January 2011 Archives

Whether you love or hate the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's work in education, it has become an influential part of the education policy world, specifically in discussions about teacher quality.

Some time ago, I interviewed Bill Gates while at the American Federation of Teachers conference, where he had come to address the union's delegates. We spoke about the foundation's $500 million Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching project and the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching study.

I apologize to all for taking so long to transcribe this for you, but a funny thing happened on my way to the keyboard, and I got immersed in a special project.

Note that this interview took place before the preliminary MET results came out. You'll recall that they found some correlations between value-added data and student surveys. Those findings caused some backlash, too,with at least one scholar criticizing how the Foundation interpreted those results, as I reported a few weeks ago.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides support for Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, but the paper retains sole control over the content. And if your sense of balance is still offended, well, let me put it this way: We've done similar Q & A features on this blog with the National Education Association.

Q: What's the most difficult or challenging part of this work so far?

A: Of course, the particulars of finding the right districts to work in and making sure that the union was really willing to allow observations and that everybody was going to push forward on it.

It's fantastic that we found the four locations where we feel great about the partnerships and that we're on the schedule we've set out for ourselves to get that kicked off. ... Pittsburgh is a place that I went and met with the superintendent, actually a couple years ago, and was very pleased that they were one of the ones that really showed they wanted to try these changes. So we're at the very beginning of this, and there will be a lot of course correction, a lot learned.

For me, I'm just kind of surprised how nascent the field is that there hasn't been clear-cut measurement systems that improve quality and that the teachers really enjoy more than a sort of pure how many-years have you been on the job, and do you have a master's degree type approach.

Q: And why do you think that is? Why has it taken so long that someone's doing a study of this magnitude, and to parse the attributes of good teaching?

A: We had the highest college-graduation rate in the world and we were doing very well through the 1960s, and it was only in the 70s that we started to realize that on a competitive basis or even absolute basis, our comparative position was weakening, and that's gone on a number of years as other countries have done better. The urgency of, hey, we've really got to be smarter about this has grown. And I think, I hope we're at a kind of reflection point where parents, teachers, and politicians say, wow, we are really not where we want to be on an absolute or a relative basis. So now we've really got to delve into improving teaching.

I think it was known for a long time that some teachers are dramatically better than others. Anecdotally, everybody's had that experience, someone who really made the subject interesting and encouraged you and someone who explained concepts in the right way, but being systematic about it requires a lot of effort, and teachers have to be willing to engage in that effort. ...

There is some earlier work like in Tennessee in the 1980s that guides some of our work, so it's not like there was nothing. But if there was a great evaluation system that improved people and that was good, we would just grab that and promote its widespread usage.

We've got really two goals: We'll tune [our measurement systems] so these teachers involved like it, and the achievement is good, and they're telling other teachers about that. Because our dream here is not just to have four great locations in the country, it's to have a fundamental approach for constant improvement that is great for teachers and for students.

Q: Your earlier work in small schools was dealing with the structure of schools. This is a lot about the attributes of teachers. I'm wondering if you have an idea of what lies in the nexus there. How do you create school structures, leadership structures, other things that will help [effective teaching practices] transfer?

A: We think that the personnel system that does the measurement and incents improvement and helping other teachers improve is a first-class system. Incentive systems are very first-class systems, and so if you get that in place, then it can cause powerful change. We've seen in spaces like health care, if you can get the incentive system messed up, you can get costs out of control. We've seen in technology where the incentive for entrepreneurs, risk-taking is very, very good, you can get some magical things to happen. Here it's the personnel system, and in and of itself it's a very powerful factor if it's embraced after it's proved itself out.

We do think some of the structural things are complementary. Having 1,500 kids all in one big high school where you don't break it down into smaller groups—we still think that's a mistake and we actually have some pretty clear objective third-party data to say that, but we admit there's a ceiling. You don't just break a high school down into pieces and get the equivalent of schools in the suburbs or the best charter schools. Unless you're helping that teacher get better in the classroom, you can only go so far.

Q: What are the roles of school leaders in helping improve the effectiveness of teachers in the building?

