Advancing the Teaching Profession

VAM and The Law of Unintended Consequences

David Leonhardt’s New York Times Magazine piece on teacher accountability offers a reasoned view of the recent ruckus over publicly releasing names of teachers who generate high as well as low value-added test score gains. I could not agree more with Leonhardt’s assessment that it is time for results-oriented teacher evaluation. The big questions, of course, are (1) just what do we mean by “results,” and (2) how are we going to be sure we’re measuring for the outcomes we really want. Because we can be sure that the measurements we choose will heavily influence those outcomes.

Leonhardt rightfully notes that “schools generally do not allow parents to see any part of a teacher’s past evaluations, for instance” and that “for the most part (parents) have to hope for the best.” But while he points to several of the serious technical flaws in using even the most sophisticated value-added models to judge teachers, he ultimately shrugs them off.

VAM methods falsely identify teachers as ineffective (as well as effective) at very high rate. However, drawing on the viewpoints of several school reform advocates (including Kati Haycock) who seem comfortable with the VAM error rate, Mr. Leonhardt suggests that it’s far better to make mistakes in judging who is an effective teacher than not using value-added tools at all.

Leonhardt, like many of the reformers he quotes, seems to think there are only two choices to pursue when it comes to teacher accountability: Use test-based results, or not. While the “either-or” scenario painted by many journalists fuels the hot debates between reformers and union leaders, it does little to actually improve public education and ensure that all students will get the effective teachers they deserve.

With value-added error rates at 25% (and higher), it’s morally irresponsible for VAM to receive such overwhelming emphasis — and it’s educationally irresponsible to use it to fire teachers as called for by many self-proclaimed reformers. Millions of students will be harmed when suitable replacements cannot be found — and many students will also lose effective and caring teachers who were falsely identified as ineffective. With the accountability pressure turned up even higher (now careers are at stake), many teachers will feel compelled to just teach to whatever is on the current standardized test. Forget all about addressing the “creativity crisis” ballyhooed on a recent Newsweek cover. America can settle in for another generation of rote learning and remediation.

None of this means that value-added data should not be used as one piece of information in a comprehensive system of teacher accountability that all of us, including Mr. Leonhardt, want for our students and their families. But failing to recognize the downside of using flawed data to make life-changing decisions may lead to rewarding the wrong teachers — a development that will undermine parents even more as they seek to secure the best education for their children (and hopefully for everyone else’s kids as well).

New Report: Don't Use Flawed Data to Judge Teachers

Why do so many journalists and policy wonks think it’s okay to use flawed data to judge teachers?

I agree that perfection should not get in way of progress. But the LA Times (and a number of think tank analysts) continue to justify the use of VAM — value-added estimates of individual teachers — as the sole determinant of who is effective in raising student achievement and who is not.

The pundits may give a slight tip of the hat toward multiple measures of effectiveness, but their conventional wisdom (as surfaced again in an August 28th LA Times article) is that “the benefits of singling out those who consistently succeed” far exceeds the bad “publicity” for those with “low rankings” (and flawed data be damned).
 
While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan claims that “no one thinks test scores should be the only factor in teacher evaluations,” he and many others are encouraging school districts to make it the overwhelming factor when he gives his blessing for newspapers to identify effective teachers solely on the basis of VAM mathematical formulas, as he did with some gusto in his August 29, 2010 article for the New York Daily News.

Meanwhile the hard research is piling up, showing how the use of standardized student test scores and value-added modeling in teacher evaluation can do lots more harm than good — and harm not just to teachers, but to schools in every kind of American community, by distorting the reasons for student success.

A major new study from a top national team of education measurement experts* offers up mounds of evidence to confirm how unstable the results of VAM evaluations are across time, across classes and across tests. These respected scholars, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, found that applying value-added methodologies to student test scores does not fully control for the varied factors that affect student learning, including the effects of summer learning loss for some students.

They also reveal how VAM does not account for the fact that some students receive instruction in particular subjects from more than one teacher or that some are offered afterschool programs, while others are not. And they make an even more critical point:

Creating a system in which teachers are, in effect, competing with each other can reduce the incentive to collaborate within schools – and studies have shown that better schools are marked by teaching staffs that work together.

The Secretary claims that the issue of publicly releasing the names of effective and ineffective teachers in the newspaper, based solely on VAM results, is an “emotional” one. But I would suggest that this issue is far more about science than emotion.

The science is clear: VAM stratagems — no matter how sophisticated their statistical procedures may be — are not capable alone of fairly and accurately identifying who is an effective teacher. There’s some irony in the fact that this major new study supports an analysis actually commissioned by the Secretary recently. The Secretary’s report concluded that over 1 in 4 teachers who are judged by VAM tools will be falsely labeled as effective or ineffective, even when there are three years worth of data available.
 
In its most recent story on teacher performance, the LA Times  identified and painted a powerful portrait of a number of effective teachers like Zenaida Tan and Hollie Bloch, two very experienced educators who teach in LAUSD. But the further irony is that while VAM helped the Times find these two teachers, there is at least one chance in four that Ms. Tan and Ms. Bloch might be labeled “ineffective” by the newspaper in some future year, using the same exact methods.

Returning to the EPI report, I could not agree more with America’s educational measurement experts that “although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.”

While perfection should not get in the way of progress, neither should flawed tools. A comprehensive system of evaluating teacher performance would include VAM measures as one component, but also an array of other metrics — e.g., teachers’ analyses of student work or how teachers spread expertise from one classroom to the next. What’s more, a really good system would reveal why some teachers were more effective than others and what we can do to increase their numbers and their spread.

Such a system also would rely on the leadership of classroom experts like Tan and Bloch, and not on school principals who have neither the time nor training to make the granular pedagogical decisions that reveal who is effective or not.

I agree with the Secretary that a public spotlight needs to shine on our nation’s most effective teachers. I’ve been advocating for just such practices for more than a decade. But let’s make sure we understand all the dimensions of teaching that make them outstanding. And then let's advocate — together — for a system that guarantees and rewards those expert practices.

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* The distinguished authors of EPI's report include four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association; two  former presidents of the National Council on Measurement in Education;  the current and two  former chairs of the Board of Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences;  the president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management;  the former director of the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center and a former associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education; a former  and current member of the National Assessment Governing Board; and the current vice-president, a former president, and three other members of the National Academy of Education.

The School Reform Policy Gap

The latest PDK/Gallup Poll reveals a significant difference in the opinions of the American public and the Obama Administration over the best ways to reform schools and assure teaching quality.

In 2010, more than one in three Americans actually gave the President a “D” or a “F” for his performance in support of public schools — a much poorer showing than the year before. What has changed? Since the 2009 poll, the Administration has laid out the specifics of its plan to turn around low-performing schools and improve teacher performance – and to significantly increase the number of charter schools in the U.S.

The poll surfaced several disconnects between current policy and public sentiment:
 
• While the Administration wants to make it easier to recruit teachers to high needs schools through short-cut alternative certification programs, the American people believe teachers need “more time to learn to teach in new ways.”

• While the Administration has put emphasis on firing “bad” teachers (e.g., Central Falls High School in Rhode Island), the American people believe the call for mass firings of school faculty is wrong-headed. In the poll, 54% prefer a strategy specifically aimed at improving teaching skills. Only 13 percent think it’s a good idea to close a low-performing school and re-open it as a charter (a la New Orleans).
 
• On the question of school reform priorities, Americans believe that improving the quality of teachers is “more important” (44%) than measuring student achievement through accountability testing (11%) or developing more demanding education standards (24%).

• A sizable majority of Americans (71%) believe teachers’ pay should be tied to their work, not just on a “standard scale basis.” But they are also increasingly skeptical about using current standardized tests to judge students and teachers — and they are now much less likely to want teacher pay to be “very closely tied” to students’ academic achievement. In the 2000 PDK poll, 25 percent called for teacher pay to be tightly linked to student test scores. In 2010, that percentage dropped to 19.

As I told Education Week reporter Dakarai I. Aarons recently, there is far more interest among the American public in supporting teachers than in firing them or paying them on the basis of test scores. That doesn’t mean the American people don’t want a results-oriented profession. They do. But they seem to understand (better than many policymakers) that most teachers who are not effective can become so.

Indeed, the 2010 poll suggests that Americans have quite a bit of faith in their public school teachers.

Far more public school parents today, compared to a decade ago, believe schools have “caused” their children to be “eager” about learning (63% in 2010, compared to 50% in 1998). What’s more, over 70 percent of Americans (not just public school parents) “have trust and confidence” in those who teach children in the public schools.

Far too many policy approaches today view teachers as the problem to be fixed — not as professionals who can create and enact solutions with the right supports. Could this negative outlook on teaching explain why more Americans are giving the President failing grades for his performance in supporting public education?

Teachers and Valued Added Tools: Finding the Right Way, Far from the Madding Crowd

Saturday’s Los Angeles Times focuses once again on the value-added data it has assembled to judge instructional performance in the LAUSD system. But the emphasis now is more on schools than teachers. The piece, penned by Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith, tunes in on which schools produce higher value-added gains than others — and why (well, only “kinda” on the why). The authors avoided putting too much of a spotlight on the newspaper’s earlier decision to use this same data set to identify publicly which teachers are THE effective ones and which ones are NOT.
 
Since last week’s LA Times article hit the press, some of the nation’s experts on value-added methodology (VAM), like Doug Harris, and advocates for their use, like Rick Hess, have challenged the newspaper's decision to publish individual teachers’ ratings. Both are quoted in Carl Bialik’s thoughtful critique in the Wall Street Journal, where he concluded that the metric being used is way too unstable to give consistently accurate results of which individual teachers are more effective than others.

Even Dan Goldhaber, a well-known labor economist who routinely develops and uses these tools in education contexts, “strongly opposes” making individual teachers' value-added scores public in the way done by the LA Times. In recent comments on the Web, Goldhaber noted that there are “legitimate reasons” — like pull out programs and migration of students in and out of individual teachers’ classrooms (which is very common in LA) — that “make the attribution of student (achievement) to (specific) teachers complex.”

The VAM tool can be very useful in helping teachers get better at what they do, as also suggested by the new Song, et. al. LA Times article. And the district and the union in Los Angeles should find a way to use value-added data to help teachers improve their teaching practice and spread their expertise. However, as an isolated metric, VAM is not a fair method (as some policy pundits and policy zealots suggest) to praise or condemn individual teachers.

Reformers have long yearned for tools to turn teaching into a results-oriented profession. I am one of them. But the growing enthusiasm for using value-added formulas to offer summative judgments on the effectiveness of individual teachers is unwarranted, when research shows that 25-30% of those identified as effective in one year would be identified as ineffective the next.

The policy and media voices advocating for the indiscriminate use of VAM tools remind me a bit of “the madding crowd's ignoble strife” described by 18th century English poet Thomas Gray. And I also recall the comment of Scottish historian Charles Mackay, who once observed:

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

Teaching Effectiveness and the LA Times: A Debacle in the Making

In an interview yesterday with Amanda Paulson of the Christian Science Monitor, I told her that the decision by the Los Angeles Times to publish a list of effective and ineffective teachers, based solely on the results of one researcher’s take on value-added estimates, was absolutely “god-awful.”

Don’t get me wrong: As an organization we are dedicated to advancing a results-oriented profession, which means teacher evaluation metrics must include evidence of student learning. But the approach used by the L.A. Times is rife with huge problems — most notably the fact that value-added data on teacher effectiveness is far too unstable to use a sole arbiter of who is an effective teacher and who is not. Even the U.S. Department of Education, which is promoting the use of value-added data in teaching quality reforms, released a major research paper last month pointing to the substantial error rates associated with generating lists of good and not-so-good teachers using these methods.

