September 2010 Archives

Education professors continue to hold beliefs consistent with Dewey-inspired progressive-education principles. But they also seem to be warming up to some changes, most notably the Teach For America program and a tougher teacher-tenure bar, according to a national survey of teacher educators, released yesterday.

Overall, said the authors of the survey analysis, such findings are evidence that teacher educators hold a variety of disparate, even conflicting opinions about the state of the profession today and the changes occurring in the field in the post-accountability era.

"Much of what we find reveals a great deal of churn, ambivalence, and even confusion," said Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett.

Let's take a look at what the survey data say:

Philosophies seemingly inflected with progressive rather than pragmatic ideas are still pervasive in the colleges of education, the survey found. 68 percent of respondents said that they felt their role was to prepare teachers to be "change agents" for shaping education, while just over a quarter said that it was to work effectively within the realities of today's public schools. Other findings along these lines:

• While 82 percent of teachers felt it was essential for students to become "lifelong learners," only 42 percent said that it was equally important for a teacher to be trained in how to manage time and prepare lesson plans, and 24 percent held that belief about understanding how to work with state academic-content standards and accountability systems.

• 83 percent of the sample said it was absolutely essential to learn "21st century skills," but only 44 percent felt that way about teaching phonics in the early grades and 36 percent about memorizing math facts like multiplication tables.

They respondents still felt teacher education programs could do better. Half of respondents said that teacher education programs often fail to prepare teachers for the challenges of teaching in the real world, and almost three-quarters said that professors of education need to spend more time in K-12 classrooms.

Those figures are down somewhat, however, from identical questions on the 1997 survey—an indication that those in the teacher-education field see some improvements.

On issues of accountability, the respondents were only moderately favorable to national accreditation as a quality benchmark; 41 percent of respondents said such accreditation amounted to procedural compliance, compared to 46 percent who said accreditation was a baseline of quality. Over 7 in 10 felt that schools of ed. should be held accountable for the quality of their graduates. And 73 percent felt the schools need to do a better job dismissing candidates who aren't up to par.

Some interesting, somewhat contradictory findings on alternative routes: 47 percent of respondents said that such programs compromise the quality of the teaching force, but 32 percent thought they're a good way to attract new candidates. The Teach For America program got high accolades, with 63 percent saying it's a good way to get passionate teachers into low-income schools.

On specific policy initiatives, a majority "somewhat" or "strongly" supported making it easier to fire poorly performing teachers, even if tenured (86 percent); strengthening evaluations and moving the tenure bar to 5 years (79 percent); and having a core curriculum at each grade (78 percent). They were less sanguine about performance-pay incentives based on student scores, however (30 percent).

The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for the entire sample; 716 educators at four-year colleges ultimately participated, but more than 5,400 were invited to participate, for a response rate of only 14 percent.

The survey folks conducted the analysis for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based group that has never exactly been rah-rah about the education schools. In the introduction, Fordham officials contended that many ed. professors "see themselves as philosophers and evangelists, not as master craftsmen sharing tradecraft with apprentices," although they acknowledged some interesting new movements within the schools about things like TFA and core curricula.

On the other hand, the survey's low response rate raised some red flags for Sharon P. Robinson, the president of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education. She contended that the results "cannot be deemed definitive" for that reason.

Ms. Robinson also felt that the progressivist v. pragmatist frame of the survey might be a bit of a false dichotomy. A top-notch teacher can be both idealist and realist, an expert classroom manager who also supports fostering life-long learning in her students, she reasoned.

What do you make of the survey findings? If you're an ed professor, does this accord with your own take on your institution or the teacher-education field?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Postings have been a bit lean these days as I focus on a larger project about teachers' professional development. But my able colleagues have a lot of really important teacher news covered this week. Make sure to check them out.

At Curriculum Matters, Erik Robelen reports on the Obama administration's goal of bringing 10,000 new teacher candidates into the profession to instruct in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, while Politics K-12's Alyson Klein writes about the U.S. Department of Education's larger teacher-recruitment initiative.

Our new research reporter (and my longtime colleague) Sarah Sparks has really hit the ground running with a ton of great items at Inside School Research. One of her latest is this analysis of a proposed tweak to the Teacher Incentive Fund performance-pay competition. It turns out, she reports, that the Education Department had a lot of problems getting folks to apply to be in the voluntary evaluation sub-competition. Read her item to figure out how it's proposing to solve the problem.