A: They have a central role to play in this evaluation system. As a teacher's doing well, they're talking to them, talking about what aids there are to help them improve. They play a very central role. It's like management. Great software writers do have managers, and they have to have a very constructive relationship in order for that to work. People have to work well together and when things aren't going well they have to talk about what's going to change. Great principals and superintendents, that's another leverage point. But it's also our view that you could do a lot there and still you'd hit a ceiling. Those things are necessary but not sufficient. We've funded a lot of principal training about how you look at data, how you deal with infinite numbers of issues a principal has to deal with, and I think we got good gains on that.

Q: One of the most interesting components of MET is the study of student impressions. Can student impressions be part of a formal teacher evaluation?

A: I know there are cases where it's worked. The school I went to, which is a private high school, the student impressions are a major part of a fairly rigorous evaluation they do. What they found is that it aligns with the other [measures]. that is, it's not really an outlier.

When people first hear that, even when I first heard that, I was like, OK, we've got to be careful, because some of my best teachers I didn't love them. Actually, some of them I did love, but some of them it was kind of a tough-love situation where they pushed me quite a bit. So you do have to be careful with the student survey not to get any sort of popularity contest or ability of somebody to manipulate the thing. I doubt anyone would want to rely on that alone than they would want to rely on test scores or videos.

It happens to be a measure that is very low overhead. You can gather that data very very quickly. ... And preliminary data about some of those questions, are very predictive, very correlated with student achievement.

It's not to say that [student feedback alone] is our personnel system. I think it's wonderful because one of the problems we have is to get multiple data points so a teacher will not feel like it can be capricious. And as you move outside of math and reading, the test score data is not helpful there, and so if we can have things like this, we can bring more teachers in.

Q: What's your reaction to the fact that there have been some teachers and unions that have taken this work on, committed to the grants, signed contracts around it? After all, this is pretty scary stuff for a lot of teachers.

A: Absolutely. These are professionals, and when people change evaluation systems, that is a scary thing. If the imperative wasn't so dire in terms of the need to improve, if we were only going for small gain, then the comfort of the status quo should win out.

It's certainly unfortunate that we have in parallel with this a lot of state budgets that are very tight, and the funding for the state education system as a whole is subject to a lot of uncertainty and in some instances, cuts. If you had your druthers, you wouldn't be doing [this work] at the same time as there are those very tough things. But the work is so urgent it's not like on the behalf of students or teachers that you want to delay this stuff.
I'm impatient; I'm like you, see the videos of people who solve disruption in the classroom, who explain a concept well. And now that you can show me what good teaching is, finally, let's talk about how you transfer that to the other teachers...

Q: Any ideas about how to do that yet?

A: We will put great teaching out on the Internet for any teacher to look at. We'll organize that in a way they can find various things and learn from it. We will put great assessments out on the internet so a kid can self-assess and a teacher can assign a kid to self-assess to see what that kid may be missing. ...

It is strange how little we know about best practices. It's really very unusual. There are some teachers who are good with the kids who are behind and not with the kids who are ahead; there are some who are good at keeping the class calm but not explaining the concepts.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Four states with above-average participation in professional development share common structures and strategies for teachers' on-the-job training, concludes a new report released by Learning Forward.

Written by Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond and other researchers, the paper notes that there's no causal data to link the approaches to professional development in Colorado, Missouri, New Jersey, and Vermont to their higher student achievement. But the insights could spur better practices in districts across the nation, it says.

The report is the final entry in a three-part study of professional development. (Read this story and this blog item for EdWeek coverage of parts one and two, respectively.)

The authors selected those states because they had gains in student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and showed high levels of teacher participation in professional development, according to federal data collections. The states, the report says, shared features, including:

• Common standards for professional development that are integrated into licensure and certification systems;

• Emerging efforts to audit and monitor the quality of professional development;

• Mentoring and induction requirements for new teachers, some of which are enforced;

• A network and infrastructure that offer support for site-based professional development; and

• Stability of resources, even during the economic downturn.

Although dozens of states have adopted Learning Forward's PD standards, it's sometimes hard to know the extent to which those standards have "penetrated" the K-12 system. The report lists some interesting initiatives for each state studied that suggests the message has gotten through in those places.

Did you know, for instance, that schools in Vermont that miss adequate yearly progress for four years must implement the professional learning community model of PD—something that's not in the federal No Child Left Behind Act—or that Missouri has a state-run network of regional PD centers that review districts' school improvement plans?

