse any of these policies and more across 118 districts and two charter management organizations in the Teacher Contract Database.
If one Teach For America (TFA) corps member can boost student
test scores at a higher rate than other teachers in the same school, would
multiple TFA corps members in the same school result in even higher student
scores?
New research by Michael Hansen, Ben Backes, Victoria Brady
and Zey Xu addresses this question by looking at Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where
TFA teachers are purposefully clustered into a targeted set of disadvantaged
schools.* This notion — that TFA’s impact on high poverty schools could really
blossom if more corps members were clustered in a school — is one TFA has
suggested in the past.
This study, like those that come before it, finds that TFA corps
members pack a lot of punch in mathematics, consistently producing nearly three
months’ more achievement in mathematics over a single school year than their
non-TFA peers. When it comes to reading
scores, though, the authors continue to find what other research has found: there
isn’t much difference.
So, is their largely positive impact greater than the sum of its
parts? In a word, no. The study found no spillover effects on the performance
of non-TFA colleagues. Student achievement in math increased only by the amount
of each additional TFA teacher and no more. Clustering the corps members had
the effect of concentrating these gains in placement schools, but TFA’s total
impact in the district would have been the same had the corps members been
dispersed evenly throughout the district.
*For more information on
teacher distribution in Miami-Dade
County Public Schools, be sure to read NCTQ’s recent paper, Unequal
access, unequal results.
Everyone says practice matters; but
the Match Teacher Residency provides a shining example of a rigorous, practice-permeated
approach to training designed to ensure that new teachers will hit the ground
running. It may serve as the uber example of Non-Traditional Teacher Prep.
As
part of a year-long residency, in conjunction with practice designing and
implementing rigorous classroom instruction, residents must master fundamental
classroom management “moves” involving scanning and making their
expectations clear. Residents learn how to receive and respond to feedback
before moving on to real classroom instruction.
Here
are some great materials, provided courtesy of Scott McCue, COO of Match Teacher Residency:
Advance
reading for candidates from Match’s handbook
on classroom management.
A video of a candidate whose first attempts at scanning
requires explicit and targeted guidance from a coach.
A video of the same candidate at the end of training, when
her scanning is adequate to pass the relevant portion of the high-stakes
assessment used to screen for preparedness for classroom instruction. We’d like to feature more
examples of rigorous teacher prep in this “From the Field” column and
we welcome submissions from teacher prep programs. Look for more discussion of
what we propose makes teacher prep assignments rigorous in our next report in
the “Training our future teachers” series.
A review of Elizabeth Green’s “Building A Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)”
Green — who did such a fine job as a blogger about NYC education issues — has written an engaging book. Unfortunately, it is in the service of a weak theory that may divert us from making the right changes in how teachers are trained.
Americans increasingly agree that the gateway into teaching ought to be a whole lot tougher. Findings released this week from Gallup/ PDK’s annual education poll indicate that six in ten Americans recognize that entry standards into teacher preparation aren’t rigorous enough. Fully eight in ten think teachers should have to pass some sort of bar exam. That could be read as a public endorsement of AFT’s 2012 testing proposal, except that sensible idea’s only purpose was to serve as the guts of a fiery Weingarten speech.
The only time you find that kind of consensus is on the subject of ice cream, or maybe bacon. The message from these latest poll numbers is crystal clear: the public thinks teacher prep needs fixing. As NCTQ has been banging this drum for a decade now (and for many of those years, as a solo act), the numbers come as very, very heartening news. It’s not good news that we have a teacher prep problem, but as we all know, the first step to fixing any problem is to acknowledge its existence. Can we agree to roll up our sleeves?
Other less heartening news earlier this month came from Missouri, when we asked the Show Me state to, “Show us their course syllabi” under the state’s sunshine law, and the answer was an emphatic NO. To be accurate, the University of Missouri System said no and on August 26, an appellate court agreed that course syllabi are indeed exempt from the state’s sunshine laws. The oddly reasoned argument concluded that the syllabi are copyrighted and don’t have to be shown to anyone. “Huh?” we asked. Copyright or not, there’s this thing called the “fair use” provision of American copyright law which allows someone to study copyrighted materials as long as they don’t profit from them. Bad news for NCTQ, but worse news for a free press and public transparency.
So now we’ll be heading to the Missouri Supreme Court. University of Missouri professor Mike Podgursky and long-time NCTQ booster was outraged by his own institution’s obfuscation and bravely said so in an op-ed (he may have tenure, but he does have to share the Mizzou sidewalks). That led to another Missouri ed professor labeling our decision a “bully” move. I know I’m biased, but it seems to me an utterly reasonable act. The issue of NCTQ having the right to review course syllabi has been settled in our favor in eight of nine states, including by a Minnesota appellate court. There’s nothing unique about Missouri in this case.
In any event, I’m not in a bullying frame of mind, nor even a litigious one. The whole business (even if reasonable) is distasteful. The problem we face is not of any single institution’s making, but a systematic problem that needs to be acknowledged. We can all contribute to its solution.