Sean Cavanagh reports on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's education plans, which include establishing a new commission that will make recommendations on teacher effectiveness issues. Among other things, the governor wants at least half of teacher tenure and promotion decisions to be based on student academic growth.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a surprise reversal, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated part of the regulations governing the "highly qualified" teacher requirements of the No Child Left Behind law.

In essence, the court agreed with plaintiffs who argued that, under the regulations, California permitted poor and minority students to be taught disproportionately by "intern" teachers who are not yet fully certified—therefore subjecting the students to a lower-quality education.

Mark Walsh has the full scoop over at The School Law Blog.

Under the NCLB law, states are expected to staff all of their core academic classes with "highly qualified" teachers, who hold a bachelor's degree, are fully certified, and demonstrate subject-matter mastery. But the Education Department's regulations allow for teachers to be considered "highly qualified" even if not fully certified for up to three years, as long as they are in an approved alternative route program and are making "satisfactory" progress. California's intern teachers generally fall in this category.

So what are the immediate implications of this ruling? States have certainly had a lot of problems getting their HQT counts to pass muster with the Education Department over the last eight years. With this ruling the ones covered by the 9th Circuit ruling are probably tearing out their hair, since their counts are now invalid again.

[UPDATE (5:04 p.m.): Mike Petrilli also makes the excellent point that states under the purview of the 9th Circuit face some immediate consequences—like having to send out letters to parents whose students taught by intern teachers saying those teachers are no longer considered highly qualified.]

But that may be premature for states in other circuits. According to David DeSchryver, an attorney at the Washington-based Brustein & Manasevit firm who specializes in federal education law, the ruling would be "persuasive" for other circuit courts but not necessarily binding on them. It certainly would, though, open the door to additional challenges.

On the other hand, the court's major argument that the regulation constitutes an "injury in fact" could probably be debated given the less-than-stellar links between certification and student outcomes, he added. So, the smart money says that the Justice Department, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education, will file its own challenge to this ruling.

A source at Teach For America, a large and high-profile group that has opposed this lawsuit, told me today that it's closely watching to see how the ruling plays out.

"We are confident that the administration and/or Congress will act to ensure that highly effective, alternatively certified teachers continue to be classified as highly qualified," the official said.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Catherine Gewertz:

While Stephen is away on assignment, we are making sure to keep you updated on the Ed Department's Teacher Incentive Fund competition. Winners have been announced; See the post on our Politics K-12 blog.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A rigorous experimental study of an incentive-pay program for teachers finds no effects on student achievement, an indication that teachers didn't change their practice in such a way as to cause student scores to rise.

The study was explicitly designed to answer the question of whether monetary incentives alone can spur improvements to teaching. The answer, by this study at least, appears to be no. Read my full Education Week story for the details of the study, the findings, and how they fit within the body of experimental research on merit pay.

But equally as important as the findings are how they're interpreted in our little corner of the edu-policy world, and how they might shape future policymaking—what we in the journalism profession call the "day two" story.

Reactions are starting to pour in. First off is the response of the teachers' unions.

The American Federation of Teachers' president, Randi Weingarten, offers the opinion that while the study shows that performance pay is not a "silver bullet," the practice might be coupled with lots of other teacher support to better effect. "There is a role for performance pay as part of a robust education reform plan, but as this and several other studies show, it doesn't work by itself to boost test scores," she said in a statement.

Echoing the head of his union's Tennessee state affiliate, the president of the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, said in a release that he wasn't surprised by the findings. "We need a broader approach to improving teacher practice and student achievement. As demonstrated by the findings, the answer is not as simple as providing bonuses to teachers," he said. They need supports to help them improve their knowledge and skills, he added.

Which, it turns out, is harder to figure out how to do than you'd expect, because the research base on professional development is not all that much more developed than the research on incentive pay. There are only a handful of experiments to show that professional development is successful, and they are mostly quite small in size; there are even fewer such studies on newer, site-based forms of development. (There is certainly anecdotal and cross-cultural evidence to suggest that site-based development is better than one-off workshops, and one hopes that researchers will continue to dig into this.)

A second thing to think about: Will this finding be bad news for existing bonus-pay programs, especially in a time of fiscal austerity? Already, several news stories suggest that a few districts with bonus programs are feeling the heat. Ericka Mellon of The Houston Chronicle discusses the ASPIRE program in Texas within the context of the Nashville study findings. She quotes an official there who underscores that that program is more comprehensive than the (intentionally) narrowly designed Nashville program.

The U.S. Department of Education is taking a similar tack. Rumor has it that the ED is planning to announce the next slate of grantees under the federal Teacher Incentive Fund this week. (Talk about bad timing.) Already the department is doing damage control, suggesting that its guidelines for that federal performance-pay program are broader than the design of the bonus-program studied in Nashville.

