Advancing the Teaching Profession

Public Attitudes about Teaching: The Details Matter

 Yesterday, Phi Delta Kappa released its annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. The 2009 survey surfaced some surprising sentiments held by the American people about teachers and teaching.

The must-read findings reveal, for example, that almost three-quarters (73%) of those polled believe teachers should be paid on the basis of their students’ test score improvements. But even more (81%) believe that teachers should be paid on the basis of advanced degrees.

The dilemma for policymakers, of course, is to determine how to use test scores to assess teachers in reliable and valid ways, as I’ve written about recently. In the matter of paying for advanced degrees — that practice has long been a part of the “steps and rows” salary schedules of most school systems. What hasn’t been addressed in any large-scale or meaningful way is how we ensure that the advanced degrees teachers earn have a measurable impact on student learning and achievement.

The public’s opinion about teacher tenure — often a contentious issue between school reformers and union leaders  — is intriguing. If the pollsters asked the American people about tenure by defining it as a “lifetime contract” then very few (26%) approved. But if the pollsters defined tenure as “a formal legal review before a teacher could be terminated,” a sizeable majority (66%) approved.

The details matter when we set out to accurately gauge public opinion on teacher and teaching issues. They also matter in devising new ways to assess and reward teachers.  Watch for the launch of our New Millennium Teacher Leaders Network next month — where some of our nation’s most outstanding young teachers will focus on the future of teaching, how they should be judged and paid, and how they will take policy actions in their local communities.

Bushaw, William J. & McNee, John A. (2009, August 26). Americans Speak Out. Are Educators Listening? Phi Delta Kappan. Vol. 91, No. 01, September 2009, pp. 8-23.

What Sarah Fine Is Trying to Tell Us

In her widely read Washington Post article of August 9, fourth-year teacher Sarah Fine makes a compelling case for researchers and reformers to include working conditions in estimating the effects of teachers on student achievement.

As Sarah relates in an essay titled "Schools Need Teachers Like Me; I Just Can't Stay," she recently resigned from her teaching post at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School in Washington DC — citing burnout as the primary factor. Why? She paints a poignant portrait of administrators “steadily expand(ing) 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.”

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.

In the large-scale reform experiments of the past decade, the potential power of policies that promote effective teaching as a major driver of school improvement has been mostly ignored. The focus instead has been on marginalizing teachers and/or “teacher-proofing” curriculum and instruction — rather than recognizing that teachers, with the right policy supports, are the ideal agents of meaningful and sustainable change.

At the federal level, teacher policy is now shifting rapidly toward well-funded initiatives that will link student achievement test scores to teachers in an effort to determine who is effective or not. Investing in research and pilot projects so that we can do a better job of identifying effective teachers makes sense — using rigorous measures and tools that keep a tight focus on the critical dimensions of student learning.

But judging teacher performance  without paying attention to the conditions under which qualified teachers can teach effectively will not give America the answers we need to create a New Millennium teaching force that will move all children ahead.