Research & Insights

It’s time to show our substitute teachers that we value them—and the time they spend with our students.

The path to becoming anti-racist is long, challenging, and for teachers, essential. Tackling one’s mindset and implicit biases takes hard work, and even trainings intended to help people do this work may not lead to changes in behavior.

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

An Action Guide for States

Teacher evaluation systems, when implemented well, are coinciding with real and measurable benefits for students and teachers alike.

Six Places Where Teacher Evaluation Systems are Getting Results

About 20 school districts have adopted new staffing models known collectively as Opportunity Culture, each designed to maximize the impact of great teachers. Makes sense, but does it work? Thanks to a recent study from Ben Backes and Michael Hansen, the first bit of evidence is in.

Districts spend on average $18,000 per teacher every year on professional development, with little to show for it. That’s why we were excited to see the new research findings looking at the New Teacher Center’s induction model–most teachers’ first experience with professional development. A recent study found that the New Teacher Center’s approach resulted in up to five months of additional learning. Remarkable!

But there’s a real puzzle here to be solved. While student outcomes–what matters most–showed tremendous gains, teachers’ observation ratings did not. Other than there not being enough observations conducted to detect differences, one explanation may be the instrument used to observe the teachers, that being the tried and true Danielson Framework. It may be time to revisit those indicators to ensure that they align with student outcomes at the earliest stages of a teacher’s career.

Here are the attributes of the NTC approach that yielded dramatic learning gains:

First off, significant time is dedicated to building districts’ capacity to support the induction model. Mentors are carefully selected and intensively trained to assess their teachers, and instructed to meet with each mentee for at least 180 minutes a month and focus on instruction during that time.

Most striking was the program’s significant investment in mentor training–with a requirement of 100 hours of training for each mentor teacher for two years. Could that be the secret sauce?

The big question left isn’t if districts should use this model, but if they can afford it. The cost to implement the program is just $500-$900 per new teacher for the New Teacher Center’s services, but that doesn’t include the districts’ costs for the mentor teachers and any associated stipends or salaries. These line items could run a district $5,600-$8,000 for a fully-released mentor per teacher, depending on the local salary scale (credit to NTC for providing us with these estimates). Our bottom line is that if these outcomes are consistently replicated, the costs are without question fully defensible.

Mississippi had to do something.

Between 1992 and 2013, no more than 55 percent of its 4^th grade children could look at a piece of writing and locate relevant information or use their understanding of the text to identify details that support a given interpretation or conclusion.

In short, nearly half of these students couldn’t adequately understand what they read.

But in recent years, the state’s response to this challenge has been strong and swift:

In April 2013, Mississippi passed a law which requires, with some exceptions, holding back 3^rd grade students who score at the lowest levels on the state-wide reading test. In Spring 2015, the year the law first went into effect, 15 percent of third graders placed at the lowest achievement level—potentially having to repeat the grade.

Beginning in January 2014, the state education department launched a massive professional development program that offered LETRS training to all Mississippi K-3 educators. In target schools (those with large proportions of low-performing readers), the state mandated participation in the training and provided literacy coaches.

During this same period, the state also worked with the Southeast Regional Education Laboratory to develop a test for teachers on early literacy and an observation tool to measure classroom practice.

Recently, researchers used the results from the test and observations to examine how teacher knowledge and classroom practice changed over two years. Jessica Sidler Folsom and Kevin Smith (both of Florida State) and Kymyona Burk and Nathan Oakley at the state education department summarized their analysis, finding results that might best be characterized as “cautiously hopeful.”

As measured by the test, average teacher knowledge of early literacy skills did go up about ten percentile points, an improvement which appears to be correlated with the LETRS training.

Similarly, in the schools where training was supplemented by on-site observations, the key areas observed (instructional quality, student engagement, and teaching competencies) all showed improvement that related to the LETRS training

It’s important to note several caveats with these results. First, the study is not experimental, so cannot prove causation. Second, even after training, teachers managed to answer about half the questions correctly on average. There is still a long way to go. Third, the law requires the state to produce better student achievement results, not merely improve teacher knowledge and skills.