Hard data on some of the new initiatives, like New Jersey's move toward professional-learning communities, are still scarce. We'll look forward to seeing more.

Many more examples in the report, so check it out.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Here's what Teacher Beat is reading this weekend. Keep those tweets and comments a-coming!

• Do education majors learn less than their peers in other bachelor's programs? That's one of the assertions in a new book that tries to gauge how much value college adds to student learning. (Hat tip to the Education Writers' Association's Linda Perlstein.)

• The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education responds to the news that the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report will be rating schools of education. It would like to see more emphasis on output-based measures, among other things.

• JPMorgan Chase will provide almost $100,000 in scholarship funds for teachers in high-need schools who are seeking National Board Certification. Research has shown that a lot of board-certified teachers tend to be in wealthier, higher-performing schools, and this initiative could help rectify that situation somewhat.

Have a good weekend and we'll be back with you on Monday.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Making teacher evaluation count not just for measuring effectiveness, but also for the ongoing improvement of teaching and learning means paying attention to many details beyond simply selecting the measures, a report by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching states.

They include carefully validating measures, supplying intensive, ongoing training to make sure observation ratings are consistent and not prone to "drift," and giving teachers and principals time to debrief ratings and determine strategies to improve, concludes the report by NIET, which oversees the Teacher Advancement Program school-reform model.

There's obviously a degree of self promotion in the report, but it also has implications far beyond TAP schools to the broader teacher-evaluation discussion so far.

Talk of teacher evaluation has been dominated by an increasingly screechy debate over whether or not to use "value-added" measures based on student test scores, rather than the issues NIET focuses on here: what other measures are available, how to put them together, and how to implement them in classrooms.

(If you're new to TAP and need a primer, read this EdWeek story.)

Here are a few highlights in the report:

• Different but complementary measures provide more information than any one measure. TAP evaluations are based on both teaching practices observed by skills and student achievement. Both have been empirically verified. TAP data show that the two measures correlate with each other, so that increase on one measure is consistent with increase on the other.

• Leadership teams in schools using TAP have a good deal of training on how to use the TAP evaluation framework, including practice sessions and the scoring of videos, and they must be recertified annually. An additional database stores evaluation results so that evaluators can check to make sure that ratings are consistent on each area of the rubric and probe problem areas. Teachers also understand what it means to score at each level: In TAP, a 1-5 rating system, a "3" is solid performance and the bulk of teachers receive that score.

• Professional development is closely linked to the system and isn't an afterthought; in a post-conference, an observer uses protocols in discussion with the teacher being evaluated to home in on areas of weaknesses and problem-solve.

• Districts and schools need to provide support to help maintain the system's high quality, including ongoing monitoring, re-training, analysis to insure 'inter-rater reliability,' and so on.

Reading between the lines: Teacher evaluation, done well, is not cheap. If it's truly to serve as the core of teaching and learning, policymakers better be prepared to pony up.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The mayor of the District of Columbia harbors concerns that the city's IMPACT teacher evaluation doesn't account for differences in the students and schools located across the city and therefore may not be fair to teachers, The Washington Post reports.

This is a subtle but important story with potentially large implications for the teacher-evaluation discussion now being held across the nation.

"It's not the same to teach in Horace Mann [Elementary in Northwest] as to teach in Stanton Elementary School [in Southeast]. That's a very different challenge," the paper quotes Mayor Vincent C. Gray as saying. "And frankly I'm not convinced that we have figured out yet how, with an evaluation system that covers all teachers across the city, that you account for the social challenges that inevitably are to be addressed by a teacher at Stanton Elementary School in ways that are different from those at Horace Mann."

"So I guess I would say at this stage ... it's a step in the right direction, but it's got a long way to go to be a fair evaluation of our teachers. And frankly any system that isn't sensitive to the differences in challenges of the kids in the schools only encourages teachers to teach in one part of the city and not in the other parts."

Interestingly, part of IMPACT actually does try to minimize the effects of student characteristics on teacher assessment: the value-added component for teachers with such data. The "co-variates" used in value-added measurements are essentially controls so that things like prior performance and poverty and so on don't interfere with the teacher measurements, though such controls aren't perfect.