This isn’t an ideological issue. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and I are frequently at odds about the best ways to assure teaching quality now and in the future. But we are in agreement on the poor judgment underlying the L.A. Times decision. Hess noted in his Education Week blog this morning that he is “increasingly nervous at how casually reading and math value-added calculations are being treated as de facto determinants of ‘good’ teaching.” And well he should be.

Elsewhere I have pointed to a lengthy list of inherent problems in using VAM to identify effective teachers — including the following realities:

1. Students are not randomly assigned to teachers, and VAM measures cannot fully sort out the effects caused by differences in students’ needs or preparedness — as distinct from teacher effects.

2. The lack of properly scaled year-to-year tests makes it difficult to evaluate gains at all points along the achievement continuum or to assess (for example) a physics teacher’s effectiveness based on her students’ previous scores in chemistry.

3. Many students in high-needs schools are highly mobile and do not complete a full year of instruction in a given teacher’s classroom.

4. Many students are taught the same subjects by more than one teacher — confounding the capacity of distant statistical models to isolate the effects from individual classroom instructors.
 
5. In addition, depending on the VAM statistical model a researcher uses, the same teacher can be identified as effective or ineffective.

6. Finally, researchers have found that the same teacher’s effectiveness rating can change depending on the school in which he or she teaches.

No wonder the USDOE report revealed that even when three years of VAM data are used, over 25 percent of the teachers will be “erroneously identified.” That should make any fair-minded person think twice about using such data to name names and possibly destroy careers.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, under the auspices of its Measuring Effective Teaching project, is taking a very thoughtful approach to teacher assessment by looking at multiple measures of student achievement and linking other metrics (e.g., classroom observations, teachers’ analyses of student work and their own teaching, and levels of student engagement) to capture a more robust and accurate view of who is effective and why.

If policymakers and the media mavens really want to learn about effective teacher evaluation, it’s time they turn to the wisdom of those who actually teach — like Larry Ferlazzo, a Teacher Leaders Network member, who penned a thoughtful response in this morning’s Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet to what will surely be a journalistic debacle.

I suspect the Los Angeles Times will soon hear from many teachers branded as “ineffective” who turn out to be “false negatives” (or a Type II error in statistical lingo), and the Times editors will need to re-think their approach to reporting on the debates about effective teaching.

I’m frankly startled by the Times's decision to publish this highly questionable data and risk humiliating many competent teachers by doing so. I wonder how journalists of national stature, who are trained to look at multiple sides of an issue and to be sure of their facts, could be so reckless?

Test Score Gains Fade in NYC and DC: Time to Focus on Teaching Quality?

News of test score “fade” from both New York City and the District of Columbia schools is surfacing. Both districts — often held up as emerging models of school reform — have used a combination of narrowed curriculum, lock-step teaching procedures, and high stakes teacher accountability to produce some short-term gains. But now the story lines of Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, two of the nation’s most well-known school superintendents, may need to change.

With the release of 2010 results, NYC passing rates dropped by more than 25 percent and the achievement gap (between white and minority students) widened substantially. In DC, school leaders had to admit that their heralded gains in the elementary schools over two previous years are now evaporating. They do not know why.

Test score gain can fluctuate for a lot of reasons, including statistical error and student mobility. and for these reasons (and others) experts claim that no test should be used as the primary arbiter of who is doing the best job of educating children.

Dan Koretz, one of the nation’s leading experts on student assessment, has concluded (p. 8) that high stakes testing often results in "substantial distortions of practice" in the classroom "and inflation of test scores." He writes: "The seriousness of this problem is hard to overstate. When scores are inflated, many of the most important conclusions people base on them will be wrong, and students -- and sometimes teachers -- will suffer as a result."

But well-documented observations by Koretz and others have not deterred zealous school reformers or journalists looking to make a splashy headline, such as Newsweek’s recent in-your-face cover story on “bad teachers” as the root cause of America’s failing public education system.

I don’t know any supporters of a positive approach to teaching quality and teacher evaluation who would question whether NYC or DC schools need to overhaul how they recruit, support, assess and pay teachers. That’s clearly what’s best for students. But I do wonder if the recent failings of Klein and Rhee’s heralded reform schemes — which grow out of a one-dimensional view of effectiveness — will raise more questions among the public about how we judge schools and the teachers who teach in them.

Maybe we’re moving toward a tipping point. I’m encouraged that Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post has opened up her blog The Answer Sheet to voices from many sides of the assessment issue — and especially to teacher voices. I wonder if there may be more of an interest now in how to elevate and spread the performance of effective teachers who do more than raise a test score a point or two — and ultimately less interest in firing a few teachers who do not always generate gains in lock-step ways from year to year.  

I’m feeling a bit optimistic: I'm sensing that more and more of us want to focus on effective teaching and how to cultivate, spread and sustain it — and not on a paradigm of punishment and recrimination.

Big Ideas from Some of Our Nation’s Most Effective (and potentially most influential) Teachers

This past weekend I had the pleasure of working closely with 19 extraordinary teachers from throughout the United States – a sample of delegates drawn from the hundreds of accomplished educators who participate in the many initiatives of our Teacher Leaders Network.

We worked hard and played hard as we gathered for a three-day retreat at CTQ headquarters in Hillsborough, North Carolina. We dug deeply into what it means to transform teaching into a 21st century profession fully prepared to help every student succeed in the decades to come, both in brick-and-mortar schools and in cyberspace.

I learned so much from Tom Bremer (Illinois), Isabel Campos-Woytek (Colorado), Ben Crosby (California), Julianna Dauble (Washington), Nina Davis (North Carolina), Susan Graham (Virginia), Sarah Henchey (North Carolina), John M. Holland (Virginia), Marguerite Izzo (New York), Kris Kohl (Nevada), Patrick Ledesma (Virginia), Lori Nazareno (Colorado), Ernie Rambo (Nevada), Marsha Ratzel (Kansas), Cindi Rigsbee (North Carolina), Zach Rupp (Colorado), Ariel Sacks (New York City), Bob Williams (Alaska), and Heather Wolpert-Gawron (California). (We really missed Renee Moore from Mississippi who could not attend at the last minute.)

Teachers in this amazing group fully represent the diversity of America’s teaching force – teaching a variety of subjects and fulfilling many leadership roles in urban, suburban and rural schools at every level of the PK-12 spectrum. They are involved in our Teacher Leaders Network Forum; our emerging network of state and national teachers of the year (thanks to CCSSO); our book-writing team which has been designing a powerful pathway toward Teaching 2030;  our TeacherSolutions group studying the kinds of conditions teachers need in order to teach effectively in high needs schools. Five of them are part of our New Millennium Initiatives in four states. Several are Teach for America alums, or other first- and second-career teachers who entered the profession through alternative certifications. Others graduated from traditional schools of education.

They are all committed to improving preparation before anyone teaches anyone’s child. They have strategies for identifying and spreading the expertise of effective teachers. They can show you how to assess students for 21st century knowledge and skills. They came up with big and break-through policy proposals for how to do so. They have passion and knowledge as well as pedagogical expertise that rarely exists inside the D.C. Beltway, where most education policy gets debated and crafted. They transcend traditional union and administrator policy positions as well as those of left-wing and right-wing think tanks. If policymakers want to know how to get to “and/both” teaching and education policy -- and leave “either/or” approaches in the dust — ask these teacher leaders.

Thanks to several foundations supporting projects these energized educators are engaged in — including Ford, Bill & Melinda Gates, Joyce, MetLife, Rose and Stuart — you will hear more from these extraordinary teachers in resounding and systematic ways. Since fleeing the classroom in 1981 to work on the transformation of teaching into the profession students deserve, I have never been any more inspired than I am by our work this past weekend. I have never been so hopeful for the possibilities that lie ahead. Stay tuned.

The Highest Paid Anybody

I have said for some time that I will continue to advocate for the teaching profession until the highest paid anybody in a school system is a practicing teacher. Think about the implications: For this idea to become a reality our education system would have to not only identify excellent teachers, but have a variety of venues to make them more visible to policymakers and the public as well as their fellow practitioners.

These top-paid educators would continue to teach part of the day, week, or year, but also spread their expertise in a variety of ways — perhaps as Teacherpreneurs (a concept outlined in Teaching 2030, a book I've penned with 12 of my teacher colleagues from the Teacher Leaders Network, with generous support from MetLife Foundation.)

While teachers and parents cheer when they hear me offer up this possibility, many of the D.C. policy pundits roll their eyes and quietly scoff at the idea. Well now a group of economists have confirmed that teachers are worth quite a bit — perhaps more than many of our top-paid urban superintendents.
 
Raj Chetty and colleagues found that even very young students who had more effective teachers and learned more in kindergarten were more likely to go college and earn more (and in doing so) produce more economic benefit to society. An effective kindergarten teacher, according to the economists, is worth $320,000. The researchers found that the effects of effective teachers were not found in year-to-year gains on standardized tests but in long-term adult outcomes. (They study drew upon a database of 12,000 children who were part of a well-designed scientific investigation in Tennessee in the 1980s and are now in their 30s.)

A recent New York Times article calls the findings “explosive.” I would suggest they are re-affirming our work at the Center for Teaching Quality — and should provoke a new narrative on how policymakers frame efforts to recruit and reward effective teachers.

• We need to think and act well beyond the narrow (and narrow-minded) strategy of focusing on ridding schools of a few ineffective teachers or paying teachers for short-term gains determined on 20th century standardized tests.

• We need to begin to blur the lines of distinction between those who lead schools and those who teach in them.

• We need to place a premium on those who produce long-term results and spread their expertise to others.

We need to really value excellent early childhood teachers, like my Teaching 2030 colleague and co-author John Holland. I will be the first to say that John — a 12-year veteran of teaching three and four-year-olds from Richmond’s toughest neighborhoods who is also an artist and innovator and thoughtful blogger for Inside Pre-K — is worth $320,000 a year.

"They will have to do what any good teacher does..."

Saturday’s New York Times brought us a fascinating article on robot technology and teaching. In their piece Benedict Carey and John Markoff describe the cutting-edge developments underway where “highly programmed machines” with motion tracking and speech recognition tools can engage humans and “rival” some teaching tasks. In one investigation, reported in the NYT article, a robot named “RUBI” was found to significantly improve the vocabulary of two handfuls of toddlers.

No doubt artificial intelligence can greatly enhance learning opportunities for the growing diversity of students entering our public schools. So many other industries and professions —whether in automobile manufacturing or in medicine —increasingly are investing in technology to enhance productivity and advance professional practice.

But as one executive of a company that makes a remotely controlled robot made perfectly clear: “The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children” and “it’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen” in a classroom. As Carey and Markoff note, “If robots are to be truly effective guides…they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.”

If you do not quite get this point, just turn to another piece in the Saturday edition of the Times, pointing to the large growth in Teach for America — a high-profile effort to recruit recent young graduates of top-flight universities, who receive only a few weeks of basic training before they enter some of the nation’s highest needs schools. Here’s what reporter Michael Winerip writes about Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, who is struggling to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers.

(Liliana) prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken. She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game. 



“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.” 



“Do I have to play?” asked the boy. 



“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered. 



The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order. 



“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”

This is where the nuance of knowing your students well as individuals and having a deep understanding of child development, sociological interactions in a classroom, and behavior management — as well as varied pedagogical techniques in math — makes the difference in what gets learned. And no robot can do it all. Nor can an ill-prepared and under-supported teacher.