However, rather than end on the standard “more research needed” note, we did a little digging and found two positive, relatively recent student trends that may be attributable to these efforts:

(1) In 2015, 60 percent of Mississippi 4^th graders met the grade-level standard for the NAEP reading test – the highest proportion since 1992.

(2) In spring 2016, 13 percent of Mississippi 3^rd graders did not meet the standard to be promoted to 4^th grade. One year later, that proportion had fallen to 8 percent.

So perhaps, in addition to more research, more time to let these interventions play out is needed as well.

We’ve long been arguing that districts could tap retired teachers to ease the transition of new teachers into the classroom. We recently found a great example of a district doing just that, Aurora Public Schools in Colorado.

Aurora designed a program to engage retired teachers as mentors, and it appears to have had strong effects where it matters most: on the math and reading achievement of the students assigned to these well-mentored new teachers. After the first year, those classrooms reported gains equivalent to one month of additional learning in math and about the same in reading after two years. Although the impact wasn’t found to be quite as large as that of the New Teacher Center’s year-long, mentor-based induction program, Aurora’s program targeted a broader swath of teachers (all those new to the district, even if they had several years of teaching experience elsewhere). Aurora’s teachers may not have had the same professional learning needs as the true novice teachers included in a recent study of the New Teacher Center approach.

Aurora layered this new program on top of its “business as usual” support, in which new teachers were always paired with a “buddy” who provides at least 15 hours of support and a mentor who provides at least 30 hours of guidance and opportunities to collaborate over the course of each year.

The program didn’t have much of an impact on the new teachers’ evaluations, but that may speak to a weakness in the evaluation process more than to a failing of the program, as the program participants were demonstrably more effective in advancing student learning. While the program was not found to improve retention rates overall, the study revealed a strong relationship between the total hours spent with a mentor and the likelihood that a teacher would stay in the district. Each additional hour of mentoring increased the odds a teacher would return the following year by 12 percent.

Implementation costs ran approximately $171 per student—a bargain according to the researchers who also estimated that the growth in achievement was likely to translate into an additional $2,760 in lifetime earnings for the students taught by teachers in the program.

Teacher quality researchers made plenty of provocative headlines in 2016. They identified trends to monitor, new tips for the trade, and a few wins worth celebrating. Here are the papers we think are the 2016 standouts.

1. Great teachers beget more great teachers
Papay, J., Taylor, E., Tyler, J., & Laski, M. (2016). Learning job skills from colleagues at work: Evidence from a field experiment using teacher performance data.

In one of our favorite experiments of the year from researchers at Brown University and Harvard Graduate School of Education, researchers helped schools identify a teacher who was struggling in a particular area and matched that teacher with someone who excelled in that particular area. Then, they left them to their own devices. No training. No oversight. The paired teachers found a way to work with one another to address deficiencies and grow professionally. In the end, gains for the low-performing teacher were large and persistent from year to year.

2 and 3. And the theme continues: When it comes to professional development, small may be better
Jackson, K. & Makarin, A. (2016). Simplifying teaching: A field experiment with online “off-the-shelf” lessons.

Okonofau, J.A., Paunesku, D., & Walton, G.M. (2016). Brief intervention to encourage empathetic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents. 

In a similar vein to the simple paired teaching strategy are two other papers, each helping us to better understand how professional development could be improved. They each involved inexpensive, light touch interventions that led to great gains. In the first, from the prolific Kirabo Jackson with his Northwestern colleague Alexey Makarin, teacher performance dramatically improved after they were given access to a library of high-quality, low-cost lesson plans in mathematics, as well as a few emails to remind them to use them. Teachers who also received access but no reminder emails did not use the plans and their performance did not improve. In the second paper, from Stanford researchers, suspension rates plummeted in classrooms taught by teachers who had participated in only a 45-minute online session, in which teachers were prompted to thinking about how to build more positive student-teacher relationships.

Both studies serve as a reminder that when big change is needed, every small step counts.

4. Districts must find better ways to address teachers’ unintended racial bias
Grisson, J.A., & Redding, C. (2016). Discretion and disproportionality: Explaining the underrepresentation of high-achieving students of color in gifted programs.

