Advancing the Teaching Profession

Staffing High Needs Schools and the Need to Listen to Teachers

The Center for American Progress just released a report on the role of financial incentives in staffing high-need schools.  The thoughtful report draws on lessons from the military, the civil service and government to frame how policymakers can attract and retain talented teachers to challenging schools. The authors of the report make very good points — i.e., the need for competitive base pay as a starting point and the need to ensure that incentives offered are meaningful.  

However, if the authors of the CAP report had dug a bit deeper, they could have pointed to the problems the military has had in recruiting new soldiers. With enormous incentives (up to $40K), the military has met its recruitment goals – but they have dramatically lowered standards, with more high school dropouts and criminals now being accepted.

Working conditions also matter when it comes to recruiting good teachers for high-need schools – as articulated by Ariel Sacks of New York City, a Teacher Leaders Network member who, along with Renee Moore of Cleveland, Miss., attended last week's CAP meeting on behalf of Center for Teaching Quality. Indeed, accomplished teachers typically say that working conditions matter more than money — and what matters most are (1) principals who know how to embrace and utilize teacher leaders; (2) access to qualified, experienced colleagues, and (3) freedom to teach students, and not just to a test or a scripted curriculum. Read more on such matters in our reports, which are built upon research evidence and the voices of expert teachers.

Despite the evidence, the CAP authors seem to ignore these issues in staffing high need schools – primarily because they are not “as easy to modify” as pay. Like expert teachers Ms. Sacks and Ms. Moore, Claus Von Zastrow at the Learning First Alliance expresses some frustrations in his recent blog over the CAP report and its munificent pragmatism about what can and cannot be done to improve the teacher working conditions that impact student achievement. He writes eloquently that policy wonks can, “[in] seek(ing) solutions to grave school staffing challenges … suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Debating the Certification Debate

In a Nov. 14th post, the luminous Eduwonkette raises the issue of why there is so much attention paid to teacher certification in the United States.  Drawing on the teacher quality research of Richard Ingersoll – who calls for “upgrading training and certification standards” — the erudite Ms. 'Kette raises questions about the often intense (dare I say vitriolic) calls by Washington DC pundits and media-types to do away with teacher certification standards.

The certification critics often cite Tom Kane’s research that shows little difference in the student achievement scores of the new teachers who enter through traditional (more extended, university-based) and alternative (short-cut training) certification regimes. There are methodological holes in the Kane study – but that is not the point to be taken here. The issue  is not “certification or not” – or “teacher education or Teach for America.”  The issue is what teachers need to know before they begin to teach and how our education system ensures they do know – so kids do not get harmed.

So here is my initial short list for a new kind of teacher certification system. It must be one that ensures  novices know how to: (1) find the right kind of standards-based teaching resources for the diverse students they teach; (2) work well with second language and special needs learners; (3) use and analyze student achievement data for improving teaching, (4) create effective classroom management systems for 21st century learning, and (5) work well with parents and families and draw on community resources to serve their students. 

Our solicitous Eduwonkette makes the point that other professions do not have their certification systems so scrutinized — and in some cases even vilified. What if we halted the vitriolic debate and considered what we want our teachers to know and do– and then supported them in their efforts to serve our nation’s students and their families?

And why don’t we transcend the debate over who should be recruited to teaching and how much preparation they should have--by discarding the idea that one teacher is solely responsible for 25 students? Instead, we can create policies that promote our best teachers to serve as supervisors and coaches of a wide range of novices, adjuncts, and teaching assistants who collectively work with large groups of students. What could dynamic support do for the retention and quality of all new teachers?

Advice to the Next President: Listening to Renee Moore

Recently John Merrow and company put together a terrific and varied array of education advice for (now) President-Elect Obama. One of 76 advisors, Renee Moore — a member of our Teacher Leaders Network and author of TeachMoore — asks the President to remember his ABCs — acknowledge the highly effective educators already in our schools; build educational policy around their expertise; and change the compensation system to reward and spread their excellence. But doing so for 21st century teaching and learning will require going well beyond the standardized assessments currently in vogue. Imagine soon that teachers —using Web 2.0 (and soon 3.0) tools, wireless student handhelds, and digital spaces — supported students’ abilities to find and use knowledge, create novel solutions to relevant problems, and communicate new ideas inside of global communities. And then, what if they were able assemble the evidence as part of a renewed accountability system for public education and the teaching profession?

President-elect Obama has called for “multiple measures” —pushing our education leaders to go beyond the rigid adherence to once-a-year multiple-choice tests that are driving more drivel into our outdated public school curriculum. The current tests, which are the hallmark in most of our nation’s urban schools, are ill-designed to determine whether students have acquired essential 21st century skills. Is our system teaching and assessing the application, evaluation, and synthesis of knowledge? Does passing a standardized test mean that students are prepared for literacy in a digital world? Will students have the skills for smart networking and collaboration? What teaching and assessments will ensure that they do? As we ask these questions, all of us should read more of TeachMoore to keep learning about the realities and the possibilities of schools for tomorrow.

We Still Do Not Know Enough About New Teacher Induction

Recently, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the research firm Mathematica released a study of the impact of induction programs on new teacher retention and student achievement. The research team used randomized controls and drew on a wide variety of data from 17 large school districts to determine the effectiveness of two distinctive approaches to supporting novices — one by the New Teacher Center, and the other by the Education Testing Service  At first glance it appears that the news was not good.  While the researchers found new teachers supported by NTC and ETS received more induction support, they found no significant differences in retention and student achievement when contrasting teachers from districts that used the programs with those that did not.  As reported by Education Week, program officials from the New Teacher Center seemed to be caught off guard and a bit defensive, claiming that the researchers need to examine more than one year’s worth of data to determine the effectiveness of their highly-touted, well-supported program.

No doubt these results need to be used to question whether or not programs such as the NTC – the most well-known of the comprehensive induction programs — are “up-to-snuff” and worth the investment. However, the results may tell us more about the research methods of Mathematica than the efficacy of the programs themselves.  The researchers compared teachers who received support from the more comprehensive approaches of ETS and NTC and those who received support from other types of induction and mentoring efforts. Looking a bit deeper at some of the findings may have uncovered why the researchers found no “effects.” 

To be sure, the treatment teachers, compared to those in the control group, were more likely to receive their mentors’ assistance in various topic areas (especially in terms of discussing instructional goals and reflecting on practice). However, teachers served by the ETS and NTC programs reported receiving about 95 minutes a week of mentoring. The control group reported receiving 74 minutes per week, suggesting a miniscule difference of 1.5 days over the course of the year. In addition, very little meaningful differences seems to exist between the treatment and control groups when it came to two key comprehensive induction elements — observing others teach in their own classrooms (47 percent for the treatment group v. 38 percent for the control) and involvement in study groups of new and experienced teachers (47 percent for the treatment group v. 37 percent for the control).  Only 30 percent of the control group reported that they were assisted in assessing student work. But only 55 percent of the treatment group reported the same.

In some cases neither group of teachers received much meaningful induction. In other cases the differences were slim. Apparently in some districts only some of the treatment teachers actually received the full treatment. Perhaps the researchers should have designed a study that goes beyond simple randomization, and laid out an approach that offers real distinctions between the treatment and control groups. If they had, we might have learned more about new teacher induction than the limitations of educational research.