We need Ms. Nguyen and thousands more like her, but we need them and those who support them to make a full commitment to the preparation, support and ongoing professional development it takes to become an excellent teacher.

Teaching Experience and Expert Teachers

I sure hope Jonathan Alter and Jay Mathews, popular journalists, read carefully last year's New York Times article by Elissa Gootman on the making of the $125,000 a year teacher for the Equity Project Charter School in Washington Heights, NY.

Alter and Mathews, who write regularly on education and teaching, are often found praising young teachers — whom they seem to believe need little formal preparation for teaching in high needs schools — at the expense of older, more experienced teachers who have been trained in education schools and thus “burdened” with pedagogical coursework. (In particular see this recent column by Alter in which he blithely offers the descriptor "older, incompetent teachers.")

So let's take a look at teacher recruitment at the Equity Project Charter School, which garnered national headlines by announcing it would pay its teachers $125,000 a year, plus performance bonuses. Who did Zeke Vanderhoek, founder of the innovative school, recruit to teach and earn the professional salaries offered? As Gootman's story documents, most of his choices are very experienced — dare we say older? — teachers, like Oscar Quintero, who has taught for over 30 years and is in his 60s. Or Judith LeFevre, 54, a science teacher from Arizona, "who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools."

While there are also several 30-somethings on the school faculty, they all have been well prepared over time for teaching in high needs schools. They have proof of their teaching expertise and a strong track record in engaging students in high quality instruction.

What is most striking is Gootman’s description of how the teachers Mr. Vanderhoek found in his nationwide search complement each other as a team. While each of the teachers had special training, skills, and experiences, what matters most is how they fit together as a cohesive unit, ready to serve  their students from Washington Heights. For LeFevre, making the move to NYC from distant Arizona was about “working with a team of master teachers.”

How is the Equity Project Charter School doing at the end of Year One? It's too soon for an academic progress report, but here's the NYC Dept. of Education Learning Environment Survey Report 2009-2010 for the school, which "provides a view of a school's learning environment based on responses from parents, teachers, and middle and high school students." The satisfaction scores are some of the highest in the city.

Skills and experience, collaboration, cultural competency, demonstrated expertise — these are the qualities that matter in today's teachers, whether they're 25 or 65. These should be the drivers of education policy and reform — not the notion that somehow, de facto, younger is better.

A Young Teacher Looks to the Future

Novice teacher Jess Lyons has been an enthusiastic member of our CTQ  New Millennium Initiative in Colorado, where she and other young colleagues have been considering the policies and practices that are most likely to help teaching evolve into the full-realized 21st century profession that all of our students deserve.

When Jess let us know that she's decided to take a break from the classroom and consider her future career options, I asked her to write about her decision. It's clear in what she has to say that Jess is still emotionally attached to teaching and her kids, but as she considers her likely career path in today's profession, she's not finding all the intellectual satisfaction she craves. Would the promise of hybrid roles that allow teachers to blend teaching, leadership and policy work be an answer for Jess? That's the question I'm pondering as I read her words here, written just before the end of the school term in Denver. — Barnett Berry

Teaching With All You Have

By Jess Lyons

I love kids. As each day draws closer to my end of year, there’s usually one moment where my heart stops. Just for a second. Then an intense feeling of dread — “What am I doing?! Why would I leave this?” — washes over me and sets my heart racing.

My fifth graders will be moving on in eight days, and so will I. Michael won’t be there to give me an elbow shake to start my day. In eight days, Miriam won’t pop her hip and tell me “Miss Jess, I’m unique.” Girl, don’t I know it. I won’t get to read with Kristen every day, moving her from a level 6 in September to an 18, and pushing for more.

All of this, of course, leads to the obvious question: Why are you leaving teaching?

I spent all of last summer and most of the fall, while completing my Masters’ in Education, trying to figure out what was the right decision. In January, after I turned in my resignation letter, when my principal asked about my reasons for leaving I told her that I felt as if the four walls were closing in on me. I don’t learn in the environment that I am currently teaching in, so how can I expect my students to do so?

As I try to coherently explain why I feel the need to leave teaching, or why teaching has “lost me,” I have to be honest and say it’s not teaching. Sure, there are a number of things that I don’t like. I love planning, but I hate that really good planning takes so many hours. I usually do it out of guilt that my kids won’t get as good an education without it. I hate learning in four walls. MY best learning never happened there, and honestly, neither will theirs.

I hate the professional development that is useless. I dislike the scripted curriculum that I have to teach with “fidelity” when I know that it might not be best for my students. I don’t like that everyone wants to tell me how to do it better, and that so much is based on numbers and data, when it’s people (my very individual students) that walk into my room.

Let me clarify that I don’t feel like society’s image of an older jaded teacher. I’m leaving at this juncture because I love children. I carry the belief that you can only be around that type of glowing energy, filled with possibility, if you yourself carry those same feelings. So far, I still do, and I don’t want to risk losing them.

Three things that might have made a difference

I believe there are three very important criteria that would have strengthened and lengthened my time in the education field.

First, great leadership in a school setting is absolutely necessary for beginning teachers to be successful. My first year, my principal and vice principal were new at their job, and it was apparent. Not to a first year teacher, of course. For me, I thought it was normal that 15-year veteran teachers cried on a daily basis, just like me, and it just wasn’t going to get better. The staff was not supported and the demands were high without clear expectations of what needed to be done. Those pressures add up, when the staff, the students, and the community are asking challenging questions and left hanging without the answers.

I really didn’t know how I was going to make it through my second year. When it came, the leadership changed. My current principal took the position and she’s incredible. She’s extremely organized. She’s fair and just in her dissemination of consequences and rewards for students and staff. This woman is a do-er, in every sense of the word. I view her as an unbreakable umbrella. She protects the teachers from as many mandates as possible, so that we can do our job effectively, and she trusts our professional ability to do our job right. It feels like a true team, working together for our students. But the experiences of that first year when the leadership was lacking are hard to forget.

Second, professional development is USELESS unless a teacher can make what he or she has learned applicable to their classroom and students. This takes time. During my first and second year, I was required to take a number of classes — provided by the district, by Teach for America, or for my Masters degree — that did not improve my day-to-day teaching. In some cases, it was because the PD was lackluster and I could have read the manual myself. In other cases, it was because I was forced to take particular sessions that were either irrelevant (and so I couldn’t infuse the content into my teaching), or there wasn’t time to absorb what I was learning and infiltrate it into my planning. Imagining a situation where I could have selected professional development that I thought would best suit me and expand my teaching practice excites and motivates me even now.

In the end, it was the restrictions of the setting where I worked that metaphorically choked me out of teaching. Working in a school district as large as Denver Public Schools means that there are more mandates than you can count on your fingers and toes. Following a scripted curriculum leaves little room for expansion and creativity. Having to have a scripted curriculum for every subject meant that I couldn’t be as creative as I wanted or needed to be around units of study.

Trying to prepare for standardized testing in a bilingual school is frustrating and scary. Spending too much time showing students how to properly fill out the tests takes away from what I should be teaching. Learning how to learn, what you like to learn, and how to show others what you have learned does not happen during bubble-test prep.

Imagining hybrid roles

Outside of the restrictions around my profession responsibilities, I felt stifled intellectually. I need intellectual discourse throughout the day. This might be found in teaching another grade level or another subject area. This could also happen if hybrid teaching roles were to be effectively established. My skin tingles when I imagine what my day MIGHT have looked like in a hybrid role where I was able to both teach students and spend time impacting education beyond the four walls of the classroom through collaboration, research and policy work.

I’m not sure yet that I am done with teaching. I only know that right now, I don’t have the same passion as others. When I walk into a room of members of the Denver New Millennium Think Tank, the air crackles. It’s alive with spirit, enthusiasm, ideas that are tangible and pushback that is building new structures on top of solid foundations. There is some life force being exuded by these individuals, and when they come together, I can almost physically see the changes happening, as we speak.

When I’m there, I feed off of that energy. It livens me, drives me, pushes my thinking and my questions. I want to solve the problems and push out the solutions. When I leave, I can’t figure out where my energy has gone. That’s when I know I’m not doing the right thing at the right time. Teaching, as I’m doing it now, is not my passion. It doesn’t make me tick. It doesn’t excite me in the way that — for example — creating American Policy around stopping Joseph Kony from abducting child soldiers in Uganda and Congo has the power to do.

Still some searching to do

There’s no simple answer for why I am leaving, at this juncture. I still have some searching to do as I consider the next step in my life and career. This summer, I will be volunteering with the international group Mercy Corps in Portland, OR. I have applied for a teaching fellowship with Orbis Institute in India for the coming Spring, but that will not be determined until late summer. Ideally, I am looking to go back to school for NGO management and policy study around international conflict and peace negotiations.

Maybe I’ll take this year off and discover just how much I miss the students, the lifestyle, and the discussions. Maybe I just need to try teaching in a different context; a different district, a different school, a different population. The beauty of teaching is that it happens all over, in so many environments.

For now, I’m comforted by the fact that if and when I do come back to teaching, I know that it will be with all my heart.
 
___

Jessica Lyons graduated from the University of Delaware with Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, specializations in Development and Africa, and minors in History, Economics and French Studies. She was accepted into Teacher for America’s Denver 2007 Corps. She taught fifth grade for three years at a DPS elementary school.

In a recent note to us, she wrote: "I do think I am looking for another field that brings out my passion.  However, being away for just a few weeks, I'm still incredibly drawn to teaching."

Matching Teachers and Schools

Over at the Public School Insights blog Claus von Zastrow hammers on a policy issue that few teaching effectiveness reformers seem to get. He raises the question, “Are good teachers always good, no matter where they go?”

Ironically, some of the same analysts who lament that teachers are treated as “widgets” promote the misdirected policy bromide that teachers have the “same value” no matter where they teach. A new generation of labor economists studying human capital issues in education (who have yet to be recognized by mainstream media) are pointing out that the “match” between teacher and school matter a great deal for student achievement. I highlighted Kirabo Jackson’s research on “match quality” in my last blog post, but it is worth repeating.

Jackson set out to: (1) determine the extent to which teacher's effectiveness, as measured by ability to improve their students' test scores, changes depending on the schooling environment, (2) quantify the importance of the match between a teacher and a school in determining student achievement, (3) document the relationship between match quality and teacher mobility, and (4) present evidence on what teacher and school characteristics are associated with high match quality.
 
He found that teachers who are effective in one school will not necessarily be effective in another—and that varying school conditions may account for 25 percent of teacher effects on student learning. Jackson used a longitudinal database to estimate teachers’ value-added to student test scores before and after a move between schools. The quality of the teacher-school match explains about 7% of school effects in math, and 30% in reading. Match strength is also highly predictive of teacher retention, a finding that is also robust to inclusion of teacher and school fixed effects.
 
Thinking about the importance of good matches, my Teacher Leaders Network colleague David Cohen (in a response to Claus’ blog) suggests that we “Consider as an analogy sports where coaches win league championships with one team and then move to the next job and struggle.”

I wonder why it is so difficult for some reformers to acknowledge this extraordinarily important teaching effectiveness policy issue. Could it be that they might have to own up to the fact that teachers are not always the problem — that it’s the dysfunctional system of teacher development we need to be fixing?

Time for a Cleansing Breath and a Serious Look at Teaching Effectiveness Data

Reading the mass media accounts of the current teaching effectiveness debates leaves me wondering how much of the debate is over substantive policy and how much is plain hard-nosed politics.