What do you think should be next on the docket for research on performance-based compensation?

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States permit high school science teachers to hold general science credentials or demonstrate subject-matter competency through a general science-content test, rather than show that they have mastered their specific discipline by passing a rigorous exam, argues an analysis released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Only 11 states require high school science teachers to hold credentials and pass tests specifically in their scientific discipline, such as biology, chemistry, or physics, the analysis says. Those states are Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Virginia.

A handful of other states have taken steps to move in a similar direction but could benefit from some tightening, the council asserts. And a majority of states simply have a general science teacher credential, endorsement, and/or test, the analysis states.

General science tests like the Praxis II are particularly problematic, the council says, because depending on where the state sets the cutoff score on the exam, it might be possible for a teacher to fail all the physics questions on the test, for instance, but still pass and therefore be deemed eligible to teach physics.

The reason? Probably a misguided sense of trying to give rural or challenging schools more flexibility in hiring teachers in this subject area, the report contends.

So why is a content test so important if a teacher already has a degree in, say, biology? According to Sandi Jacobs, the vice president over at NCTQ, a test is the only real way that a state can ensure a teacher has broad knowledge of his or her discipline, absent other measures of effectiveness. Coursework, she said, isn't a good proxy given that states' requirements are so varied and tend to give students so much choice over what they take.

Here's one question I had for Jacobs: Research on elementary teacher content tests suggests they are not that great of a predictor of teacher effectiveness. That is, while there's some evidence that they can predict who will do well in the classroom, they also screen out a fair number of teachers who would have gone on to be "effective" teachers and permit other ones who wound up being less effective to enter classrooms. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been analogous research done on secondary teacher content tests, but it's reasonable to assume there might be a similar problem.

"As we look at single-subject tests, we absolutely do have to be mindful of those issues," Jacobs agreed.

In any case, the paper has implications for federal policy. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, all core academic classes must be taught by a "highly qualified" teacher, but the law merely mentions "science" as a field and does not define it further. And guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Education explicitly says that states can use general science licensing regimes to meet the HQT mandate. That probably should be tightened up in reauthorization, Jacobs said.

This is an area where there isn't a lot of agreement about how policies should be designed, and NCTQ has set one benchmark. But surely a case could be made for other ones. Do you agree or disagree with the council's standard and ratings? Write in and let us know.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Much of the coverage of value-added measures for judging teacher effectiveness assumes that such measures would falsely identify decent teachers as being ineffective. That's certainly an area of concern, given the fact that the estimates seem unstable, especially if they're calculated over just one year of data.

But is there a reason to think that the data could help other teachers make the case that they are effective? The experience of some union affiliates with value-added suggests that is a possibility.

For instance, while covering the NEA Representative Assembly this summer, I spoke in depth with the current and former presidents of the Tennessee Education Association, respectively Gera Summerford and Earl Wiman, about the state's win in the Race to the Top program. That federal competition put a premium on including student-achievement information in teacher evaluations.

You may remember that Tennessee has had value-added data for more than a decade, and until recently, it was an optional but not mandatory component of teacher evaluations.

According to Wiman, over the past decade, the union has actually used information from that state's value-added system to save teachers' jobs during tenure and dismissal hearings. In other words, the information showed that those teachers did make a difference for kids, and effectively served as a type of check on principals.

Under a law passed to position Tennessee for RTT, value-added will make up part of a teachers' evaluation, in addition to locally developed growth measures and observations. About this new system, Ms. Summerford said, "I"m confident it isn't something any teacher should be afraid of. I think the data will surprise us."

The union did draw the line at a mandatory connection between the scores and teacher pay. That element will be bargained locally by districts receiving dollars through RTT.

And the union leaders did say that there's a need to make sure that all the data are accurately matched between teachers and students, which has apparently been a problem in certain instances.

Generally, neither of the two union leaders was exactly sanguine about the Race to the Top. But their objections were rooted more in the program's overall prescriptiveness than in the value-added piece.

"I'm still hopeful we can enact some true reform around this," Ms. Summers said about RTT, "but I'm not confident it will happen."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

For years, New York City's so-called "rubber rooms"—temporary reassignment centers for teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings—were an embarrassment for both the teachers' union and for the district. Teachers essentially reported to the rooms during contractual work hours, and were paid during that time.

Back in April, the United Federation of Teachers and the school district reached an agreement to shutter the rooms. Teachers were to report for clerical duty or assignments other than instructing kids.