2016 began with a sobering finding: even when black students have the same high test scores as white students, they are much less likely to be enrolled in a gifted education program. The main culprit is the identification process, relying heavily on teacher recommendations. As we explore in this paper, jointly authored with Brookings researcher Michael Hansen, districts will not be able to hire their way out of this problem, recruiting more teachers of color. The solutions must also include better training of faculty and safeguards to help teachers recognize and overcome their biases.

5. Groundbreaking policy and smart talent management continue to make the District of Columbia a district to emulate
Adnot, M., Dee, T., Katz, V., & Wyckoff, J. (2016). Teacher turnover, teacher quality, and student achievement in DCPS.

Over the last decade, District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) has charted new territory in teacher recruitment, retention, and management–and they have faced plenty of pushback and skepticism along the way. But this year the Academy has weighed in with a paper from University of Virginia researchers, surfacing proof that one of their biggest bets is paying off. By letting low-performers go, doubling down on retention efforts, and getting smart about recruitment, DCPS has increased the quality of their teacher workforce substantially. The result is real growth in student learning, surpassing what’s been measured in any other urban district.

6. On the need to get more intentional about student teaching
Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J.M., & Theobald, R. (2016). Does the match matter? Exploring whether student teaching experiences affect teacher effectiveness and attrition.

Our top list wouldn’t be complete without a paper from Dan Goldhaber and company. This year’s top Goldhaber paper looks at student teaching, a much unstudied topic that the researcher and NCTQ both agree deserves a lot more attention. This Washington state study finds that teachers are more effective if they have completed their student teaching in a school that was demographically similar to the school where they would ultimately work. Not only that, but teachers are also more likely to remain in the profession if they student taught in a school that had low teacher turnover. Two important insights for teacher prep programs to ponder.

If you look closely, they’re actually not hard
to find: inexpensive professional development opportunities for teachers that
actually do make a real difference in student learning. Earlier this year, we
covered an experiment that demonstrated that teachers are remarkably more
empathic towards their students after completing just a brief 70-minute exercise. We also learned how pairing a highly skilled teacher with one
who is struggling, even absent a formal curriculum, turns out to be more
effective than a lot of higher priced PD models.

Now, we’re offered new evidence that spending
very little money giving teachers access to high-quality math lessons can yield
big pay offs.

In a white paper from the National Bureau of
Economic Research, Kirabo Jackson and Alexey Makarin describe a nice little
experiment in which 119 math teachers were given access to a library of
inquiry-based lesson plans that currently runs at a cost of $320 per teacher
for the year. Teachers also received a few occasional email reminders about the
availability of the resources and were reminded that they could collaborate on Edmodo with other teachers
also using the lessons. That was it.

The results were remarkable. By the end of the
year, the growth in student achievement among these teachers was on par with
far more costly efforts, such as reducing class size by 15 percent or replacing
an average-quality teacher with a great one.

A couple of interesting points: 

First, it was the lowest performing teachers who
saw the greatest gains.

Second, there were some teachers in the
experiment who didn’t get the email reminders and, with that group, there were
no gains at all.

There are also some important caveats to this small study, including
a significant decrease in lesson downloads and usage over time, suggesting that
teachers did not themselves appreciate their value enough to implement more of
them.

You can check out the lessons used in the study on the Mathalicious website. 

It’s a popular movie theme–the story of that one teacher who really connects with
students, setting them on the right path to a productive future.

In the face of all evidence on the (apparently) utter uselessness of most professional development, might there be something that works? A new NBER working paper claiming just that perked up our ears.

Researchers John Papay, Eric Taylor, John Tyler, and Mary Laski employed a relatively simple approach. High- and low-performing teachers in Tennessee were paired together based on their professional strengths and weaknesses and then asked to spend a year developing the low-performer’s skills that needed improving.
That’s it.
No new, mandatory meetings. No expensive coaches. No new policies. And cheap. The only real cost to schools was the time the teachers needed to work with each other—and even that was left to the discretion of each school.
The results were astounding: in classrooms taught by low-performing teachers, students scored, on average, 0.12 standard deviations higher than students in the control classrooms. To put that in perspective, the authors compare this improvement to what you would expect from a student assigned to a teacher ranked at the median rather than in the bottom quartile—or to an experienced teacher rather than a novice teacher. There was also evidence to suggest that the gains in teacher performance persisted or even grew in the year after the partnership was completed.
Might this be a one-hit wonder? After all, it only looked at 136 teachers who all taught in the middle grades. A study of the impact on a larger sample is in the works. For the cost, though, we think it might be worth a try elsewhere!

