Advancing the Teaching Profession

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.

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.

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.

Teacher Pay: Fact Check

Recently the The Manhattan Institute, a New York conservative think tank known to open criticize public schools and the teaching profession, released a report claiming that teachers across the nation earned an average of $34.06 per hour in 2005, which was $8.98 more than the average non-sales, white-collar worker. I guess the policy wonks at the Manhattan Institute got nervous when they learned that more business leaders, policymakers, independent researchers, and education economists increasingly agree that teachers need to be paid more and differently. The institute's findings were released the same day that Iowa’s Gov. Chet Culver, a former teacher from Des Moines, called for $70 million more to help increase average teacher pay in his state from 40th to 25th in the nation.

Here are the facts: According to a 2005 report the average salary of today’s teacher ($46,597 per year) is far less than those of the full professor ($94,606), engineer ($78,023), computer systems analyst ($73,269), retail buyer ($64,813), and accountant ($56,102). Over the past decade, the purchasing power of teachers has dropped as well. For example, between 1994 and 2004, for every real $1 increase in average accountant pay, teacher pay rose only 19 cents.

The cherry-picking data analyses of the Manhattan Institute relies on governmental data that calculates teachers’ work hours by examining union contracts or school district employment rules. The vast majority of teachers work more than 49 hours a week, with many after-school hours of lesson planning, parent conferences, home visits, school events and meetings with colleagues. In addition, in any given year approximately 25 percent of America’s teachers attend summer education programs to improve their skills or learn new content. Unlike what is found in most professions, teachers often pay for their own professional development. About 42 percent of America’s teachers also teach in summer school to supplement their salaries.

The institute’s analyses of the work life of teachers is naïve, at best. In 2004, the distinguished members of The Teaching Commission, chaired by former IBM chief executive Louis V. Gerstner Jr., recommended that the nation invest an additional $30 billion per year in teacher compensation, giving every teacher a 10 percent increase and providing a 30 percent increase to the “top half.” More later on what Gerstner calls for in paying the top half of teachers a lot more. Indeed across-the-board teacher pay increases are NOT the panacea for improving teacher supply, quality, and retention. However, the Manhattan Institute teacher pay conclusions are way out of step with both the research data and our nation’s business elites

Florida Pay Plan Archaic, Not Pioneering

A few days ago CNN.com blared a headline that read: “Teachers union challenges Florida's pioneering bonus-pay plan.” However, a quick look at the article and one clearly can see that the plan is not pioneering at all. At best it is archaic. The ill-conceived Florida program reminds me of merit pay plans of the past (déjà vu all over again) and the news blast represents yet another example of sloppy, sound bite journalism. The headline should read: “Unions, teachers, administrators, and parents should question Florida’s new merit pay plan program.” Why? Here are just a few reasons:

1. The program solely uses narrow standardized test scores that only measures the performance of a very limited number of teachers on just 2 subject areas (those who can have standardized test scores attached to them) ;
2. Florida’s accountability system does not measure student growth very well (e.g., consider a 5th grader who, because of language and other issues, reads on a 2nd grade level but must “measure up” on a 5th grade test that cannot identify teachers who help him move from the 2nd to 3rd grade literacy level);
3. The program’s merit bonuses of $2000 are small and inconsequential – with no evidence that the amount is sufficient for motivating teachers to teach more effectively;
4. The program does not reward teachers to use test data and spreading their teaching expertise;
5. The program does not address the core issues of teaching lower-performing students and staffing under-performing schools;
6. The program does not address at all the under-prepared and out-of-field teachers Florida hires because policymakers are not willing to address the real reasons (e.g., working conditions) behind the teacher shortages in the state;
7. The programs does not reward small teams of teachers working together producing meaningful results for students and their families over time; and
8. The program does not involve professional teachers in its creation.

TeacherSolutions, a new intiative of our Teacher Leaders Network, is the answer. Next month we will release the inaugural report of TeacherSolutions – a select group of accomplished teachers who have studies, considered, and weighed in on the complex policy problem of professional compensation.

