Advancing the Teaching Profession

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.