The headline of a new study from Matthew A. Kraft (Brown University) and David Blazar (Harvard Graduate School of Education) caught our eye: Intensive, personalized coaching programs can improve teacher performance substantially.

Professional development that works? Well… perhaps.

The two researchers examined New Orlean’s yearlong adaptation
of a coaching program from Boston-based MATCH School. Participants spend a week
in a summer workshop followed by four one-week sessions of observation and
feedback. Importantly, the participants teach a range of grades and subjects,
distinguishing the program from more common coaching interventions that focus
on early literacy.

Teachers who got the coaching scored significantly higher
than the uncoached teachers on an index of teacher quality that includes
classroom observation scores, principal evaluation, and student surveys. In
fact, the impact of having been coached exceeded even the impact of a teacher
gaining more experience. The difference between coached and uncoached groups
was nearly 50 percent higher than the difference between novice and experienced
teachers.

Coached teachers outperformed uncoached teachers by 0.59 standard deviations. For comparison, experienced teachers (3+ years experience) outperformed novice teachers (1 or 2 years experience) by a smaller margin of 0.44 standard deviations.

Despite relying on a generally strong methodology, the size of the sample involving only 30 matched pairs tones down our enthusiasm a tad. But more importantly, the sample is restricted to teachers from urban charter schools who wanted to participate in the program—meaning that this approach may not translate well to other settings or less willing groups of teachers.

Still, given how little we know about how to help teachers improve, even preliminary evidence of some ways professional development might become more effective is noteworthy.

The Mirage by TNTP

Just make sure you leave before they read the headline findings. TNTP estimates that, on average, districts spend a whopping $18,000 on professional development per teacher per year (cue coffee spit-take). One would think all that spending would provide some decent returns. Not so—few teachers showed improvement, and no clear connections emerged between professional development and teachers’ improvement. When planning next year’s budget, districts may want to think about whether all this cost is going to result in much benefit.
Want our take? Find it here: TQB

At this point, we figure that everyone else has already written about the more interesting and insightful takeaways about TNTP’s latest report, entitled The Mirage (see here and here). (That’s what we get for putting out a newsletter only once every two weeks). No question that the results were depressing, finding that school districts are spending about $18,000 per teacher on professional development that isn’t developing anyone.
One explanation we liked for PD’s lack of an impact didn’t seem to get much of a bounce around the echo chamber. On the day of the report’s release, Washington, DC’s Chancellor Kaya Henderson observed that the biggest “bang for the buck” in teacher PD might lie in teachers’ study of curriculum (see above!)—hashing through standards, joint unit and lesson planning, sharing resources and materials—and that is something American school teachers just do not seem to get to do a lot, at least compared to other countries.
As if to confirm our hunch, shortly after The Mirage was released, we stumbled across an even more depressing example of How Bad PD Is in the USA, and which illustrates the disconnect between professional development and curriculum.
Two Florida State University researchers describe how school districts there essentially squandered a generously funded opportunity to allow teachers to spend a lot more time on curriculum. While roughly half of all Florida districts signed up to use dedicated Race to the Top funds to implement a Japanese Lesson Study,mostnever followed through.
No question that Lesson Study involves a significant amount of time and resources. Groups of teachers must meet regularly to set goals, review content and plan and practice lesson delivery. Doing Lesson Study right requires a hefty budget for training on how to implement the PD, devoted planning time and substitute teachers to cover classes while teachers observe each other’s lessons. When it came down to making the changes that Lesson Study requires in schedules and spending, not only did districts fail to benefit from the money they were slated to receive, most never even requested the money.
Motoka Akiba and Bryan Wilkinson never were able to pinpoint why exactly the money wasn’t spent. We could posit a few guesses, but then so could our readers, we imagine.
Professional development that dives deep into curriculum, where content and pedagogy intersect, may not be simple, but it is, in our humble opinion, the Holy Grail. 

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. 

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 states require 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
.