Bill Turque's story suggests, though, that city officials think the Teaching and Learning framework, a major part of the overall evaluation for all teachers, should also somehow be able to address such differences.

The story intimates that the local teachers' union, which plans to propose an alternative to IMPACT, would be supportive of such a move. But I wonder if teachers would object to an evaluation framework that isn't consistent across the city.

And already there are other D.C. officials, like a council member quoted in this story, who think that entertaining different standards would open the door to lesser standards for teachers of poor kids.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A prominent scholar has criticized the preliminary report the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently put out on its Measures of Effective Teaching study, arguing that the conclusions the Gates Foundation draws from its data aren't supported by its research.

You'll remember that the earlier paper found that value-added estimates of teachers, particularly in math, did appear to predict performance in a teacher's other classes and on other tests. Student surveys also seemed to offer up some clues on teacher effectiveness.

But Jesse Rothstein, a University of California, Berkeley researcher who's written a number of papers on value-added measures argues that the Gates report actually appears to undermine the potential usefulness of of value-added as part of teacher evaluations, the opposite of the conclusions drawn in the preliminary MET report. At the very least, the report's enthusiasm for value-added is "premature," he said in an interview.

For example, the Gates project found a .54 or "moderate-to-large" correlation between teachers' value-added performance on the state math test and on a supplemental, more cognitively demanding exam. By Rothstein's reading of the data, a .54 correlation means that a teacher whose value-added put her at the 80th percentile would still have a 30 percent chance of scoring at the lower end of the scale on the other test.

The two parties aren't debating the actual data in question. Instead, what this amounts to is a problem of interpretation: Where the Gates folks find promise in the notion that there's some predictive power to these value-added measurements, that power, in Rothstein's view, is "shockingly weak." It hints that teachers' estimates on value-added measures depends on things like how closely they follow the curriculum on the test, he said.

When I asked Rothstein to describe what a less-worrisome, strong correlation might look like, he suggested an 0.7 or 0.8 correlation.

In the paper, Rothstein also argues that the Gates experts didn't account for the "fade out" of value-added estimates over time, as he's documented elsewhere, and that other problems, such as the nonrandom assignment of students to classes, mean that it's hard to know how these calculations would play out in the real world.

He contends that, by stating that value-added seems to be a relatively strong predictor of performance—before study on all the other measures is complete—the foundation's interpretation is skewed toward support of value-added.

I checked in with the Gates Foundation after reviewing the critique. Here's what spokesman Chris Williams had to say:

"I think we would say that Rothstein is right that we need more randomized evidence of the causal effects of the estimated teacher impacts," he said. In fact, that's actually a part of the project set to begin this year.

But, he added, the foundation doesn't think that value-added should be the sole measure of teacher effectiveness.

"The paper highlights the mistakes if we were to rely solely on test-score measures, but we're not advocating that approach, and I think we've been pretty clear about the purposes of the project," Williams said. "We don't think value-added [alone] should be teacher evaluation."

Whether you view these results as a boon or a blow to value-added, the bottom line for the moment is that researchers and practitioners really don't (yet) know the optimal mix of teacher evaluation measures or how to weight them.

Other questions to consider: What happens if some of the other measures being studied, like the much-awaited teacher observations, don't turn out to be all that highly correlated with student achievement? It's a distinct possibility. After all, as it turns out, the .54 correlation between tests was one of the stronger correlations in this preliminary report. (Student ratings, though consistent across a teacher's classrooms, were generally less predictive of his or her value-added performance.)

When all of the data is out from MET, will there be enough evidence from all these measures combined to make a decent evaluation tool? Could the problems with any one of these measures be balanced out by the strength of the other measures (i.e., if a teacher gets dinged on value-added but gets a strong observation score)? It's hard to say at this point, but the preliminary MET did find that the correlations got a little stronger when both value-added and the student perception information were combined.

In any case, whatever system is used to judge teachers will have some degree of error. Policymakers, teachers, unions, and school boards will need to come to an accord about how much and what type is acceptable for which purposes.

To the issues Rothstein raises in this paper, if the parties agree to pick value-added as one measure—and that's a big "if"—then they'll also have to make a decision about which value-added calculation to use, which test is most appropriate for that purpose, and which curriculum will underpin that test.