There is no question that teachers should be assessed on how well their students learn. But a simple use of student achievement data (and value-added or growth models) may lead to capricious conclusions as to who is effective or not. There are three major studies, undertaken by economists over the last six months, concluding that it is VERY difficult, if not impossible, to simply claim an individual teacher is effective or not, even when using so-called sophisticated value-added tools. For example:

• Teachers have greater value-added gains when they are in schools with others who generate high value-added gains. This means there is a large peer effect and some teachers who are deemed ineffective would be effective if they teach in schools with other high value-added teachers. [1]
 
• Teachers have greater value-added gains when they teach the same subjects and grade levels consistently—especially in their first 5 years of teaching. Using 12 years of valued-added data, Ost found that a teacher who teaches the same grade for each of her first five years helps students perform 0.137 standard deviations better than students with a novice teacher.  This means that some novice teachers who are deemed ineffective would be effective if they taught the same stuff year after year.[2]

• Teachers who are effective in one school will not necessarily be effective in another—pointing to the fact that varying school conditions may account for 25 percent of teacher effects on student learning. The researchers used a longitudinal database to estimate teachers’ value-added to student test scores before and after a move between schools and determined there was a “good” match in terms of improved value-added and the different school. Match quality explains about 7% of school effects in math, and 30% in reading. Match strength is also highly predictive of teacher retention, a finding that is also robust to inclusion of teacher and school fixed effects.[3]

Even Rick Hess, a long-time fan of the concept of value-added methodologies, has raised cautions about assuming that VAM, in its current state, is a policy panacea. In a recent Education Week blog post, Hess writes that “advocates who are waging an admirable fight to end or dramatically scale back hyper-rigid, industrial-era state policies governing teacher tenure and compensation display a worrisome tendency to mandate that, henceforth, teachers will be evaluated in large part on (thus far) largely nonexistent, hyper-rigid, value-added metrics.” Current policy initiatives that rely heavily on these statistical metrics, he adds, represent “crudely drawn, sketchily considered, and potentially self-destructive efforts."

So, as the disputes between labor and management as well as between thoughtful scholars and high-pitched policy wonks continue, it might be prudent for policymakers to take a cleansing breath and look carefully at the pros and cons of using standardized student achievement data to assess who is an effective teacher and who is not.
 
The need to explore these issues more deeply is why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a $335 million investment in teacher effectiveness, with major grants to three large school districts and two public charter school networks to transform their systems of professional development, tenure, evaluation, and compensation. Working collaboratively with both administrators and unions—not just one or the other—the Gates-fueled approach to teacher effectiveness will rest not only on standardized test score data but other metrics derived from new tools to gauge student engagement and analyze teaching practices in depth.

It is also time, as our work supported by the Ford Foundation underscores, to pay more attention to the right working conditions that make a difference for student achievement. These include conditions such as teaching in-field (the subjects a teacher knows well); opportunities to share and critique lessons with colleagues, and resources to work closely with students and families outside of the traditional school day.

We have found that these conditions can determine who will be effective or not. I wonder when policymakers and the mass media that informs them will begin to grasp this critical point. Examining conditions is not an excuse, it is a reality of teaching. The optimum conditions for student learning must be addressed if effective teachers are to maximize their teaching effectiveness.

[1] Jackson, C. K. & Bruegmann, E. (2009). Teaching students and teaching each other: The importance of peer learning for teachers (NBER Working Paper 15202). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research.

[2] Ost, B. (2009). How Do Teachers Improve? The Relative Importance of Specific and General Human Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Retrieved on February 1, 2010.

[3] Jackson, C. K. (2010). Match quality, worker productivity, and worker mobility: Direct evidence from teachers. (NBER Working Paper 15990). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research. Download PDF of full report

Bringing Star Teachers to High Needs Schools

So here's the good news. State policymakers in Massachusetts are seeking to entice “amazing” teachers, who have proven to be effective, to pick up and teach in 35 of the state’s lowest performing schools. Hard to argue with putting great teachers with the students who need the most.

Indeed, the “hunt for star teachers” seems to have some of the markings of potent policymaking. For example, according to a recent Boston Globe report, teachers are promised “such things as additional pay or opportunities for leadership roles in overhauling curriculum.” But I have to wonder to what extent the state’s policymakers are creating an incentive plan that will really matter for the long haul.

Mounds of evidence, including our own Ford Foundation-funded research, suggests that expert teachers are willing to move to high needs schools — but ONLY if a number of working conditions are in place. These include:

1. Effective principals who value teacher leaders and discourage teaching to the test;

2. Expert colleagues with whom to work -- because effective teaching, especially in high needs schools, requires collaboration, not individual teachers who teach as if they are the lonely but determined Caped Crusader;

3. Access to high-quality curriculum resources (e.g., classroom libraries for elementary teachers and lab equipment for science teachers);

4. Specialized preparation for teaching in high needs schools, since substantial evidence has proven that effective teachers in one setting are not necessarily effective in another; and

5. Resources and strategies in place that assure what is taught in the “8 a.m. to 3 p.m.” curriculum is connected to critical “outside-of-the-school” support providers.

These working conditions are rarely considered by policy mavens who are promoting incentives to entice effective teachers to high needs schools. It’s not just “show them the money and they will come.”

I wonder if Massachusetts policymakers remember the “heralded rise” and the “neglected fall” of the state’s signing bonus program of a decade ago that earned a big red F as a strategy to entice talented teachers to high needs schools. [They can read a detailed dissection of the effort here for $4.95.]

I hope Bay State leaders have an institutional memory that stretches back that far. If so, perhaps the state’s turnaround school reform efforts will yield amazing results for students.

GadFly “Gotcha” over Stanford Charter School Misses the Mark

And Ignores the Facts In Order to Advance Ideology Over Students and Families

Last week news was created when a charter school launched and supported by Stanford University’s School of Education was denied a 5-year renewal of its proposed charter by the Ravenswood, California school board. The board later approved an extension of the charter with modifications. The Ravenswood board members cited low test scores in the school’s new elementary grades as the rationale for denying the initial charter request, and cited the successes of the longer-standing high school division as the reason for extending a modified charter which focused on continuing the upper elementary and high school grades.

A report by the New York Times on the school board’s initial decision played up the idea that a respected university’s education program was unable to produce a quality learning experience for the diverse group of students who attend Stanford New School (SNS). The Times failed to report many of the facts that led up to the controversial board decision and has thus far not followed up with a more complete story or to recount subsequent events.

The NYT did not report that Stanford New School began as a high school charter, launched at the Ravenswood Elementary School District’s request to provide the first public high school in over 25 years in the low-income East Palo Alto community. The then all-Black community had lost its high school due to desegregation back in 1976, and students were bused out to districts from which most failed to graduate. The high school charter quickly turned this situation around, and has routinely graduated over 85% of its students and sent more than 90% of graduates to college – with an increasing share (now 53%) admitted to 4-year colleges, a rate double the state average.

The East Palo Alto Academy High School has also improved test scores for its students (now Latino, African American, and Pacific Islander from households that are among the lowest-income in the state), raising the Academic Progress Index, the state’s achievement measure, by 180 points and sharply increasing exit exam pass rates. 

With nearly 2/3 of its students limited English proficient, and most entering 9th grade reading below the 5th grade level, the school has a heavy lift, but it has developed intensive support systems to allow students to catch up while pursuing a college preparatory program. Through its Early College Program, students also take college courses while in high school. Last year 125 of them took 550 college credits, and 40% earned “A’s” in their college courses.

It was only three years ago that Stanford New School launched the elementary division — a slow expansion plan that would add a grade each year. While parents were deeply committed to the school, and turned out by the hundreds to support it at the initial board meeting earlier this month, the elementary portion of the school was still establishing itself. It had only 2 years of performance data from a few grades when the charter renewal came up last week. These scores were higher than those of some now-successful schools when they were first founded, but lower than those of more established elementary schools in the district – a source of concern to the Ravenswood board.

Although you’d be hard pressed to pick this fact out of the Times’ sensationalized account, the Ravenswood school board actually indicated its strong support for the secondary component of the Stanford New School even as it denied the initial charter request based on its concerns about the elementary test scores. Instead, the board voted to modify the charter to assure the high school would continue.

Pundits who oppose the far-reaching, student-centered school reforms of Stanford scholars like Linda Darling Hammond were quick to wave the Times story about as evidence of the failure of those ideas. The most vitriolic pundits, in fact, singled Darling-Hammond out, even though her association with SNS was limited to advising on the high school’s development, a role she relinquished in spring of 2008 while working on the Obama campaign and transition.

When Darling Hammond offered a fuller account of the situation than that reported in the Times, long-time critics like Chester “Checker” Finn Jr. simply ignored it – choosing to continue their harangues against her, going so far as to suggest that the opponents of performance assessment (an issue Darling-Hammond has championed) had some how been “outed” by performance data.

The real dispute, of course, is not about whether performance should be measured (of course it should), but over how comprehensive those measurements should be, using what tools, and for what variety of purposes. But that's a debate for another time. 

 
Having visited East Palo Alto Academy High, I can attest to the fact that students do, indeed, have to engage in performance assessments, as well as study for the state standardized tests. They must present research papers each year in exhibitions to panels of judges, who evaluate their work and require revisions when the work does not yet meet high standards. Graduates attest that this practice was one of the most important in preparing them to succeed when they arrived in college.

No doubt the SNS charter school, especially the elementary school, has faced challenges. Creating a school for high-need students in a low-income community where 2/3 of parents have less than a high school education is hard work. And Checker Finn should know. His own foundation “parachuted down” from its snarky, policy wonk world and helped support several charter schools in Dayton, Ohio, first through a Fordham funded organization called KIDS (Keys to Improving Dayton Schools). KIDS provided grants to two schools, Omega and East End Community, in 2002. When the schools floundered, Fordham took over direct sponsorship in late 2005. 

In 2006, Mr. Finn’s co-worker Terry Ryan owned up to the “tremendous challenge of educating disadvantaged students in urban communities” and even went so far to offer his “respect for traditional educators” who have to teach children who bring to school “painful stories.”

As things turned out, Mr. Finn and his collaborators fell flat on their faces. The Omega school never could attract enough students, and the East End Community School could not make AYP with their proficiency rates on standardized tests far, far below the state average. The schools closed in 2008.

What’s the admonition about throwing stones in glass houses?

______________

Snapshot
East Palo Alto Academy High students have participated in Sojourn to the Past, a 10-day educational trip through the South, for a number of years. Students traveled to key civil rights communities, from Atlanta to Selma and Memphis, met civil rights activists, and visited historic sites. They raised a portion of the cost themselves (writing 20 fundraising letters to family members, friends and other potential donors), attended 10 preparatory seminar sessions, and recorded reflections throughout the trip.

Is the quality teacher-prep message finally getting through?

In the recent round of federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grants, several urban teacher residencies won major awards. Awardees included the Boston Teacher Residency, the Denver Teacher Residency, and University of Chicago's Urban Teacher Education Program.

The Boston residency program, with $15 million TQP dollars, will now recruit and prepare more than 540 teachers, who will train for more than a year and emerge with expertise in either working with second language learners or special needs students.

The Denver Teacher Residency, in partnership with the University of Denver (DU), also won a substantial award to focus on “growing” teachers from its own community – individuals who have the cultural competence to teach the district’s diverse students and are willing to teach more than a couple of years (unlike many other alternative certification recruits that have been hired recently). While policy pundits dismiss the need for teachers to earn advanced degrees (and higher pay), DTR promotes an 18-month Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction, coupled with a two-year induction program.

