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.
Every minute counts: How districts govern teacher time
Teachers’ time is one of our most precious resources in schools. To design policies that make the best use of time to support teacher effectiveness, it’s helpful to see how school districts allocate it and how that compares across the country.
Think a four-day school week is better? Think again
A four-day work week may seem like a good way to attract teachers and address tightening school budgets, but researchers say it might do more harm than good.
A look at districts’ planning and collaboration policies for their teachers
As districts begin to
plan what the next school year will look like, we analyze how teacher planning
and collaboration time are currently being addressed in the nation’s largest
districts.
Teachers accomplish so much each day, that any day that they are absent means lost learning for their students. In this report, NCTQ explores the importance of teacher attendance; examines teacher attendance trends across 30 of the largest school districts in the nation; and identifies patterns and connections that surround teacher absenteeism, such as a connection between central office and teacher attendance, and correlations between teacher attendance and teacher characteristics such as tenure and years of experience. The study is an update to NCTQ’s 2013 Roll Call report.
November 2017: Teacher Planning and Collaboration Time
While salary often dominates news headlines about teacher contract negotiations, time to plan is often just as precious to teachers. Let’s take a look at how much time 124 large districts set aside for teachers to plan lessons, grade, collaborate, and engage in other non-teaching activities that are necessary in order to provide good instruction.
This month, we analyze school calendars for the 2016-2017 school year to answer some key questions. Is school really starting earlier? How long is the school year for students and teachers?
July 2016: How much time do teachers get to plan and collaborate?
In order to be well prepared for daily instruction, teachers
need time without students to plan and collaborate. This month, Trendline delves into how long the teacher workday is and how much of that time
is devoted to planning and collaboration.
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.
Myth Busters: Scholar asserts reports on American teachers’ teaching time are grossly exaggerated
The myth: U.S. teachers spend upwards of 50 percent more time in front of their students than teachers in
other countries (see more examples of this myth here, here
and here).
The
reality: They don’t. A new studydigs into why survey data incorrectly suggest that our
teachers spend so much more time teaching a classroom of students (as opposed
to other kinds of activities such as
planning, classroom duty and tutoring students, which are counted
separately) than teachers in other countries. The graph above depicts teachers’ responses to the survey question used
to gather U.S. data on teaching time–notice a pattern?
The question intends for teachers to add up how much time they spend
teaching each week and then round to the nearest hour. The responses spike at
intervals of five, suggesting that teachers estimated the amount of time they
teach each day to the nearest hour and multiplied by five (for the five
instructional days in the week), leading to an inflated amount of teaching
time.
For example, teachers who teach five 45-minute classes a day should have
reported 19 hours of teaching per week, but instead reported 25 hours, rounding
a 45-minute period to an hour.
This error of rounding seems to explain why, year after year, the OECD’s Education at a Glance reports that U.S.
teachers spend significantly more time in front of their classrooms than do
teachers in other countries.
Another reason to
suspect the reported amount of teaching time is inflated? About a quarter of
the survey respondents reported teaching their students more hours than the
length of the school day itself.
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.
With the start of a new school year upon us, we thought we’d take a look at the 2013-14 calendars in the 114 school districts we track. Here’s what we found.
We’ve thought a lot about the strike in Chicago over the last nine days. Today we took some time to look at the details of the contract and the sum of their parts. Is it good for kids? Does it move the district in the right direction?
For this issue, we took a look at school year calendars to see just how long students were out of school this summer and how many days they’ll spend in school this year. We compared this to the 2011-2012 school year calendars to determine which districts
This month we dug into our database to see how much planning time teachers get to prepare lessons, collaborate with colleagues, and engage in professional development. Here’s what we found.