Not an easy thing to do.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, the publisher of the famous and much-debated college ratings, announced today that they are embarking on an ambitious project to review—and rate—teacher education offerings in all the nation's 1,400 schools of education.

Each school will be reviewed against 19 standards and graded on 17 of them. These standards have been revised and reduced in number since NCTQ did its review of Illinois and Texas education schools, essentially a "field test" for this larger project.

Alternative routes housed at institutions of higher education will be included in the review, but it won't include Teach For America or district-created programs that operate independently of ed. schools.

The groups are sending out letters to deans at all the schools seeking their participation in the review process. It's likely to be a difficult sell for some teacher-educators: NCTQ's Texas review was criticized by deans there even before the results came out.

In Texas, deans objected to the fact that the ratings were based on reviews of syllabuses and materials culled from websites rather than in-depth visits to schools. They argued that important topics might not be listed on such outlines. The forthcoming reviews are going to be based on a similar methodology, so anticipate more back-and-forth in this vein. (In fairness to NCTQ, ed. schools grumbled in the past about accreditation visits, too.)

Among other things, the reviews will focus on student-teaching, such as whether candidates are learning classroom-management skills; whether they are expected to take coursework or demonstrate expertise in their content area; and whether the ed. schools follow their graduates into classrooms to see how they're performing and survey them for feedback about how to improve programming.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Tough-talking New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has finally gone ahead and said that he wants to end teacher tenure in favor of five-year renewable teacher contracts, the Wall Street Journal reports. And In Idaho, state Superintendent Tom Luna has also advocated eliminating tenure and basing part of a teacher's salary on performance, the Idaho Statesman reveals.

In doing so, both men join officials in Florida and Wyoming (along with former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee) who also want to do away with tenure as it's currently conceived.

Christie's announcement isn't a particular surprise given all of his back-and-forth with the New Jersey Education Association. Not long ago, the NJEA presented its own plan to expedite due process hearings to 90 days, but that doesn't seem to have made much headway with Christie.

Leaders in two other states have tenure-reform proposals: Illinois officials want to tie tenure-granting to student achievement, and Utah leaders hope to make it easier to dismiss teachers with several years of poor student growth. Those changes are similar to the ones Delaware and Colorado, respectively, made last year during the run-up to the Race to the Top competition.

Has that competition emboldened more extreme action or is this a function of changing political winds?

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Former District of Columbia Chancellor Michelle Rhee has unveiled her new advocacy group's much-awaited set of policy priorities.

Rhee's profile in the education world is so huge that, unless you've moved to Jupiter for tax reasons, you have probably heard at least tangentially of her hard-charging style in D.C. For wonks closely following her actions, like those of us here at Education Week, most of the teacher-related ideas outlined in this paper from Students First aren't a big stretch from ideas she's espoused in the past.

But there are a few surprise additions in other sections, including an endorsement of California's "parent trigger" and support for private-school choice programs.

Let's take teacher issues first. The group says that decisions about professional development, compensation, hiring, assignment, and so on should be based primarily on performance, rather than on traditional factors like seniority.

One thing in particular caught my attention in this section: The group argues that teacher evaluations must be uncoupled from collective bargaining. That clearly stems from Rhee's experience in Washington. Everywhere else in the country, states specify some parameters for teacher evaluations in their districts, and beyond that, evaluation protocols often have to be bargained. But D.C.'s IMPACT evaluation system did not have to be bargained—a sore spot with the D.C. affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. It was one reason why the district was able to roll out the system so quickly and to implement some performance-based dismissals.

Essentially, the Students First proposal says that a school district should get feedback from teachers and their representatives on the plan, but should maintain the final say over its implementation. As you'd expect, that is not likely to be a popular idea with the unions, which would probably argue that such a proposal limits the scope of collective bargaining.

The proposal also advocates ending tenure outright for teachers. In the document, the group says that state and federal policies provide enough anti-discrimination protections for teachers that the addition of due process should no longer be needed.