In the last round of TQP funding, UCLA and its highly touted Center X, in partnership with LAUSD Local District 4 and the Los Angeles Small Schools Center, are developing a powerful model for teacher education for high needs schools. The UCLA effort will pay very close attention to preparing teachers to work with second language learners (with a focus on theories of language structure, acquisition, and development) and on the resources necessary to provide low-cost housing to teacher recruits within the communities they serve. UCLA-trained residents are expected to conduct research into their practice to inform their own development and to assist the program in evaluating its effectiveness.

Could residencies — urban and rural — serve as harbingers of the teacher leaders needed for 21st century schools? Is it possible there may be a movement afoot to take teacher education seriously? Will our nation get over its dysfunctional infatuation with short-cut training? Stay tuned.

No doubt too many traditional education schools are not getting the job done, but neither are alternatives that offer miniscule training for teachers who teach for a short time, while lulling many policymakers into a sense of false security about the quality of the teacher supply lines.

Many Teachers Eager for Hybrid Roles

The MetLife Foundation has released its third and final set of important results from its 2009 annual survey of our nation’s teachers — those dedicated individuals who represent the profession that makes all others possible.

The most recent MetLife installment, Teaching as a Career, captures teachers' thinking about their profession at a critical moment in the history of public education in America, as hundreds of thousands of Baby Boomers approach retirement and a new, very different generation of teachers and potential teachers enters the New Millennium workforce.

One intriguing finding – among many – is that hybrid teaching roles are particularly appealing to new teachers and those who are less than “very satisfied” with their teaching careers today. This concept of hybrid teaching roles is discussed in the recent CTQ monograph The Teachers of 2030 and in even more depth in an upcoming book from Teachers College Press by a team of teachers in the Teacher Leaders Network. 

This TeacherSolutions 2030 book project, supported by the MetLife Foundation, involves a dozen of the nation’s most accomplished teachers – young and not-so-young – who agree on the critical importance of creating hybrid roles that allow classroom experts to both teach students and lead outside their schools, in and out of cyberspace.

The timeliness of their perspective is apparent when we look at this finding from the MetLife survey: Hybrid teaching roles are particularly appealing to new teachers (46%) and those who are less than ‘very satisfied’ with their current teaching career (42%).

The survey report offers several quotes from teachers about the potential of hybrid roles:

“Provides a career trajectory for folks that enables them to keep one foot in the classroom while also stretching themselves or sharing their expertise as a professional.”

“Gives teachers more flexibility; greater opportunity to exercise or explore leadership roles or other roles outside the classroom without having to leave the classroom.”

“Allows schools to take maximum advantage of teacher expertise without weakening the classroom presence of quality teachers.”

The expansive vision of hybrid teaching put forth by my TeacherSolutions 2030 co-authors reaches beyond the thinking of most public school educators today. For example, Ariel Sacks, a 30-year old Brooklyn middle grades teacher, imagines growing numbers of teacherpreneurs who teach part of the day or week and spend the other half of their worklife in diverse roles that support student success. Those roles might include teaching future teachers, working as community organizers with local education funds, serving as peer reviewers to maintain high professional standards, collaborating with researchers to investigate the effects of teaching policies on student achievement, and/or selling their skills and knowledge virtually in the global education marketplace.

More on teacherpreneurism in our forthcoming book. In the meantime, check out the third and final report from this year’s MetLife survey — certainly the nation’s most comprehensive source of facts and opinions about teaching gathered directly from classroom teachers themselves.

In closing, let me share what I believe is the most disturbing finding across the entire survey: Over 70 percent of America’s teachers do NOT believe they are heard when it comes to the current debates on education. Do our policymakers and pundits really believe change is possible without teacher ownership?

Today’s Education News: Rife with Contradictions

Higher expectations for student achievement are a must — but today’s education news is rife with contradictions about setting and reaching them.  

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have just offered their draft of much-needed college and career readiness curriculum standards for students, reflecting the demands of the 21st century world in which students will live as adults. Thus far, however, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is paying too little attention to the context in which these standards will be firmed up. And while the group led by NGA and CCSSO acknowledges the need for new investments in higher quality performance assessments and the spread of teacher expertise, we do not hear how sorely these investments are needed.

Next we look to the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, which reveals that fewer teachers in schools with high proportions of low-income students strongly agree that their schools uphold high standards for all students. Teachers in these schools are also less likely to be confident that they have the necessary knowledge and skills to help their students succeed academically. That shouldn’t surprise us: More and more of the teachers who enter high-needs schools have less and less high-quality teacher preparation. Too many are flying solo in classrooms with only a few weeks of training — mostly tips on how to manage classrooms — when they need serious preparation to help our most challenged students master the 21st century skills called for by the Common Core student standards.

And then there's the recession. As the need to make deeper investments in students and teachers becomes ever clearer, we are now learning the extent to which the current economic crisis is forcing districts to lay off teachers and cut back on the number of days students attend school. Yesterday, the Kansas City Board of Education voted to close almost half of its schools and cut 700 of 3,000 jobs directly related to student achievement, including almost 300 classroom teachers. When a school district like Kansas City with many high-need students has to cut $50 million from its budget, one wonders how our nation will muster the extra resources to help millions of American children on the wrong side of the achievement gap reach new global standards of achievement.

And then there’s the media hysteria.

Newsweek blares a cover page story claiming that the key to saving America’s “failing public schools” is to fire all of the bad teachers protected by their unions. Yes, there are unfit teachers and we shouldn’t let them teach anybody’s children. But few experts would suggest that the number is very high — and certainly not so high that by removing them we will instantly solve the complex problems that plague high-needs schools and communities. Newsweek’s editors never once reflect on root causes — like the large numbers of ill-prepared teachers who enter and exit teaching quickly, or the many high-needs schools led by a revolving door of ill-trained principals who botch teacher evaluation and undermine the potential for effective teachers to work together to solve the problems in their own schools. Most blatantly, the article fails to consider just how our present mechanisms for teacher recruitment and preparation will replace teachers lost in wholesale firing frenzies. With laid-off journalists, perhaps?

If we expect all students to jump the bar of higher expectations now being raised by the Common Core Initiative, we will first have to own up to the contradictions that are impeding progress in our most challenged schools. Serious investments. Teacher preparation and support. Better leadership development. These are the things that will strengthen our schools. Not a teacher witch hunt.

No principal? No problem, if teachers lead.

A guest blog from CTQ staffer Ali Kliegman

Imagine a school without a principal. Not the kind of school whose principal is gone for the day, resulting in mad chaos, children roaming the halls and little instruction taking place. Instead, imagine the opposite: high achieving students who are hungry to learn, and steadfast, accomplished teachers who are eager to teach, and, well that’s it.

 
This is exactly the kind of school that teachers in Los Angeles are hoping to create at Hillcrest Drive Elementary, reported NPR’s Marketplace recently. “When we win,” LAUSD President, AJ Duffy declared, “then the world will say that we can do a far better job than a private school or a charter school or an education management company.” It’s no surprise, though, that many are threatened by this prospect and somehow suggest outside charter organizations as a superior alternative. Too bad for students, the debate is cast over whether or not to hire union teachers at these schools, rather than how to place the best teachers—those who will lead the way toward an effective 21st century teaching profession—in the highest needs schools.
 
Not only are Hillcrest’s teacher leaders ready to assume the responsibilities of their administrators, but they are moving full speed ahead to transform their school. These teachers champion a number of reforms requiring changes in their union contract, including longer school days, after school activities, and individual learning plans for every student in the building. What’s more, these teachers are offering suggestions for their own evaluation (in this case, through the peer evaluation model, which has proven successful).
 
Cynics of this alternative brand of leadership should visit the Math and Science Leadership Academy in Denver, Colorado. As a teacher-led school, MSLA has no principal. Instead, two lead teachers work on instruction, discipline and any other area typically managed from the top down.  As a 1st grade teacher, Julie Variot says, MSLA decision-making fits within a “round circular structure where everyone has a voice.” Though hundreds of teachers applied this year to become a part of MSLA, only 10 were selected. Watch this video to learn more about how strategies like teachers evaluating as well as helping each other have allowed its students to flourish. All too often charters, staffed with non-unionized teachers, are pitted against public schools, staffed with those who are. It does not have to be such a stark either/or. For proof that it does not, listen carefully to the principal of the neighboring KIPP school (non-unionized) endorse the work of MSLA (unionized).

The point is, effective leadership matters. In my own experiences as a Teach for America corps member in New York City, my colleagues (both TFA and non-TFA) were far more instrumental in my growth than my principal. My former principal (also a former corps member) was the first to admit she never learned to teach effectively in her first years of teaching. When I asked her to model lessons, though she was expected to be the instructional leader, she politely recommended our literacy coach instead. It’s no wonder then, why MSLA’s model works. Who better to learn from than those confident and experienced enough to lead, while wise enough to continue bettering their practice in a room full of students?
 

Last week, the L.A. school board, following the recommendations of Superintendent Ray Cortines, denied many of the charter requests and gave priority to teacher-led initiatives like Hillcrest. The concept of a teacher-led school isn’t new, nor is it naïve. Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves what we are waiting for.

Ali Kliegman taught seventh grade Humanities in the Bronx for two years as a Teach for America corps member. She holds an M.S. in Teaching from Pace University and worked previously in education policy for the legal reform coalition Common Good.

Latest MetLife Survey Confirms the Power of Teacher Collaboration

Policy pundits and journalists who weigh in on the teaching effectiveness debate should take note of the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher — whose theme Collaborating for Student Success  speaks volumes to the issue of how to identify effective teachers.

While researchers continue the search for methods to isolate individual teacher effects, the MetLife survey reveals that over 90% of the nation’s teachers believe their colleagues contribute to their own teaching effectiveness. New teachers, in particular, were more likely to strongly agree that their success in the classroom hinged on the effectiveness of others.  
 
For me, this finding calls to mind the 2009 study by Jackson and Bruegmann highlighting the importance of peer learning for teachers. Using 11 years of matched teacher and student achievement data in North Carolina, these scholars (from Cornell and Harvard, respectively) were able to isolate and quantify the added value brought about by teachers’ collective expertise — finding that most value-added gains are attributable to teachers who are more experienced (and qualified) and stay together as teams.*
 
The results reported in Part 1 (Effective Teaching and Leadership) of MetLife's new survey offer additional insights. Teachers in schools that report more collaboration are more likely to point out that:

• other teachers contribute to their classroom success

• there are higher levels of trust among teachers and principals,

• there are more opportunities to watch each other teach, and

• they are more satisfied with their careers.
 
The MetLife data confirms the powerful effects of deep teacher collaboration. Policymakers who seek to improve student performance should pay attention to the international PISA research, which found that teachers in nations with high-performing schools have somewhere between 10 and 20 hours a week to work with their colleagues — critiquing lessons, examining student work products, and developing and adapting curriculum. Strikingly, the MetLife survey also reveals that the average American teacher spends less than 3 hours a week working with his or her fellow teachers — and almost one in 5 teachers has less than one hour per week of “structured collaboration.”
 
Want to improve teaching effectiveness? Listen to teachers — and make it possible for teachers to spend substantive time listening to each other. Kudos to Metlife for providing important new evidence to support this much-needed reform strategy.

* Jackson, C. K. & Bruegmann, E. (2009, August).  Teaching students and teaching each other: The importance of peer learning for teachers.  NBER Working Paper 15202.  Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research.

CAP's tenure report is curiously incomplete

The Center for American Progress just released an interesting paper on teacher tenure reform — suggesting that tying job security to student test scores is the linchpin to improving teaching effectiveness. It’s interesting but oddly incomplete.