Now the New York Post gets a juicy story out of this new set-up. And while its headline is a bit sensational, the story makes it clear that some teachers don't see a particularly big difference between their new assignments and the rubber-room days of yore.

Obliquely, the story gets at an important point: The rubber rooms may be closed, but the policies that created a situation in which teachers get paid for doing something other than teaching remain largely untouched.

To be fair, changing those procedures is a bigger hurdle than most people realize. For one, dismissal procedures are often specified in state law and must be followed by districts. But New York City's contract added some additional layers on top of that, including an arbitration process that occurs only a few days each month.

In the April agreement, the district and the union committed to a faster timeline for hearing cases and the provision of more arbitrators to crank through them. Meanwhile, the president of the UFT's parent American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has promised to explore differentiating due process procedures based on the substance of the claim, with a speedier resolution for cases of malfeasance vs. those that hinge on issues of performance.

But in agreeing to assign these teachers to other work, the United Federation of Teachers and the district essentially bypassed the larger philosophical question: Should teachers awaiting dismissal hearings have their pay suspended pending an outcome?

(And for that matter, is there a precedent for such a policy in any other public profession?)

A tough, tough issue. Let's hear your thoughts.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Leaders in the District of Columbia today announced details of the performance-based-pay program enshrined in its recently inked contract. Under the system, deemed "IMPACTplus,"—a reference to the IMPACT teacher-evaluation system upon which the pay decisions will be made—teachers deemed "highly effective" stand to earn annual bonuses of up to $25,000.

In addition to these one-off bonuses, teachers will have the opportunity to qualify for permanent base-pay raises as well.

But given the district's hotly charged political environment, payouts under the new program could already be in jeopardy. The fate of the teacher-evaluation system and the performance-pay program is likely to be contingent on the victor in this fall's mayoral election.

A longstanding priority of D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the performance-bonus system was formally instituted in the collective bargaining contract approved earlier this year. The contract left most aspects of the system to the district to work out in the future.

Under the details released this morning, highly effective teachers who work in schools in which 60 percent of students qualify for federal free or reduced-price meals can earn $10,000, and teachers in grades and subjects with "value added" data based on student test-score growth can qualify for an additional $10,000. Teachers of "high-need subjects," finally, will receive an additional $5,000.

For teachers in schools with lower concentrations of poverty, the bonus amounts are $5,000, an additional $5,000 for the subset of teachers with value-added data, and $2,500 for those who teach high-need subjects.

District leaders also announced a new system for increasing teachers' base-pay raises. Those who receive two sequential "highly effective" ratings would earn the salary bonus now reserved for teachers who hold master's degrees, if they don't already hold such a degree. Finally, they would also be eligible to move forward several "steps" on the salary schedule. Step increases are normally granted automatically for each year of service.

Those teachers at schools with 60 percent or higher populations of poor students would advance five steps forward, and those teaching in schools with fewer such students would advance three steps forward.

The announcement comes right before many of the district's 500,000 members will vote in the primaries for the upcoming mayor election, next Tuesday. (In D.C., the winner of the Democratic primary usually wins in the general election.) The outcome of the vote could have significant implications on how or even whether bonuses are ever paid out under the system.

The private foundations that pledged to help finance the bonuses have made their donations contingent on the continuation of Ms. Rhee as chancellor. But that position is appointed by the mayor, and the key opposition candidate to incumbent Adrian Fenty is Vincent Gray, current chairman of the City Council.

Gray is considered to have a closer relationship to the Washington Teachers' Union, a critic of the IMPACT evaluation system and of the use of value-added data for decisions involving teachers.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

If you don't live in Washington, you'd be forgiven for not paying much attention to our mayoral race this fall, but it carries great weight for the education field and particularly for the national dialogue about teacher effectiveness.

As a mayoral-control district, the mayor gets to appoint the city schools chancellor, and after his 2006 election, District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed the polarizing Michelle Rhee. She has made major changes in the city's central office, closed underpopulated schools, instituted a new teacher-evaluation system, overseen a hotly debated collective-bargaining contract, and engaged in some well-publicized battles with the Washington Teachers' Union and its national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers.

Running against Fenty in next week's primary is the chairman of the D.C. Council, Vincent Gray. He has not stated that he will keep Rhee on as chancellor. His campaign literature refers only to having a "strong chancellor" in place. For her part, Rhee has implied that she's not inclined to stay on under Gray's leadership.

