Advancing the Teaching Profession

This Year's MetLife Survey: Good News for Teacherpreneurs

Several years ago, with support from MetLife Foundation, CTQ helped make the case for teacherpreneurs—classroom experts who teach students regularly but also have time, space, and reward to incubate and execute bold pedagogical and policy ideas.

Since then, and with generous funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rose Community Foundation, we have begun to cultivate and pay for teacherpreneurs in Colorado (Jessica Keigan and Jessica Cuthbertson) and Florida (Megan Allen and Ryan Kinser) as they lead Common Core and teacher evaluation reforms, create virtual learning communities, and organize National Board Certified Teachers as online mentors. And with continued funding from MetLife Foundation, Seattle-based teacherpreneur Noah Zeichner is leading work at CTQ to launch an international network of teacher leaders to fuel a 21st-century teaching profession.

We have been embraced by forward-thinking administrators (and program officers) who want to transcend the 20th-century debates over teaching and learning. They want to ensure that all students are college- and career-ready and help blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them. But we have faced resistance from a number of reformers who do not believe teachers can or should lead.

Now MetLife, with its 29th annual survey, continues to shed light on teachers and the future of their profession. This survey speaks volumes to our concept of teacherpreneurism.

The latest poll has found that 23 percent of America’s teachers—or about 700,000 of them—are “extremely” or “very interested” in serving in a hybrid role as a teacher and leader. (And about half are at least “somewhat interested” in such an assignment.)

These findings are compelling, especially when set in the following context: The vast majority of the same teachers (84 percent) are “not very” or “not at all” interested in becoming a principal, and with good reason. The same MetLife survey revealed that 75 percent of our nation’s principals believe their job has become “too complex,” and almost half (48 percent) report they are “under great stress several days a week.”

It is time to get over fallacious boundaries between teachers and administrators and rebuild the profession that makes all others possible. It is time to create more time for teachers to incubate and execute their own ideas—making the job of “principal-ing” more manageable and encouraging more of our best teachers to lead without leaving. Thanks to MetLife for teaching us that 700,000 teachers are ready to do so—and continuing to support us and our new book, TEACHERPRENEURS, which documents how innovative teachers lead without leaving.

What's Next: Evaluation As Narrative

Stephen Sawchuk’s recent Ed Week article on the new wave of teacher evaluation systems—and the high ratings they're generating—has likely left many reformers scratching their heads.

Stephen points out that in states like Tennessee and Florida, which are hotbeds for Michelle Rhee–type teaching policies, the vast majority of teachers are quite effective. Even in Florida, where teachers are judged by standardized test score gains, 97 percent received top ratings. In Tennessee’s new system, more than 16 percent of the teachers were rated with the lowest score on test score measures. Only 0.2 percent of those observed by principals were categorized as ineffective.

While there are many policymakers—and virtually all of our nation’s 3.2 million teachers themselves—who want to see more rigorous and valid evaluation systems that strengthen teaching practices, there are also reformers who want nothing more than to identify ineffective teachers and dismiss them. But overall, we need to shift our focus from what's not working for the ineffective minority to how we can ensure continued growth for the effective majority.

Although scholars have long pointed out the problems of current teacher evaluation systems (see Art Wise and Linda Darling-Hammond’s 1984 research (PDF) and its seminal findings), there is still much to learn about the validity of the programs that are being put into place today.

Even when pains are taken to create a fair and reliable ratings system, such as the Measures of Effective Teaching project, flaws still abound. Jesse Rothstein and colleagues found that in each of the multiple measures (standardized test score gains, classroom observations, and student engagement ratings) used in the carefully designed project reflects a distinct dimension of teaching. They also noted that “none of the three types of performance measures captures much of the variation in teachers’ impacts on alternative, conceptually demanding tests.”

What none of these analyses suggest is how teaching conditions must change before we can design and implement a valid and reliable evaluation system.

Both principals and teachers must have more time to look carefully at the data and make sense of it. In top-performing nations like Singapore, teachers only teach students 18 to 20 hours a week. Here in the U.S., we devote little organizational space to assembling sound evidence, analyzing it, and applying professional judgment to determine who is effective and why—and how to help them get better.

Singapore's core competencies for teachers, via the National Institute of Education, Singapore. (Click to enlarge.)

In Singapore there is no obsession with standardized test scores. Teachers are evaluated on how they nurture the child, work with parents, and care for both the heart and mind. In Singapore, evaluation is not a number (or three of them); it is a narrative that encourages teachers to expand their teaching repertoire, select a career track, and take those developmental actions that lead to greater competence and higher levels on a career lattice. Teachers’ evaluations are based on the experience level of the teacher, since the level of competence expected of a new teacher is much lower than expectations for senior teachers. But most importantly, the evaluations don't just assess current performance. They also consider a teacher’s potential.

Will policymakers start viewing evaluation differently? I suspect they will, if only they listened more carefully to the millions of teachers nationwide who want an evaluation system that will genuinely improve their practice and their students’ learning.