No doubt, as the CAP report noted, “Legislated and bargained contractual protections make the process of dismissing an ineffective teacher with tenure prohibitively lengthy and expensive in most states, and teacher tenure evaluation processes remain largely disconnected from teachers’ performance in the classroom or student achievement.”

And there is no question that something is askew when “virtually every single tenured teacher” in a recent study was “rated satisfactory (or higher), and less than 1 percent received a negative evaluation.” This does not make sense.But here is what I believe to be curiously absent in the CAP report.

1. Many ineffective teachers remain in their tenured positions not because of tenure but because of poor evaluation systems managed by either overworked administrators or those who are not very effective at rating teachers.

2. Many tenured teachers are not teaching effectively not because of archaic tenure laws but because administrators have forced them to teach out of field. Almost 50 percent of the nation’s math teachers are teaching out of field.

3. Our own studies of high performing, high poverty schools reveal a number of conditions undermine teachers opportunities to teach effectively. They include:

• principals who do not cultivate and embrace teacher leadership;

• the lack of time and tools for teachers to learn from each other;

• the lack of high quality, specialized teacher education for the highest needs schools, subjects, and students;

• the lack of preparation in working with second language and special needs learners, and

• increasing student mobility as families, due to economic distresses, move in and out of school communities.

The CAP report on tenure reform raises important issues, but by choosing to concentrate only on the behaviors and actions of teachers and not the system as a whole, the CAP analysis is of limited use in shaping better teacher policies. Without a comprehensive assessment, we surely cannot find the best solutions to teacher evaluation, tenure, and effectiveness.

Well-rounded, fair and valid

As the Race to the Top competition heats up, the conversation about how America should measure teacher effectiveness is also coming to a boil. It’s a critically important conversation. There’s no question that teaching must become a results-oriented profession.

In this context, a recent survey from Public Agenda and Learning Points Associates is timely. It surfaces how teachers view a variety of teaching effectiveness policy reforms, suggesting that the conventional wisdom held by policymakers and pundits often is out of synch with those who teach students every day.

The survey results (which offer up a treasure trove of insights from the classroom), reveal that only 8 percent of the nation’s teachers believe that teacher pay should be tied to their students’ performance on standardized tests. The pollsters attempted to see if those teachers who might be characterized as “effective” viewed this complex issue differently. They did not.
 
It’s interesting to compare these poll findings with the views of accomplished teachers who have spent considerable time sorting through the issues of performance pay. Many of the expert educators in our Teacher Leaders Network and New Millennium Initiative indicate that they are ready to create a much more accountable profession that focuses on outcomes for students. CTQ's 2007 TeacherSolutions report on performance-pay, written by 18 outstanding teachers from across the U.S., outlined a bold framework for teachers to be compensated quite differently — with a focus on rewarding those who help students learn more, spread their expertise to colleagues, and take on significant and far-reaching leadership roles inside and out of their schools.
 
The difference in point-of-view has to do with the metrics of effectiveness. I'm not surprised that a random sample of American teachers are not keen to be judged by a single arms-length assessment. Yet our longstanding work with teachers (and our own research) reveals that many teachers are ready to consider performance pay as part of the teaching profession. But it has to be done right. Student achievement measures should be used — but sole or even primary reliance on today’s multiple-choice standardized tests makes most teachers extremely suspect. As far back as late 2004, The Teaching Commission (led by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner) found in a poll that the vast majority of teachers and the public do not trust standardized tests as a sound measure of student learning.
 
Teachers are ready to create and use new achievement measures — and drive new performance-pay systems that elevate teaching, help colleagues learn from each other, and reward those who do the most for students. As Linda Tyler of the Educational Testing Service noted yesterday in an Education Week commentary, in identifying effective teachers “we can use multiple measures, including student-performance data, classroom observation, feedback from students, and other evidence, to provide well-rounded, fair, and valid input into important decisions.”

Well-rounded. Fair. Valid. I’m confident that’s what parents and citizens expect as policymakers look for a better way to measure the effectiveness our nation’s public school teachers. Creating such a system will require leadership from our most accomplished teachers. It’s time for policymakers and the pundits to listen to them and let them lead.

Understanding the Source of Effective Teaching

Guest blog by Alesha Daughtrey, CTQ Research and Policy Associate, and Ali Kliegman, CTQ Policy Assistant

With the reauthorization of ESEA looming, the debates over how to measure teacher effectiveness are heating up. Pundits and education reform leaders increasingly call for disbanding university-based teacher education and state certification regimes in favor of recruiting talented individuals from competitive colleges with the right “personality” or dispositions to teach effectively.

A January 2010 article in Atlantic Monthly by Amanda Ripley cited a variety of individual characteristics that a new Teach for America study associates with effective teaching. Many of these (such as Ivy League diplomas and personal “grit”) cannot be taught to or supported in developing teachers. Thus, proponents of these positions suggest that—contrary to conclusions supported by rigorous research—there is little that schools or preparation programs can do to improve teaching effectiveness.

It was surprising, therefore, that the article highlighted the effective teaching of William Taylor, a product of an education school where he was “well prepared” and ready to culturally connect to the students he is teaching. He, like other superstar teachers identified in the TFA study, “constantly reevaluates what [he is] doing.” But that means teachers have to know what they are doing, and have access to a wide range of pedagogical strategies to use when their students do not learn as they are expected.

In many ways, debating the comparative effectiveness of teachers prepared through traditional teacher education, Teach for America, or other “short-route” preparation programs distracts us from our central challenge in creating effective 21st century public schools. There is more variation within traditional teacher education and alternative routes like TFA than between them.(1) And indeed, a close examination of research on TFA cohorts suggests that their teaching effectiveness gains are likely due not to their individual dispositions or test scores, but to the additional training and support they receive over their two years in the classroom.(2)

In her Atlantic article, Ripley cites a study that found no correlation between prior experience teaching in disadvantaged neighborhoods and teaching effectiveness. But this study misses a key variable: context-specific preparation for high-needs classrooms, which is rare in many university-based programs and far too brief an experience in TFA and other alternative routes.(3) This problem is compounded when the school and district offer few if any systemic supports such as professional development, collaboration, and assistance navigating school communities. These systemic supports are what are needed for talented teachers to teach effectively. And many effective teachers, over the long haul, are exactly what students in high-needs schools most need and deserve.

Yes, there are a few superstar teachers who can do it alone—but only for a short period of time, as they usually burn out and give up teaching. Our public schools, which hire over 250,000 new teachers a year, cannot improve over time if they are staffed with a revolving door of underprepared teachers.

(1) Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford H., Loeb, S. and Wyckoff, J. (2006.) How changes in entry requirements alter the teacher Workforce and affect student achievement. Education Finance and Policy 1,no.2 (Spring):176-216.

(2) Berry, B. (2005, October 19). Teacher quality and the question of preparation. Education Week. Retrieved April 1, 2009 from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/10/19/08berry.h25.html.

(3) Rice, J. K. (2008, Spring). From highly qualified to high quality: An imperative for policy and research to recast the teacher mold. Education Finance and Policy, (3)2, 151-164.  Retrieved January 19, 2010 at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/edfp.2008.3.2.151.

Alesha Daughtrey holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Duke University and brings extensive policy analysis and advocacy experience to her work managing CTQ’s research initiatives.

Ali Kliegman taught seventh grade Humanities in the Bronx for two years as a Teach for America corps member. She holds an M.S. in Teaching from Pace University and worked previously in education policy for the legal reform coalition Common Good.

 

Investing in Teaching: An Obvious Truth

 Jay Mathews seems a bit humbled by the recent University of Michigan study finding that teachers in schools governed by comprehensive reform models and scripted approaches to instruction end up teaching very differently from one another — with no consistent impact on student achievement. In his recent blog post, the prominent education journalist says the research  (reported in a recent Harvard Education Letter article by Bob Rothman) should “rip a big hole” in how policymakers view reforms that simply focus on test-based accountability.  Some might suggest that the problem is that our current approaches to accountability set too low of a curricular bar over which students and their teachers need to leap.

But the bigger problem is the low quality of the tests themselves and the ever-growing incentives (including perverse ones) that put higher and higher stakes on the outcomes. No wonder, with blunt-instrument testing as the measure, that the University of Michigan researchers found “the student gains from highest level practices, such as examining literary techniques and sharing writing with others, were no better than those produced by low-level practices, like asking questions that have answers at the back of the textbook chapter and summarizing story details.”

Other high performing nations use far fewer external accountability-based tests and invest more heavily in recruiting, preparing, and supporting high quality teachers who have more responsibility in judging each other’s instructional practices.

In these nations, teachers are not just drawn from the top tiers of talented college students, but the government pays for their teacher education programs — ones that demand extensive preparation, not short-cut training over a few weeks in the summer. Other nations also offer teachers substantial time for professional development practices like “lesson study.” The lack of such approaches in the U.S. seems to be the root cause of the “teaching gap.”
 
Although many nations send their children to school for more days per year than we do here in the U.S, their teachers actually spend less time teaching and invest that time in learning to teach better (from each other). Classrooms are not private domains and expert teachers are expected to spread their expertise among their colleagues.

In Singapore, the government fully pays for all teachers to engage in 100 hours worth of high-quality professional development each year — and on top of that, teachers have 20 hours a week to work with each other, doing things like reviewing each other’s pedagogical approaches and their impact on student learning (not just what is on a standardized test). In Singapore and many other nations teachers are expected to actually help develop and score the few external exams that are used. 

If Jay Mathews wants to figure out the deeper reason why some “high-end (teaching) methods don’t work better than low-end” ones, then he should read Linda Darling-Hammond’s recently published book, The Flat World and Education, which unpacks these issues and many more. It calls for investments in the teaching profession — not fly-by approaches to teacher training and more high-stakes testing that many so-called reformers clamor for.  

Mathews closes his column with these words: "...(W)e ought to resist what history shows is our instinct to forget inconvenient results and keep doing what we are doing. Ignoring hard truths is not the best way to help our kids."

Jay Mathews and others need not “ignore the hard truths.” Darling-Hammond has put them all together for easy reference.

How to Really 'Drive' Teacher Performance

Much has been said about teachers and how to “get them” to teach more effectively. Anyone interested in finding effective strategies to drive a results-oriented teaching profession might want to take a look at Daniel Pink’s new book, Drive, where he posits that using a “carrots and sticks” approach alone will do more harm than good.

For a quick review of Pink's important insights, go to the Learning First Alliance Blog and check out Claus von Zastrow's fascinating interview with the business author and future-thinker. Pink believes we need to upgrade our teaching policy “operating system” to “Motivation 3.0” — a concept built around “the elements of autonomy, mastery and purpose.” This does not mean we do not use student performance data to drive our teacher development system. We must. But we need to use the data to identify high performers AND the reasons why they are high performing — and then our accountability system must ensure that those conditions are in place so teaching expertise can spread and students can learn.

Can We Combine Teaching and 'Senior Leadership'?

This past weekend Bob Herbert of the New York Times offered a glimpse into how new generations of education leaders for America’s public schools might be developed. In his op-ed piece, Herbert offers a refreshing description of the Harvard Graduate School of Education's new doctoral program (the first in 74 years):

The three-year course will be tuition-free and conducted in collaboration with faculty members from the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The idea is to develop dynamic new leaders who will offer the creativity, intellectual rigor and professionalism that is needed to help transform public education in the U.S.

What's refreshing is the new program's perspective that 21st century schools will require administrators who know how to manage like a MBA while still having knowledge of teaching and telling. That's just common sense, some might say. However, for the last decade the conventional wisdom has been those who run school systems do not need to know much about pedagogy.  Kudos to the Wallace Foundation for investing in Harvard’s more balanced approach to preparing senior leaders for school systems, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector.