Again, ending tenure is an idea that's not popular with the unions. But could there be any takers among states? A few years back, such a proposal probably would have been risible, but it's a different story today. In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican whom Rhee is advising, has also mentioned eliminating tenure. Rumors have it that he'll try to get a bill similar to S.B. 6, which would have ended tenure but was vetoed by former Gov. Charlie Crist last year. And Wyoming is also poised to debate the idea of ending tenure altogether for teachers.

As for new ideas: One would require districts to obtain parental consent for a student to be taught by an "ineffective teacher," and to allow them the option of having their child taught by one deemed effective.

Though the parent trigger permitted in California is still largely untested, Rhee says she supports it as an option for empowering parents.

And finally, she supports a mix of school choice options, including traditional schools, charter schools, magnets, virtual schools and private schools.

That is somewhat different from her position on private-school choice while in D.C. While serving as chancellor, Rhee said that she didn't oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships program, but didn't weigh in on vouchers as an educational intervention writ large. Now, she seems to have taken a stance on them. (Interestingly, Gov. Scott is taking a similar tack on vouchers in Florida, leaving the intriguing question of which of the two figures is rubbing off more on the other one!)

Also of interest: The teachers' unions came out swinging against this proposal (read the American Federation of Teachers' statement and the National Education Association's one here).

Dave Murray at the Grand Rapids Press offers an interesting perspective on the situation: It may be evidence that, while Rhee is far from proving that Students First can be a viable force for change, the unions are clearly taking no chances that her ideas will catch on.

"There are dozens of education advocacy groups out there, constantly churning out policy papers. But the swift and strong reaction to Rhee's Monday announcement shows the unions are taking this new organization seriously," he wrote.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The New York City Education Department must include teachers' names in the performance-data reports it provides to news outlets to fulfill open-records requests, a New York state court ruled today.

That means that media outlets in Gotham could potentially do something similar to last year's controversial series by the Los Angeles Times. Reporters there published a series of analytical stories based on linked teacher- and student-performance data obtained through an open-records request. The newspaper also made public a database allowing parents and the public at large to look up teachers by name and to see whether they were more or less effective in raising students' test scores.

Fearing a similar situation, the United Federation of Teachers had sued to redact teachers' names from such requests in New York, saying that such a release would constitute an invasion of the teachers' privacy. But the court didn't agree.

"This information is of interest to parents, students, taxpayers, and the public generally. Although the teachers have an interest in these possibly flawed statistics remaining private, it was not arbitrary and capricious for the DOE to find that the privacy interest at issue is outweighed by the public's interest in disclosure," Judge Cynthia Kern wrote in the opinion.

The court also knocked the UFT's argument that the city's officials had promised not to release the teacher reports publicly, saying that that agreement didn't overrule public access to the information. "The board of education cannot bargain away the public's right to access to public records," the justice wrote.

The UFT plans to appeal the decision, according to the Associated Press.

UPDATE (4:49 p.m.): Here's a statement from UFT President Michael Mulgrew:

"The reports, which are largely based on discredited state tests, have huge margins of error and are filled with inaccuracies, will only serve to mislead parents looking for real information.

"We intend to appeal as soon as possible, and will be asking the Appellate Division, First Department, to halt any release pending their review of Justice Kern's decision."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Districts in Washington state sent out more than 2,000 layoff notices between 2008-09 and 2009-10, and seniority was by far the greatest determinant of which teachers they prioritized for cuts. But evidence suggests that districts attempted to protect certain teachers, including those in "high needs" subjects and those who held master's degrees, according to a recent analysis of Washington state data.

What's more, had the decision been based on effectiveness, rather than seniority, the teaching force would have been significantly more effective on average, authors Daniel Goldhaber and Roddy Theobold assert in the paper.

The analysis, from a working paper by the Center for Education Data & Research, at the University of Washington in Bothell, provides a glimpse into which teachers under the seniority system are most likely to get the ax in tough budget times. (In Washington, most of these layoffs never came to pass, thanks to the federal economic-stimulus bill.)

it's also the latest salvo in the debate about layoff policies, which have come under fire from groups like the New Teacher Project. Such groups say that seniority-based layoffs could raise class sizes and negatively affect student achievement and disproportionately affect at-risk students. Recently, for instance, the American Civil Liberties Union and other partners won a lawsuit in Los Angeles alleging that such policies violated students' civil rights.