Review of Elizabeth Green’s Building A Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)
Along with Tom Loveless, Robert Pondiscio and David Steiner, count me among those who are less than enchanted by Elizabeth Green’s new book. The journalist—who did such a fine job as a blogger about New York City education issues—has definitely written an engaging book. Unfortunately, it is in the service of a weak theory that may divert us from making the right changes in how teachers are trained. In a nutshell, Green’s argument is that two teacher educators, Deborah Lowenberg Ball and Magdalene Lampert (both very prominent in teacher ed circles), have perfected the student-centered, discussion-based instructional practices that parallel those in Japan’s math classrooms. By contrast, Green argues that while the “teacher moves” developed by Doug Lemov (very prominent in the world of charter schools) bring order to often chaotic urban classrooms, they stifle student interaction and thought. (A more charitable portrayal, at least, than by those in teacher ed who view Lemov as promoting nothing more than a “bag of tricks.”) Nearly two decades into their work, neither Ball nor Lampert has yet to produce any research demonstrating that teachers who employ their methods produce greater learning gains than teachers who do not, a vacuum that may have passed muster years ago, but can’t be tolerated any more. Ball has laid out an impressive research agenda into the relevant questions, but—to our knowledge—neither she nor anyone else has set about answering those questions. Nor, apparently, did Green demand that the heroines of her story show her the proof that their methods were effective, instead drawing parallels to Japan’s classrooms. Reviews to date of Green’s book have also noted the lack of research evidence and the problems with drawing parallels between American and Japanese schooling. But they have missed another obvious weakness, which William Schmidt’s studies about the self-professed teaching difficulties of our elementary teachers and the middling preparation of our middle school teachers internationally make quite clear: many of our teachers have a difficult time teaching math at even a procedural level. Whatever the pedagogical value of probing, student-centered discussions of math concepts, ignoring the fact that Japanese teachers can orchestrate such discussions because they are better-versed in math ignores a critical factor in improving the preparation of U.S. teachers. What’s missing from the Green story is a simple, matter-of-fact observation: teachers can’t teach what they don’t know. Any discussion of the pedagogy of math instruction that doesn’t explicitly address the issue of content preparation is deficient on its face.
As students settle into their first months of
the new school year, it’s a good time to check in on the teacher policy
landscape governing the profession across the country. From new college- and career-ready standards to
changes in evaluation systems, many states are making progress towards ensuring
that all students have effective teachers. Currently, all but ten statesrequire that at least some
objective evidence of student learning is considered when evaluating teacher
performance. And with so many new
teachers just beginning their careers, it’s good to see that 31 states require
mentoring for all new teachers and 26 have strong overall induction
policies , unless
of course you are a new teacher from one of the many that don’t. For more
information on the national landscape, or to see how your state’s policies are
doing, explore our State Teacher Policy
Yearbook dashboard here .
Taking a look at charter schools operated by schools of education
A news article some months ago about a charter school operated by the School of Education at the University of California, Davis led us to ask “How many education schools operate charter schools, and how do the students in those charter schools fare?”
More teacher experience may have a few more benefits than the research has been touting (not that we really think it didn’t). A new study by Helen “Sonny” Ladd and Lucy Sorenson finds a positive relationship between a teacher’s years of experience in the classroom and students’ achievement and non-cognitive behavioral skills, into at least a teacher’s 12th year of teaching, far surpassing the 5th-year crest that most research is telling us represents the end of the climb. Using a sample of about 250,000 students in North Carolina (a state known for its robust data system) over five years, the researchers find that years of experience are positively related to student test scores, especially in math. The effect is not insubstantial: the positive impact on student achievement from a teacher with five years of experience is about twice as much as the disadvantage presented by a student’s race or family income. Those benefits from experience continue to grow until a teacher has about 12 years of experience. The study also found positive (albeit weaker) correlations with students’ non-cognitive and behavioral skills, including student absenteeism, disruptive classroom behaviors, time spent completing homework and time spent reading for pleasure. Notably, Ladd and Sorenson found that “high ability” teachers leave the profession more often than those of lower ability. There are a few methodological concerns to keep in mind: non-random assignment of students to teachers (which happens often when principals reward veteran teachers with higher-ability classes or parents request certain teachers) could throw off estimates. Also, because the data set only includes five years of data, even with the use of teacher fixed effects, no teacher is compared to herself across 12 or more years (for example, the data set does not show Ms. Smith’s effectiveness as both a first-year and a 15th-year teacher). To sum up, while this research finds a relationship between experience and efficacy, it cannot conclude that experience causes teaching efficacy.
It’s back-to-school time for districts across the country, and there’s no doubt many families have spent some time examining this year’s calendar. In this month’s Trendline, we take a close look at student and teacher calendars for 2014-2015.
This month’s Trendline takes a close look at how districts in the NCTQ Teacher Contract Database are currently implementing key aspects of teacher tenure.