As the leader of an organization committed to making accomplished teachers full partners in school reform, my next thought is: Where is the high-profile approach to developing senior education leaders who still teach students? My New York City colleague Ariel Sacks, a young teacher in our Teacher Leaders Network, explores this same question in her blog On the Shoulders of Giants, drawing on the example of her father, a doctor who combines health research and consulting with a small patient practice "to keep it real." As is so often the case, Ariel's post has attracted thoughtful comments from her blog readers and from within our TLN Forum discussion group.

Ariel, by the way, is one of 12 talented teachers working on a book about the future of teaching to be published by Teachers College Press next year. Read Ariel’s blog and consider the possibilities of developing a cadre of "teaching leaders" who work in hybrid roles (in less hierarchical school systems) and are able to lead from within and without the classroom.

Merrow Loose with the Facts

John Merrow’s latest blog post on charter schools and teacher education is worth a read — especially if you are interested in how journalists can get real loose with the facts. I have always been a fan of the Merrow Report, where John has spent the time to dig deep into complex issues of teacher quality and school reform. But his latest blog entry ignores the research that shows charters, on average, are less effective in advancing student achievement than their more traditional school relatives. He goes on to opine — with no evidentiary basis whatsoever — that there are only 50 decent education schools (out of about 1200) across the nation. (He doesn’t name them but that would be an interesting list to see him publish.)
 
Yes, we should promote charter schools as incubators of new approaches in education and poor education schools should be closed down. But John’s sloppy analysis obscures the facts and fuels the kind of dysfunctional dualism that defines most of the school reform debate (charters staffed with non-unionized teachers vs. publics staffed with teachers who are protected by union work rules; teacher education the way its always been done vs. short-cut alternative certification that allows teachers to bypass pedagogical training, etc.) It's "war" journalism and it's not the kind of thing we expect from the nation's best broadcast education reporter.
 
I’m certain John knows which nation produces the highest student achievement worldwide — Finland. Guess what? Finland’s teachers are among the most highly unionized anywhere worldwide.
 
Teachers in charters are now unionizing because they are seeking the working conditions that will allow them to be successful with students (Read Claus von Zastrow’s comments on Merrow’s blog). Growing numbers of university-based teacher education programs are working with school districts to jointly prepare teachers for high needs schools (see Secretary Duncan’s recent Title II grantees). These programs are very much focused on the knowledge and skills teachers need to be effective AND on the working conditions that are critical to a teacher's success, however effective she or he may be.
 
PS: Will charters go to scale and save our public schools? Ask Tom Toch.
 

Some RttT Rules Ignore Research

Last week, the NY Times published an editorial, “The ‘Highly Qualified Teacher’ Dodge,” chastising Education Secretary Duncan for not pushing states harder to address the fact that inexperienced and unqualified teachers are disproportionately hired by high needs schools. The Times editors noted that Duncan’s Race to the Top (RttT) grant guidelines may allow states to “paper” over the problem, much like the Bush administration did.

The NYT editorial also criticized “the sometimes excessive influence of boutique alternative certification programs” which, while attracting bright college students to teaching, do not prepare them deeply for teaching in high needs schools (e.g., working with second language learners, special needs students, students living in poverty) and actually encourage them to exit after only a few years in the classroom, leaving their students to a revolving door of underprepared teachers.
 
The USDOE’s RttT guidelines for alternative certification include recruiting candidates selectively (good) and providing supervised, school-based experiences for them (good). However, the RttT rules do not specify whether alternative certification candidates need to pass muster in a full-year supervised internship before becoming a teacher of record (bad), and they actually call for “significantly limit(ing) the amount of coursework required” (real bad – one more iteration of the “teachers don’t need much help learning how to teach” line of poor reasoning).

Alternative certification coursework shouldn’t be a time-waster — any course of study required of teacher candidates needs to be pertinent and of good quality. Non-traditional recruits (e.g., mid-career switchers) should also be offered a different preparation regime than the more traditional 18-23 year olds. But let’s not ignore the recent studies showing that alternatively trained teachers who had very limited pedagogical coursework before they began to teach actually lowered their students’ achievement scores over the course of the academic year.[i]

And let's not forget the 2008 examination of evidence on the value of teacher education by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that teachers with more extensive clinical training (including a full-year internship) before they began to teach actually produced higher student achievement gains.[ii]

In light of all these findings, the RttT guidelines on teacher recruitment and preparation just don’t make sense. The New York Times and the Congressional Black Caucus are right to be raising questions.

[i] Corcoran, S. P., & Jennings, J. L. (2009). Review of “An Evaluation of Teachers Trained Through Different Routes to Certification: Final Report.” Boulder, CO and Tempe, AZ: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved November 1, 2009 from http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-evaluation-of-teachers

[ii] Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford, H., Loeb, S. & Wyckoff, J. (2008, September). Teacher preparation and student achievement. NBER Working Paper Number W14314. National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved September 30, 2008 at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1264576

Reform Rhetoric Needs to Match Teaching Realities

A recent report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress identifies what it describes as “leaders and laggards” in efforts to reinvent our nation’s public schools. As a backdrop to the federal government’s $4 billion-plus Race to the Top competition for innovative state actions, the report calls for path-breaking approaches to school reform and teacher quality. However, the report seems to promote more status quo thinking than not — and ignores a number of key factors central to improving student learning and advancing teaching as a results-oriented profession.
 
For example, the report calls for more of the same short-cut alternative certification programs that do not prepare teachers for high-need schools or the demands of 21st century teaching. It also fails to consider the critical role of working conditions in ensuring teachers can teach effectively.
 
The report promotes much needed entrepreneurship in public education — and heaps much-deserved praise on school districts like Long Beach Unified in California. However, the report’s authors pay no heed to the fact that LBUSD neither relies on charter schools nor alternative certification programs like Teach for America or the New Teacher Project. In fact, the district works very closely with the education school at California State University–Long Beach to grow their own teaching talent and prepare a new generation of teachers who are well versed in innovative pedagogical approaches, including those needed to work effectively with second language learners and the district’s standards-based curriculum. In a district serving so many high-needs students, LBUSD leaders can’t afford to take chances with teacher effectiveness.
 
The report also disregards the role that teaching and learning conditions play in teacher effectiveness and retention — and therefore in student achievement. Teaching in a high-needs school is often a frenetic experience. Many teachers need to put in well over 60 hours a week to manage multiple interventions, meet the social and emotional needs of their students, mediate conflicts when out-of-school turmoil spills over into the classroom, cope with the complexity of teaching highly mobile students, and deal with the constant pressure to prepare for high-stakes tests. Many teachers in high-needs schools, especially those without extensive preparation, also struggle to find resources they can use to differentiate instruction for students with varying academic needs, including the growing number of students who are learning English as a second language.
 
The human price, all too often, is professional burn-out — well described by a former Teach For America recruit, Sarah Fine, who resigned from teaching because administrators “steadily expand(ed) the workload and workday” while “more and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported.”
 
At CTQ, our current studies of working conditions are revealing how poor school administrators mismanage the hiring of new teachers and how devastated school budgets force well-intended principals to hire cheap and less prepared novices and not the expert veterans they seek. We have also found how school mis-management can create unnecessary out-of-field teaching (e.g., biology teacher teaching math, early childhood teachers forced to teach 5th grade without any support in the transition) that keeps teachers from doing their jobs effectively.
 
Reform reports like Leaders and Laggards can play an important role in educating the public about aspects of school reform. But our students will be better served if the reform rhetoric more closely matches the realities that teachers face every day.

Effective Teaching: It's about Teams, Not Lonely Heroes

A few months ago I posted an entry about an important new study demonstrating the powerful effect of teacher collaboration in producing greater student achievement gains.

Using 11 years of student data in North Carolina, researchers from Harvard and Cornell have found that most value-added achievement gains are attributable to the make-up of teacher teams, not the traits and characteristics of individual teachers. Put another way, the collaboration model—not the lone-teacher-hero model loved by Hollywood and a surprising number of ed-policy wonks—produces the most student growth.

Despite the conventional wisdom posed by some inside-the-Beltway policy analysts, researchers Jackson and Bruegmann found that teaching experience (and qualifications) matter for student learning. Despite the barrage of criticism they have endured in recent years, it turns out that teaching veterans and those who meet standard certification requirements actually promote more academic growth—especially if they are organized for student success.

Now Education Sector, in a terrific new report by Elena Silva, explains why schools can no longer risk isolating teachers. Silva's work also raises serious questions about individualistic merit pay plans.

“The strategic positioning of teachers, where the best ones work among and with the rest, may be as important as formal training or professional development,” she writes.

However, Silva also points out that collaboration doesn’t mean less personal responsibility—that the “team approach doesn’t come at the expense of individualized growth or accountability” and the need continues to identify and reward “the specific contributions and areas of needed improvement of each individual teacher.“

To have the desired impact, new forms of performance pay must be more nuanced and sophisticated than the blunt instruments of the past. They will need, for example, to recognize, encourage and reward teamwork that impacts student learning and teachers who spread their expertise to others.

I’ll admit to some bias, but I think the 2007 TeacherSolutions performance-pay report, penned by 18 expert  teachers from our Teacher Leaders Network, describes a powerful framework for paying teachers in ways that matter most for real student learning.

As I read through the new Economic Policy Institute report Redesigning Teacher Pay: A System for the Next Generation of Teachers, I was struck by the many areas of agreement between the work of the 2007 team of classroom teachers and the ideas presented by Susan Moore Johnson and John Papay. That bodes well for the EPI work, I think. The one thing missing in most of the performance-pay schemes to date has been teacher buy-in and support. And without that, no new plan for professional compensation is going to survive for long.

Stilled but not lost

Ted Sizer, one of our nation’s most brilliant and accomplished educators, died Wednesday — leaving a legacy of both extraordinary vision and action. Ted’s life will be chronicled by those far more capable than me. But from time to time over last several decades I had the honor to work with him on a research study or to join him in advancing education policies that would focus more on students and less on tests, more on results that matter than proxies for them that don’t. I was always humbled by his resolve as well as his humility.

I am also grateful to him for teaching and influencing so many teachers and administrators across our land — including Bob Shirley, who was the headmaster of one his Essential Schools that educated our son, Joseph. Like in other Essential Schools, Bob as the lead educator, also taught students, including Joseph. Bob and the faculty knew our son well (all students are known well in ES) and helped him turn some very important corners in those turbulent adolescent years. The wise and caring educators in that school focused on the essentials — the mind and the spirit. They shaped Joseph academically, but far more as a man (now 27 years of age with a passion for helping others live a better life). I am thankful for Ted Sizer's inspiration.
 
The New York Times published a thoughtful piece on Ted. But my friend George Wood (another extraordinary principal teacher), who leads the Forum on Education and Democracy, said it much better:

“We will miss Ted Sizer and his tireless voice of reason. The image that will be forever etched in my mind is of Ted, head resting on one hand, the other hand busy taking notes, listening intently to whomever was speaking. And then, in his ever so thoughtful way, cutting to the heart of the matter at hand and insisting that we speak plainly, forcefully, and, yes, lovingly, about what is essential about schooling -- that being the careful cultivation of every child's mind…. While Ted Sizer's voice has been stilled, his ideas and dreams live on through the work of the many educators and students whose hearts he touched.”

Pundit Nick Kristof Gets It Wrong

In a recent column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof does plenty of collateral damage as he bashes teacher unions for over-protecting incompetent teachers. Kristof's commentary is so over the top that he effectively smears every good and dedicated public school teacher in the nation -- and there are several million of them.

Maybe he's intoxicated by Halloween. The Times columnist substitutes scary teacher stories for any credible data about the actual numbers of incompetent teachers (3-5% by most estimates) and ignores recent research suggesting that the unions are not the biggest problem. All that ails public education, Kristof asserts, is the union goblins who focus on benefits for their members at the expense of children.

Education Notes Online does a terrific job of unpacking Kristof’s diatribe, drawing on commentary by Steve Koss at the NYC Education News Listserve.

Ariel Sacks, who writes the blog On the Shoulders of Giants, is a brilliant young teacher in NYC (and a member of the Teacher Leaders Network). In a recent post, she paints a much more accurate picture of the complexities of the "incompetent teacher" problem. We've got to make it easier to fire incompetent teachers, but we've got to do it fairly, using sound measures of competence and a system that protects teachers from abuse.

If we want to figure out how to begin to solve the real problem, we need to glean the insights of New Millennium teachers like Ariel, who are committed to improving the teaching profession and to making teachers equal partners in school reform.

We Need to Dispel the Myths about Effective Teachers

If you want to reflect for a moment on education half-truths and the imprecise diagnosis of teaching quality problems, take a look at two articles published in the October 18th edition of the Los Angeles Times — one on value-added teacher evaluations and the other on challenging education myths.

Both pieces raise important issues related to the role of teacher education as well as student test scores in developing and identifying effective teachers. But in addressing those issues, the journalist-authors actually embellish current myths rather than dispel them — and may send us down the wrong policy road.

Myth: Teacher tenure rules make it impossible to get rid of poor teachers.

Fact: A recent study by the New Teacher Project clearly shows that the difficulty in removing ineffective teachers has much more to do with poorly trained administrators who have few skills and inadequate tools to distinguish between excellent, average, and poor teaching. Another report, from the Center for American Progress also concluded that poor evaluation procedures, not tenure, are most likely to account for a school district’s inability to fire poor performers.

Myth: Teach for America, a rapid-entry alternative certification program designed to recruit bright young people into teaching, produces more effective teachers than traditional university-based programs.

Fact: Nationally, the Teach for America program produced about 4000 new teachers this school year, a very small contribution given that U.S. public schools need to hire about 250,000 new teachers annually. Studies show that TFA recruits tend to produce student achievement gains only slightly better than comparison teachers — and only in math, not in reading. Most importantly, the comparison groups in these studies tend to be teachers in the same or similar schools who have even less formal pedagogical preparation than TFA recruits. Why? Because the high needs schools in which TFA’ers teach often have to rely on substitutes and other poorly qualified individuals. Studies also show that more than 80 percent of Teach for America recruits, much like other recruits who enter with little formal training, leave the classroom by their third year of teaching, becoming part of the revolving door of novices who pass quickly through high-needs classrooms. This does not mean that tradtional teacher education has it right. It doesn’t. But less is not more in preparing teachers for high needs schools.

Myth: Standardized tests now in place are always the most accurate means of assessing student progress and teacher effectiveness. Scores from these tests should be the primary metric for evaluating teachers and increasing accountability.

Fact: Today’s “value-added” systems for measuring teacher effects can provide useful information, but the data are not always reliable for making high-stakes decisions. Assessments based solely on scores from tests currently in use are not designed to help teachers become more effective. Also, recent studies show that most value-added student academic gains are attributed to teacher teams, not individuals. Drawing on very sophisticated analyses, these studies reveal that the most powerful predictor of student achievement over time seems to be whether small groups of teachers are learning from each other as they teach. This suggests that policymakers should not just focus on replacing the “bottom 6-10%” of ineffective teachers, but devise strategies so that “teachers raise their games when the quality of their colleagues improves.”

Policymakers and practitioners do need to think much differently about assessing teachers and transforming teacher education. But that new thinking will not be productive if we cling to the educational equivalent of urban legends about what makes for effective teachers and successful students.

Looking beyond the Big Broom

In many ways DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee has become the iconic leader of the current school reform movement. Who can forget the December 2008 Time Magazine cover depicting Rhee brandishing a broom and a stare — ready to sweep out the incompetent teachers in the beleaguered district and replace them with bright young talent who would raise student achievement test scores in a hurry.

There’s no doubt that a take-charge approach is needed in the DC Public Schools, where a focus on effective teaching and accountability were sorely lacking before Ms. Rhee’s tenure began in 2007.
 
But a bit more than two years into Rhee’s chancellorship, another side of the D.C. reform initiative is beginning to surface, suggesting that the current school reform team may not be enacting the changes that students most need and deserve.

The inexperienced and inexpensive itinerant teachers favored by Ms. Rhee’s human capital approach to school system management are not always the answer.  In fact, by drawing on the voices of several students, today’s Washington Post suggests that many of these recent hires may be doing more harm than good.

Dayna Downs, a middle school student, told this story: "We had a great science teacher who knew how to handle our class and make learning fun. Now he's been replaced with a less-experienced teacher, and the class is acting a lot differently. Some students don't listen anymore." Downs told city officials at a hearing Saturday that "We have a science test coming up, and I'm worried about failing because our new teacher doesn't know where we are in our work."

Ikechukwu Umez-Eronini, a high school senior, complained of the “complete lack of transparency about what’s going on in the school system.” Umez-Eronini, a leader in student protests over teacher firings, continued: "You can't get a straight answer about anything -- not about the firings, the school budget or the test scores.”

This Post article (by metro columnist Courtland Milloy) suggests that the Big Broom is simply too crude an instrument to improve schools in the long run and protect children’s interests in the here and now.

Radical change is required — but solutions need to match the problems. I believe a new narrative is beginning to emerge around how we can more accurately identify effective teachers and teaching practices, and how we can craft nuanced reform policies that don’t reduce the complex issues in our public schools to a single cause.

In the meantime we all need to listen more carefully to thoughtful students like Dayna and Ikechukwu, for whom misguided policy is no abstraction.

The Right Push for Merit Pay

No doubt the public has a right to question the role that teacher unions play in school reform. The latest salvo from Richard Whitmore and Andy Rotherham, published in an October 2, 2009, commentary in the Wall Street Journal, will surely raise a few more eyebrows. But as usual, policy analysts, sitting in comfy offices far-removed from the real work of teaching children, often miss the point. Yes, unions have challenged the use of merit pay to reward teachers — and some do so because they themselves are too comfy with the status quo. But many are challenging merit pay because the systems being proposed by such analysts as Whitmore and Rotherham are built on shaky technical ground: pay systems that do not reward the best teachers (e.g., see Houston’s ASPIRE program), or rely on unstable student test scores (e.g., see Tim Sass’ analysis of the instability of value-added measures in Florida), or favor teachers who teach in easy-to-teach in schools (see Stein’s review of the Hillsborough County, Florida program). 

Do not get me wrong: Unions need to do a lot more to promote performance pay systems that students deserve — and we (and our Teacher Leaders Network ) have been pushing them to do so.  Too many union leaders have been recalcitrant or asleep at the wheel. They should be leading teacher pay reforms — and not just saying no to proposals for change. But I wonder why analysts, such as Whitmore and Rotherham, do not report on why unions often object to merit pay — as opposed to uniformly castigating them as purveyors of the status quo. Without even-handed reporting and discourse, it is difficult to advance the conversation and implement much-needed reforms in public education.  Perhaps journalists and policy analysts might turn to teacher leaders themselves in advancing the dialogue on the future of the teaching profession.

To see the work of accomplished teacher leaders around performance pay, be sure to read the TeacherSolutions report Performance Pay for Teachers: Designing a System that Students Deserve. The forward-looking TeacherSolutions 2030 team continues the conversation in a recently published monograph and forthcoming book on the future of their profession.

And You Wonder Why Teachers Raise Questions About Standardized Tests

Yesterday’s New York Times brought us an insightful essay from Todd Farley regarding the deep problems with standardized tests — including the “mad scramble” inside the industry to “score tests, meet deadlines and rake in cash.” Policy pundits and many erstwhile darlings of the media often portray teachers (and their associations) as anti-reform and purveyors of the status quo when they raise questions about the flaws in using standardized tests to assess student progress and teaching effectiveness. Farley’s piece is insightful — a must read for those who want to peel back the layers on the usual superficial criticisms of those who are uncertain that multiple choice tests serve as accurate barometers of student academic progress.

Farley identifies the endemic problems with how these tests are scored as well as the quality of specific items themselves. Others, such as economist Tim Sass, raise questions about the stability of value-added measures to determine who is an effective teacher and who is not. Sass' recent analyses show that in Duval County, Florida almost 20 percent of those who scored in the bottom quintile of teachers in year one scored in the top quintile the next. Such fluctuations cannot tell a meaningful story about good teaching.This is not to mean that standardized tests and value-added measures should not be used -- but they must be used carefully. It is time to question the pundits who vilify those who raise questions about using standardized test to carte blanche judge kids and the teachers who teach them.


Image Source: WoodleyWonderWorks, Flickr Creative Commons

Getting Global Education Wrong in Urban Districts

Last week a New York Times article revealed how many urban districts have given up on recruiting American teachers for high needs schools. Instead, foreign teachers, many of whom are not fluent in English or do not have a cultural understanding of U.S. students, are filling vacancies because of school districts' inability or unwillingness to offer the salary and working conditions needed to staff our nation’s most challenging schools. Drawing on a powerful, data-filled report from the American Federation of Teachers, we learn that about 19,000 teachers are now working in the United States on temporary visas and that for-profit recruiting practices are almost entirely unregulated. Abuses include forcing teachers to pay recruiters 25 percent of their salaries and to take out loans with an annual interest rate of 60 percent, while placing them in overcrowded, unfinished housing.

There is so much wrong with this story.  Granted, not all foreign recruiters are abusive — and clearly American students can benefit from the international experiences their teachers have had. And some can speak English fluently — and have been trained as teachers back in their home countries. But many have not. In addition, these urban school districts are not hiring foreign nationals to bring a global perspective to their curriculum. They are taking short-cuts — letting policymakers off the hook for making the tough decisions needed to transform America’s dysfunctional teacher development system. They are short-changing students by denying them the teachers and teaching they deserve.

New Research Confirms the Importance of Spreading Teacher Expertise

As policymakers focus on identifying and rewarding effective teaching, they should pay close attention to an important new study demonstrating the powerful effect of teacher collaboration in producing greater student achievement gains.

Using 11 years of student data in North Carolina, researchers have found that most value-added achievement gains are attributed to the make-up of teacher teams, not the traits and characteristics of individual teachers. Drawing on sophisticated analyses of this large database, they reported in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that peer learning among small groups of teachers seems to be the most powerful predictor of student achievement over time.

Researchers C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann found that "students have larger test score gains when their teachers experience improvements in the observable characteristics of their colleagues." Less experienced teachers who are still acquiring “on-the-job” skills are most sensitive to changes in peer quality; teachers with greater labor-market attachment are more sensitive to peer quality; and both current and historical peer quality changes affect current student achievement.

The researchers warn that using value-added methods to identify individual teachers for merit pay and other high stakes decisions may very well be confounded by how teachers learn from each other. As one of the study’s authors noted, “If you give the reward at the individual level, all of a sudden my peers are no longer my colleagues—they’re my competitors. If you give it at the school level, then you’re going to foster feelings of team membership, and that increases the incentive to work together and help each other out.”

It is time to figure out 21st century teaching effectiveness systems that both identify expert teachers and reward them for spreading their expertise to others. I've been harping on the importance of this "spread effect" for some time. It's exciting to see research from a disinterested source that substantiates this key component of effective teaching.