This has some hefty implications for the city's roughly 4,500 teachers, as well as for the teacher-quality field at large. For instance, D.C. is unusual in that it does not have to bargain the format of its teacher-evaluation system with its local teachers' union. Rhee introduced the IMPACT evaluations back in 2009, making D.C.'s system one of the first operational ones in the nation to include individual and schoolwide "value-added" measures, in addition to a series of five classroom-based observations.

While a bunch of other states say they plan to institute similar systems under the federal Race to the Top grants, those promises remain just that at the moment.

The Washington Teachers' Union and its parent affiliate have condemned IMPACT, particularly for the value-added components and the fact that the "master educators" who perform some of the teacher observations aren't jointly selected by the union. Would Gray preserve the IMPACT evaluations or seek to make major changes to them? That is an open question, but Gray is said to be more conciliatory to the WTU, which has endorsed his candidacy and run radio ads on his behalf.

Another important teacher-related feature: The performance-pay bonuses in the newly inked contract were to be funded largely by private foundation grants, and are contingent on whether Rhee stays or goes. If Gray comes in, there is no guarantee that they will stay in place.

So far, Gray holds a lead in the straw polls leading up to the primary, which takes place Sept. 14.

For more analysis on the D.C. situation, you can't do better than the assessments offered by Rick Hess and Andy Rotherham.

UPDATE 9/9, 12:50 pm: Two more perspectives worth reading suggested by readers, one scheduled to be published by Rethinking Schools and one by Bill Turque at The Washington Post.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Over the long haul, mutual-consent teacher policies don't appear to improve the distribution of inexperienced teachers—or the levels of turnover in high-minority schools.

That's the conclusion of a recent analysis by researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.

If you're new to this wonky area of school hiring, mutual consent is a policy in which both the teacher seeking a placement and the receiving school's principal (and sometimes other staff) must agree to the placement. It differs from voluntary transfers or forced placements that are based on seniority.

D.C.; Rhode Island; Colorado; Austin, Texas; Chicago; and Milwaukee are some of the places that have either partly or totally done away with forced placements.

One of the perceived benefits of mutual-consent policies, as the New Teacher Project has shown in several reports, is that teachers placed through mutual consent seem to be happier in their schools than those where teachers were placed by the central office. That makes some degree of common sense, since principals aren't forced to hire teachers they don't want, nor are teachers forced to work in schools that aren't a good fit for them.

But does the policy change school staffing or transfer patterns? To find out, the CRPE researchers analyzed teacher records for a midsize urban district that instituted the policy in 2001 for many teachers. They examined records for four years on either side of the shift and compared the results.

UPDATE, 9/1/2010: A source brought to my attention that the district curtailed but did not totally eliminate forced placements.

They found that the teacher-experience gap between low- and high-minority schools actually increased following the shift. Teacher turnover in the district also soared and was most deeply felt in high-minority schools. Despite these initial "shocks" to the high-poverty schools, the report states, the rates self-corrected over time. But they left little overall improvement in the distribution of experienced teachers, or the teacher-transfer rate between low- and high-minority schools.

One possible reason: Disadvantaged schools might have a harder time retaining talented young teachers, since they no longer have to bide their time under seniority rules before transferring to schools perceived as more desirable. Also, the authors suggest that other changes might have occurred after the time period studied as principals became more comfortable with the new hiring policy.

"Although it might be necessary for school districts to lift hiring constraints to improve school staffing, lifting constraints alone is not sufficient to reshape the teacher workforce, especially in disadvantaged schools," the authors write.

These findings are hard to parse for a couple of reasons.

For one, the issue of teacher turnover is complicated. Generally speaking, turnover is not conducive to establishing a tight-knit group of instructors. But on the other hand, as some experts point out, not all turnover is a bad thing. You wouldn't want an ineffective teacher to stay in a low-performing school, and at least one study shows that teachers who do transfer from challenging schools are generally less effective than those who elect to stay.

Mutual consent doesn't appear to be a substitute for incentive programs to get more teachers to apply to challenging schools, officials at the National Council on Teacher Quality opined in a recent bulletin.

"The door keeps revolving; why should we be surprised?" NCTQ wrote. "A policy change that distributes senior teachers more equally would have to provide incentives for effective teachers to stay in high-poverty schools and middle-class schools to hire inexperienced teachers."

What do you think? Do the positives of mutual-consent hiring outweigh the negatives?

It's a difficult question to answer empirically and one that probably won't be settled until researchers can determine whether mutual-consent policies lead to better teacher and student outcomes, like improved working conditions or better student achievement.

(Hat tip to the NCTQ for bringing the study to my attention through its monthly bulletin.)

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