The authors looked at a sample of about 2,000 teachers who received layoff notices in 2008-09 or 2009-10 and compared it with the teaching force as a whole. They broke out the information by teachers' credentials, their license "endorsements," and used other state and federal data to supply the demographic characteristics of each teacher's school. They also used "value added" estimates on a subsample of teachers to create an alternate scenario looking at which teachers would have been cut based on presumed effectiveness, rather than seniority.

Among the findings:

• Teachers that received layoff notices were less experienced, by an average of 10 years in 2008-09 and eight years in 2009-10, not a surprising finding given the emphasis on seniority in local contracts. However, such teachers were also less likely to hold an advanced degree. The authors postulate that districts tried to hang on to teachers felt to have advanced skills.

• Evidence suggests that districts protected teachers in high-need subjects like math, science, and special education; having those credentials meant those teachers were less likely to be laid off. On the other hand, having an endorsement only in health/P.E. and the arts generally increased the likelihood of being laid off.

• Holding more than one endorsement generally decreased the likelihood of being laid off, signaling that districts may be trying to hold on to teachers who can be assigned flexibly to classes in the building.

• All that said, seniority swamped all other factors in predicting which teachers received a reduction-in-force notice, with a first-year teacher twice as likely as one in year 4-6 to receive a layoff notice.

• Value-added measures of teacher effectiveness were not correlated with the RIF notices, so administrators do not appear to have paid attention to effectiveness when targeting teachers for layoff. (All usual caveats about value-added not being a perfect measure of teacher effectiveness, etc., apply here.)

• In a subsample of teachers with value-added data, just 16 percent of teachers who received a RIF notice would also have received one had the decisions been based on value-added results. The results would also have affected some students less, with black students less likely to have their teacher laid off under the effectiveness scenario.

• A large differential in teacher effectiveness exists between those teachers who received RIFs and those who would have received them under the hypothetical, value-added-based model: 20 percent of a standard deviation of student achievement in math and 19 percent of one in reading.

Also, make sure to check out an earlier item for a summary of another paper looking at layoffs through a similar frame. It, too, found wide differences in who would be cut under two sets of layoff criteria.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A Washington-based political-action group proposed yesterday to use a bunch of federally funded teacher programs as the basis of a new competitive initiative to produce effective teachers.

Called "Ticket to Teach," the proposal by Democrats for Education Reform is part of a series of briefs on what the group calls "the new normal" for public education. The phrase riffs off U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's well-publicized speech last month at the American Enterprise Institute calling on districts to rethink how they're doing business in a time of fiscal austerity.

The idea of the proposal is to fund "consortia" of districts, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and community organizations to create a new, tailored initiative for preparing teachers. The funding would be used to support loan forgiveness, stipends, and scholarships for teacher-candidates—but only for candidates recruited from the top third of the nation's college students (similar to the idea put out by McKinsey & Co. in a recent report.)

The goal of this Race-to-the-Top-style initiative is to create preparation pathways that do a better job as service providers to local districts and that give new teachers higher salaries, more prestige, and more support in exchange for stronger accountability and a longer commitment to the profession, DFER Director of Federal Policy Charles Barone said in an interview.

For example, teachers prepared through the initiative would receive a $65,000 minimum starting salary, a yearlong "residency" before teaching, and more time for lesson planning, collaboration, and mentoring once placed. They'd get financial rewards as they prove they're effective in the classroom. But they'd have to agree to teach at least 3-5 years in the school in which they're placed.

In general, the idea is similar to the current Teacher Quality Partnership grant program, which funds partnerships of teacher colleges, nonprofits, and school districts to improve teacher preparation, but would be "more competitive" and with a more-specific set of requirements than the current programs, Barone said. For example, alternative preparers of teachers would need to be included in the consortia. The new pathways would need to include training in psychology, brain development, behavior management, data analysis, and special populations. And the consortia would have up-front agreements with district schools in which candidates would be placed.

The bulk of the funding, the group says in its proposal, should come by repurposing funding federal programs already on the books, including several loan-forgiveness initiatives for higher ed. in general; the TEACH grants, which subsidize teacher-candidates who commit to working in high-needs fields; the TQP program, funded through the Higher Education Act; and professional-development spending under Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

As usual, that could be a major challenge. Consider that much of ESEA Title II is caught up in things like class-size reduction and therefore not easy to move around, for instance.