To increase productivity, today’s management experts tell us, you must listen carefully to the advice of high performers in your workforce. Yet the insights of our most successful teachers are rarely solicited when school and teaching policies are under development. Even though teachers are not often invited to the policy table, they are frequently labeled as obstructionists when they decline to endorse “bold new plans” or point out flaws in policies that they know from experience will not yield the intended outcomes. Keep your eyes and ears peeled.

Getting the Merit into Merit Pay

The Baltimore Sun recently reported that Maryland, with leadership from Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., intends to offer teachers “financial rewards for those who take on tough assignments and produce gains in test scores.”

The devil is always in the details. However, reviewing news article surfaces several vexing issues, prompting my own hard-hitting questions for which I would like to see answers.

1. The program will allocate only $800,000 for incentives. How much do policymakers believe is necessary to “motivate” teachers to teach for effectively? Why do policymakers believe that small bonuses for gains in test scores will achieve the results they seek?
2. The news articles suggested that the proponents of the plan believe that it “is common sense to reward employees for good performance.” I would agree. However, I wonder why these proponents rarely cite the evidence revealing that ineffective teaching is most often chalked up to lack of preparation (for classes and students taught) or inadequate resources?

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley has got it right: "What I find is that there are many teachers who are attracted to schools that are in challenging neighborhoods when they have good leadership," he said. "I think the better incentive for teachers is good and strong leaders. That allows them to use their talents to the fullest where it is the most needed. I have yet to see a merit pay system that looked workable."

This does not mean policymakers should not help craft performance pay plans that reflect the complexity of teaching. However, let’s get real: Paying teachers differently or for performance and merit is not a new educational idea. Efforts from years past—including those in the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s, failed to resolve a variety of technical and organizational issues. Today’s policymakers and education reformers are likely to repeat the merit pay mistakes of the past by:

• using invalid, untested, or poorly designed measures of teacher effectiveness,
• neglecting to train administrators who could produce useful and trusted data,
• refusing or forgetting to involving teachers in developing plans and programs, and
• ignoring the importance of teamwork in increasing student achievement.

There are some interesting and thoughtful approaches to paying teachers more and differently. But the examples of Florida and Texas, described in the Baltimore Sun article are not good examples at all. They both focus on paying a limited number of teachers a limited reward for individually raising student test scores a few points. Let’s hold policymakers accountable for doing the right thing when it comes to rewarding teachers for what makes a difference for their profession and the students they serve.

More on Unmeritorious Merit Pay

A few posts ago I commented that the “new” Florida merit pay plan for teachers had no merit.  Reformers and policymakers in Florida (and elsewhere) are stoking the “use of standardized test scores” fire to judge and reward teachers. To be sure, our public school system needs to go well beyond the current single salary schedule. However, even the more robust and thoughtful value-added statistical formula cannot account for how different teachers contribute to the learning of individual students. Susan G. – a middle school family and consumer sciences teacher, and member of Teacher Leaders Network  — recently posted on the TLN blog:

Any "bonus" compensation that rewards individual (teachers) and ignores the contribution of (other) teachers who give students opportunities to apply that learning is short sighted and suggests the designers of the policy have no grasp of how students really learn. I live on the "elective" hall of a middle school. Last week our art teachers had students illustrating Langston Hughes poetry and using Escher's work to connect tessellation and math. In Technology Systems (formerly known as Shop), students were working with aerodynamics and robotics. My students were studying the persuasive speech of advertising as well as using applied algebra to develop a nutrition label for a recipe. The keyboarding teachers had their students working on their technical writing skills which emphasize proper punctuation. You can't even talk about music without using math and foreign language.

Reformers and policymakers would be well-advised to pay attention to highly accomplished teachers like Susan in designing and implementing new professional compensation systems. They are the ones making learning happen for students right now.