"I think the odds of consolidating these programs are probably nil," Barone acknowledged. But, he added, there's still an opportunity to fund groups that manage to put together the pieces of these various initiatives in a comprehensive way. "Given budget pressures, people are going to look for better ways of spending funds they already have," he said.

I've sent the proposal off to groups that represent preparers of teachers for some reaction. While we wait for it, feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comments section—after you've read the whole proposal, of course!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Happy New Year! I'm excited to be back in town and back on the beat.

Before we return to our regularly scheduled programming, though, I shall follow in the steps of my colleagues and bring you this morning the most-read items from this blog in 2010.

1. NEA Votes 'No Confidence' in Race to the Top: In a highly symbolic move, the union voted at its annual Representative Assembly to take a "no confidence" position in the federal competition. Although most NEA affiliates are not big fans of the program, the vote was actually close: Some affiliate heads worried that making such a public fuss would jeopardize their relationship with the Obama administration.

2. Rhee to Dismiss Hundreds of Teachers for Poor Performance: The firing was heard round the country as then-Chancellor of the District of Columbia's school system Michelle Rhee pared her force of 241 teachers. The district touted the move as one of the first instances of performance-based dismissals, although as it turned out later, only some of the teachers had poor evaluations under the district's newly implemented system; the others were let go for problems with their licenses or because principals didn't want to hire them.

3. Obama Comments on R.I. Teacher-Firing Drama: A flare-up in labor relations between an American Federation of Teachers affiliate and a district became a national issue after President Obama added his two cents. The dust-up had to do with the district's decision to replace teachers using the "turnaround" model under the federal school improvement program. The incident highlighted the unusual dynamic between teachers' unions and the Democratic president they helped elect.

4. Scholars Support Value-Added Uses: On the heels of a number of reports highly critical of using "value-added" student test data in teacher evaluations (see no. 7 below), a group of scholars came out in favor of judicious use of the information. They asserted that, while imperfect and fuzzy, the information provided by value-added is useful coupled with other measures, and compared it to the high-stakes use of statistics in other fields.

5. Teaching Assignment Linked to Teach For America Retention Rates: A study by Morgaen Donaldson, a University of Connecticut assistant professor, found that TFA retention rates differ based on the subject, grade, and field taught. TFA posts are always popular (frequently generating some pretty, uh, impassioned comments by vocal supporters and detractors), and this one was no exception.

6. School Factors May Influence Teacher Effectiveness: A paper by C. Kirabo Jackson, a Cornell University researcher, suggests that teacher effectiveness varies based on whether the teacher is a good "match" for a school's culture and approach. School norms and cultures are understudied in general, and this paper suggests that diving into that question will be necessary for the teacher-effectiveness conversation.

7. Scholars Slam Value-Added for Teacher Accountability: Testing experts released a report highly critical of the use of student growth data, citing its instability over time. They argued that such data should make up no more than a minimal part of a teacher's evaluation, if at all, one of the opening salvos in a debate that is likely to crank on for years.

8. Panel Says Teacher Prep. Needs Overhaul: We've heard all that before, but this time the report seems to have gained some real attention, primarily because it was released by a major player in the teacher ed. arena, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Next on the agenda: Will ed. schools carry out these far-reaching changes? Stay tuned.

9. Bill Gates Speaks to AFT Convention: The philanthropist congratulated AFT affiliates for engaging in conversations about pay, evaluation, and tenure; took a slight (but underreported) dig at the NEA; and called on teachers to continue to confront tough issues. A major speech from Gates is always news—but with her efficient handling of a group of protesters, AFT prez Randi Weingarten came close to stealing away the show.

10. More Unions Bow Out of Race to the Top: In the run up to the Race to the Top, much attention was paid to the union "buy-in" factor. The defection of three state union affiliates from their states' respective bids made news here—coupled with a few instances of muddled messaging.

Also, don't forget to check out our top-read full Education Week stories at this link. Two important teacher stories made the cut: A study on performance pay and a profile of a district that did away with the step-and-lane teacher salary schedule.

Now, onward with 2011 coverage!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend