April 2011 Archives

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder included several new ideas focused on raising standards of entry for teachers in a wide-ranging proposal to the state legislature on education reform.

You can read my colleague Sean Cavanagh's write-up of the proposals, which run the gamut from performance pay and tenure reform to more online learning and school choice. But one thing that caught my attention in particular was the level of detail paid to teacher preparation and entry standards in the profession.

Among other things, Gov. Snyder called on the state board and department of education to:

•Ensure that teacher education programs require candidates to be able to instruct to the Common Core State Standards, now approved in all but a handful of states, and increase clinical experience;
•Increase the "cut scores" on teacher licensing tests;
•Ensure districts rigorously assess teachers' skills on the job;
•Better link continuing education/recertification requirements to activities that build teachers' skills;

Teacher education reform has been in the news lately, but not really at the top of the list for state governors or legislatures that have been focusing efforts or on changes to their teacher evaluation systems (or in curbing or doing away with collective bargaining).

Michigan, though, is an interesting state as far as teacher education is concerned. It produces far more teachers than there are actual teaching positions in the state and is known as an exporter of teachers to other states. So, if there's a competitive "marketplace" that could give an edge to some of these reforms, it is probably Michigan.

The reference to the Common Core State Standards Initiative is also notable. I've not heard much discussion so far about the ways in which teacher preparation will have to adapt to new content standards. Snyder's inclusion of CCSSI got me thinking about how well current teacher education programs prepare students to work with state content standards or with the curriculum at use in the local districts teachers are likely to work (many schools supply a majority of their teachers to one district).

Got any good examples of teacher-education programs that align to state or local content standards? Let us all know.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, a body of educators, teacher-educators, and state officials organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers here in Washington, has just finalized a revision of the Model Core Teaching Standards.

In the past, this influential set of standards has formed the basis of many states' professional teaching standards, and in some cases to guide teacher education program approval decision.

The InTASC group released a draft of the updated standards for public comment last summer and has been hard at work incorporating feedback from the field in the meantime.

Originally crafted in the early 1990s for beginning teachers, the revised version is meant to serve as a guide for teachers at all stages of their career. It delineates 10 areas of focus, detailing for each area the knowledge teachers should have, the performances they should demonstrate, and the "critical dispositions" that should guide their teaching philosophy.

In comparison with the draft standards, certain sections in the final version have been tightened up somewhat (especially for the dispositions) and others expanded a bit, but most of the changes seem aimed at making the standards as clear as possible.

There don't appear to be any major changes in emphasis between the draft and final versions. There is perhaps a bit more attention to teacher knowledge of grade-level academic-content standards. Since the document is supposed to work in tandem with the Common Core Standards Initiative, that's not too much of a surprise. The standards for leadership and collaboration are also more detailed.

As always, the question about all this work has to do with what changes they'll produce in the quality of teaching and learning. Will there be a more concerted effort on behalf of states to measure teacher progress against these standards? Will they align to all the teacher-evaluation work out already under way? Can "critical dispositions" be accurately measured, something that's proved challenging in the past?

I'm thinking, in part, of my colleague Catherine Gewertz' recent blog item, in which she reported that some textbook publishers are already pitching their materials as "common core" aligned. There is probably a parallel to be had with the InTASC standards. Let's hope that they will get states and teacher-preparation programs and districts thinking about where they are falling short, rather than becoming part of the "oh, we do that already" file.

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Two recent studies on Cincinnati's teacher-evaluation system provide some initial insights about classroom practices that seem to be linked to better student performance, and evidence that teachers improve as a result of the formal review process.

Published in the journal Education Next, the first study, by Tom Kane, Eric Taylor, John Tyler, and Amy Wooten, analyzes teacher scores on Cincinnati's evaluation system between the 2000-01 and 2008-09 school years. Under this system, teachers receive four observations and are graded on a 1-to-4 scale on several different standards.

The researchers grouped these standards into three main areas: overall classroom practices (which includes all of the standards), classroom management, and using questioning and discussion instructional techniques.

They found that a 1-point increase (from 3 to 4) on overall classroom practices led to a seventh of a standard-deviation increase in reading achievement and a tenth of a standard deviation in math achievement.

In addition, they found that, while overall teaching practice was the best predictor of student achievement, classroom management was more highly correlated with better math performance than the teachers' use of questioning. For reading, use of open-ended questions was more highly correlated with student performance than classroom management, though this finding was somewhat less robust.

The link between classroom practices and achievement is also a question being studied as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measure of Effective Teaching project. (MET is also being overseen by Kane, who participated in this Cincinnati study.) The Gates folks have released some information from MET, but we've not yet had the analysis of the classroom observations.

Arguably, information on classroom practices are the most important of all, since it will help teachers know specifically what they can do to be better at their craft.

A second study on Cincinnati's evaluation system came out in March. That one, credited just to Taylor and Tyler, looks at the effect of evaluation on midcareer teachers.

Again using longitudinal student data, the researchers found that student performance improved in math—both during the year the teacher was evaluated and even more in the years following evaluation—compared with students assigned to the same teacher in the years before the teacher was reviewed. The study found that these results couldn't be explained to changes in the type of students taught by those teachers or to experience.

You may be wondering why all this research is coming out of Cincinnati. Well, it's one of the few districts that has used a teacher-evaluation system based on several classroom observations—and with four categories of teacher performance—for more than a decade.

In other words, it's essentially the basic model many states and districts are now trying to put in place to meet the requirements of federal competitions and newly passed state laws on teacher evaluation.

(There are, of course, some differences between the Cincinnati model and some of the new systems going into place, like the District of Columbia's IMPACT. For instance, Cincinnati does not currently use value-added, and most teachers are reviewed at Year 1, at the tenure year, and every fifth year thereafter, rather than annually.)

Cincinnati's system also connects to a career ladder of sorts. Teachers identified as being especially effective can move to "lead teacher" role and serve as peer-evaluators or in a variety of other roles across the district.

A plan to tie the system more broadly to teacher pay across the district, however, was voted down by the teaching corps in 2002.

Another important point: These findings are coming out in a teacher-evaluation system where the majority of teachers receive 3s or 4s on the 4-point scale. That's raised some questions about the rigor of the system. But in the Education Next study, the authors note that, despite the high ratings overall, "there is a fair amount of variation from teacher to teacher that we can use to examine the relationship between TES ratings and classroom effectiveness."

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The wires are buzzing with the details of a bill recently signed into law in Ohio, SB 5, which limits the scope of collective bargaining for public employees in that state, does away with reverse-seniority layoffs, and will tie teacher evaluations to pay raises.

The state is being billed in some news reports as the first in the nation to require merit-based pay for all teachers, although legislation signed into law in Florida seems to have a very similar requirement. I haven't completed my read of the enormous, 300-page bill yet, but from what I can tell, it isn't all that explicit about just how the new pay systems should be structured.

The state is hard at work putting together a new teacher-evaluation model for its participating Race to the Top districts. Now it looks like whatever it comes up with will end up being adapted statewide and also connected to pay reforms.

Many of the details in the bill will influence the refinement the evaluation system, including a requirement in SB 5 that 50 percent of the teacher evaluation be based on student growth.

"We're really trying to build a flexible model that can adapt to many situations, but still meet the measure of the law," Julia Simmerer, the director of Ohio's education standards board, told me last week.

The new evaluations are rolling out for the state's Race to the Top districts this fall (minus the student-growth component).

What's NOT gotten a lot of press, however, is that Ohio Gov. Kasich, a Republican, is also proposing that teachers who work in the state's lowest-performing schools take tests of subject-matter competency, as one of several proposed reform measures. The idea is to make sure that teachers in the lowest-performing schools know their content.

The proposal is in Kasich's budget proposal. It's not clear who's supposed to foot the bill for these tests; the budget doesn't specify that part.

States have mixed records on licensing tests. Most of them, save Massachusetts, set the passing bar at a pretty low level. On the other hand, it's interesting to note that this proposal would re-test teachers once they've already gotten into classrooms.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATE (April 20, 4:45 p.m.): Since this item was published, I've confirmed that several institutions in two additional states, Kentucky and New York, won't voluntarily participate. Continue reading for the latest details.

Some public higher education institutions in Wisconsin, Georgia, Kentucky, and New York—and possibly other states—will not participate voluntarily in a review of education schools now being conducted by the National Council for Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report, according to recent correspondence between state consortia and the two groups.

In response, NCTQ and U.S. News are moving forward with plans to obtain the information from these institutions through open-records requests.

In letters to the two organizations dated March 28 and March 16, respectively, the president of the University of Wisconsin system and the chancellor of Georgia's board of regents said their public institutions would opt out of the review, citing a lack of transparency and questionable methodology, among other concerns.

Also on March 16, the presidents, provosts, and education school deans of public universities in Kentucky wrote in a letter to the research and advocacy group and the news magazine that they won't "endorse" the review. Phillip Rogers, the executive director of Kentucky's Education Professional Standards Board, confirmed to me that this means the state will comply with public-records requests, but it isn't voluntarily handing over information.

Finally, the chancellor of the State University of New York system, Nancy Zimpher, sent a letter April 20 stating that she will direct system officials that they "need not participate" in the review.

The situation is murkier in Maryland, Colorado, and California, where public university officials have sent letters to NCTQ and U.S. News requesting changes to the review process, but haven't yet declined to take part willingly.

Formally announced in January, the review will rate education schools on up to 18 standards, basing the decisions primarily on examinations of course syllabuses and student-teaching manuals.

To a degree, whether or not public institutions participate voluntarily in the review is a bit of a moot point in the face of an open-records request. But with these letters of protest, the institutions are on record as opposing the review. They'll have something to bring forth if they receive unfavorable ratings.

To date, NCTQ has sent requests for information and public-records requests to institutions in Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The states have thus far been quite cooperative, according to NCTQ's director for the project.

The recent action is in addition to separate letters raising concerns about the review sent by state associations of teacher education colleges. These associations typically count both public and private colleges of education as members. NCTQ and U.S. News have received letters from the Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia chapters. They appear to be leaving the decision to take part up to their member institutions, in much the same way that the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is doing.

You can read some of the correspondence on NCTQ's new "transparency central" website. It lists the number of participating institutions in each state and the number of institutions in the state to which the council has submitted an open-records request.

Additional correspondence will be put up on the website as requests for information go out to more states and institutions, said Arthur McKee, who is directing the project for NCTQ.

If you're new to this debate, here's an Education Week story with some background for you. The review has been in the works for about a year, but its official "launch" brought protests from deans at schools affiliated with the Association of American Universities and from another group of deans whose institutions had received grants from the Spencer Foundation. [UPDATE (April 21): A source says these are used to improve research training for doctoral candidates.]

In response, NCTQ and U.S. News hosted a couple of webinars in February and made a presentation at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education's conference, in San Diego. The review partners said they'd no longer issue failing grades to colleges that don't participate, instead giving "estimated" scores. They agreed to allow institutions to publicly challenge ratings and make those challenges and responses public on NCTQ's website. And finally, they're developing another outcome-based standard based on "value added" data for states such as Tennessee and Florida that can link recent graduates back to their preparation programs, in response to complaints that the review was too focused on syllabuses.

If the recent correspondence is any indication, such actions don't seem to have done much to reassure the teacher-preparation field at large. Take, for example, this letter from the Council for Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions. Its signatories insist that institutions should not be given scores at all if they don't want to participate.

There are a couple of related issues worth teasing out here. One has to do with an emerging subtext about which standards really matter for teacher preparation and how institutions should be measured against those standards. Several of the letters from the states reference state-approval standards, regional accreditation standards, (voluntary) teacher education accreditation standards, and the standards promulgated by the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium. Many of those standards have been put together by the education field, as in other professions, these officials argue, and are based on research and consensus about good teaching,

NCTQ, in general, contends that such standards are too vague—and in any case, points to the fact that few institutions have failed to meet them over the years.

We'll soon have upgraded sets of standards to debate: Two teacher education accreditation bodies are merging and plan to upgrade their standards. And the Council of Chief State School Officers is finalizing a new version of the InTASC standards. So expect more on this topic to come.

Second, the transparency question seems worthy of additional attention. Should private institutions that produce public employees, like teachers, participate in these kinds of reviews?

And here's a question for NCTQ and U.S. News: What's incumbent upon them to release? They've released the indicators for each of the review's standards but won't release the scoring guide, something several of the school groups have requested.

We'll have more for you soon. This review, and all the issues it's raising, isn't going to be going away anytime soon.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 7:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

As teacher-evaluation policies continue to emerge, several states are adding flesh to the outlines made in state law or in their winning Race to the Top bids.

Tennessee's Teacher Evaluation Advisory Committee has released its blueprint for the state. You may recall that, according to a state law passed last year, 50% of the evaluation must be based on student academic achievement (35% on growth in test scores and 15% on alternate measures, such as graduation rates). The state eventually won a $500 million grant in the federal competition.

For teachers in non-tested grades and subjects, the state will for now use schoolwide value-added growth rather than individual teacher value-added measures.

As much as teachers' unions have concerns about value-added for individual teacher evaluations, they're even less sanguine about using schoolwide growth measures. That's partly because individual teachers' ratings will be based on the achievement of students with whom the teacher may have no contact.

UPDATED, 4/20/11, 2:25 pm: State Commissioner Kevin Huffman reminds me the schoolwide component isn't permanent; teams of teachers are working to develop other measures, some of which could be ready this fall. The law governing teacher evaluations requires the new system to start then, which explains why schoolwide value-added will serve as a stopgap measure. Also, some teachers he's spoken with in the state say the schoolwide measures will improve collaboration and the teaching of core subjects across the curriculum. So, there are a variety of opinions on the matter.

Contrast Tennessee's approach with that of Rhode Island and select New York districts, which are developing alternative measures for non-value-added grades and subjects.

In other news, Tennessee approved the Teacher Advancement Program's rubric for the four required principal observations that make up the other part of each teacher's evaluation. And Gov. Bill Haslam approved a bill that would tie the still-emerging evaluations to the state's tenure-granting process.

Colorado's Council for Educator Effectiveness, meanwhile, just released nearly 200 pages of recommendations on teacher evaluation. A bill approved by the legislature last year, S. 191, requires performance-based teacher evaluations for all teachers, which will ultimately be linked to tenure-granting, layoff, and dismissal decisions.

The report lays out a specific evaluation framework for the state, but there will be flexibility for districts to weight some of the components according to local needs, as the Denver Post reports.

Two things in the Colorado report warrant a particular mention. First, the panel report underscores that the system should help support the development of better teachers, not just "sort" them into categories. Second, it outlines the challenges that different kinds of teachers and schools—i.e., rural, urban, high school, elementary school—might face in putting the system into practice.

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Politics K-12's Alyson Klein has the latest for you on the fiscal 2011 budget bill. Here's an interesting teacher-policy tidbit: Under the finalized agreement, which Congress will vote on in short order, 1 percent of the $2.5 billion Title II-A State Teacher Quality Grants would be reserved for a competitive program.

Groups eligible for such a competition include national teacher programs that have been cut under stop-gap funding measures, such as the National Writing Project, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and Teach For America, among others.

Based on the budget figures, one percent would amount to $25 million at the most. That's not a whole lot of cash for all these groups to fight over, when you consider that the three groups I named above had earmarks totaling $54 million.

Still, one of the reasons this is important to follow is because the Obama administration, in two successive budget proposals, has already proposed consolidating this funding into competitive grants, supplemented by some $500 million from Title II.

In other words, we're likely to get some signals from the administration about how it would like to run a competitive teacher-quality grant programs. Stay tuned.

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The original peer-assistance and -review program seems to have narrowly escaped the budget ax in Toledo, Ohio, a decision that allows the district to access its nearly $11 million cut of Race to the Top funds.

Last month, Superintendent Jerry Pecko indicated plans to "cancel" both PAR and an alternative-compensation system known as TRACS, as part of a plan to close a projected budget deficit of about $37 million. In newspaper articles, Mr. Pecko said he'd work with teachers to institute two different (presumably cheaper) programs.

In response, Francine Lawrence, the president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, sent a letter to the Ohio education department pulling the union's support for the Race to the Top. Since both programs were included in the district's scope of work under the federal grant, she reasoned, the superintendent's cancellation of the program had effectively altered the jointly agreed-upon plan for implementing its share of the funding.

PAR carries symbolic importance for both the TFT and for "labor-management collaboration," an idea that's been in the spotlight a lot lately. Lawrence's husband, Dal, helped institute the program in 1981; she once described it to me as "the fundamental collaborative initiative between union and management. All of our other collaborative ventures stem from that."

TRACS is relatively more recent. It began in the early 2000s and also got funding from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund grant.

Now, Pecko and Lawrence appear to have worked things out. They recently sent a joint letter to the state education department in which Pecko withdrew his cancellation of the programs, and Lawrence reinstated the union's commitment to RTT. For the time being, that seems to mean both programs will be sheltered from budget cuts.

But there could still be other conflicts mounting over the programs. As this Toledo Blade story indicates, there are potential battles brewing over the place of "value added" achievement growth in the two programs.

PAR is part of the district's evaluation system, while the TRACS program rewards both individual and school-based achievement growth. I've looked up the details of TRACS, and teachers do need to set and show they've met an achievement-growth goal. But from what I can tell, that doesn't necessarily need to mean standardized-test scores.

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A bill to end "last-in, first-out" layoff policies in Georgia has passed both chambers of the legislature and is on its way to Gov. Nathan Deal for signature.

The bill, SB 184, prohibits local boards of education from using seniority as the "primary or sole" determining factor when implementing a reduction in force. Boards that don't comply can have some of their state education funds withheld.

Georgia's action follows that of Utah, where a similar bill was recently signed into law. Other states that have recently ended LIFO through legislation include Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona, in addition to the District of Columbia through its recent teachers' contract.

Former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's advocacy organization apparently played a role in getting this bill through, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

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"Gen Y" teachers want more frequent feedback on their teaching, tend to be more open to shared practice, and say that rewards and sanctions should be differentiated based on performance, a new analysis concludes.

But, while such teachers believe in teacher evaluation, they have concerns about whether it can be done equitably and validly, and they tend to overestimate schools' ability to provide them with up-to-date technology tools, the analysis says.

Put together by the American Institutes of Research and the American Federation of Teachers, the analysis tries to pick out key features of teachers from Gen Y—defined as those born between 1977 and 1995—and their relationship to the profession. It pulls from some 11 different surveys, focus groups with Gen Y teachers, and three case studies in AFT districts.

We're all drowning in teacher surveys, and it's useful to have a compendium of them all in one place. Check the appendix for links to all of the instruments that were reviewed, and in some cases re-analyzed, for this report.

There's nothing particularly surprising about these findings, but they do a good job of playing up one of the big tensions going on these days, especially for these younger, Gen-Y teachers. This generation, with its love of Facebook, Twitter, and social media, wants regular, rapid feedback on its performance. And it's open to making teaching a more transparent, shared process. But formal feedback as part of an evaluation or performance review is still viewed as potentially unfair, frightening, and biased.

The latter finding is interesting in light of a study from last year of teacher evaluation in select charter school networks. In that study, the authors found that evaluation is a much more common practice, but it's also somewhat less formal, often taking on more of a coaching structure. Such a system is somewhat harder to do in K-12 schools, where there's often for legal reasons a clear demarcation between coaching and and formal evaluations.

Hard to say what policymakers across the county now working on evaluation systems are supposed to make of these findings. In any case, it's clear that this is a delicate, difficult balance to strike.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

From guest blogger Liana Heitin:

Joseph A. Aguerrebere, the president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, will step down June 30 after eight years of service, the organization announced in a statement today.

Neither the statement nor an NBPTS spokesman gave a reason for Aguerrebere's departure.

Aguerrebere joined the NBPTS, the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit that provides voluntary national certification for qualifying teachers, in 2003. He previously was deputy director at the Ford Foundation in New York City.

According to the NBPTS statement, the number of nationally certified teachers quadrupled during Aguerrebere's tenure, and is now at 91,000.

The board will soon start a nationwide search for a new president.

For more on Aguerrebere's tenure, see his bio here.

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The highest-performing teachers appear to be underrepresented in economically disadvantaged middle schools—but the pattern is less pervasive at the elementary level, concludes a study of 10 districts released today.

The study, released by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, analyzed value-added test-score data drawn from the 10 districts, which cover 723 schools and more than 11,000 teachers in all. Eight of the districts are participating in the IES-funded Talent Transfer Initiative research project, which I wrote a bit about in this story.

The researchers calculated value-added estimates for all of the elementary school teachers, as well as middle school reading and math teachers. Then, they identified the top 20 percent of teachers in each subject and grade span that got the greatest gains for students.

Next, they put each district's schools into poverty quintiles and examined which schools had the most top teachers.

The greatest disparities emerged for middle school math and reading. On average, 29 percent of the top middle school math teachers worked in the lowest-poverty schools, while 15 percent taught in the highest-poverty schools.

At the individual district level, there were differences in those patterns. Some had no major differences between high- and low-poverty schools in the proportion of the most effective teachers, while others had disparities. One district had a whopping gap for middle school math teachers, with 62 percent of the top teachers in the lowest-poverty schools compared with just 6 percent in the highest-poverty schools.

Of the 10 districts, eight also had information on elementary schools. There, the distribution patterns were less clear-cut: On average, there was no statistically significant difference between the highest- and lowest-poverty schools' proportions of top teachers.

At the individual district level, however, four of the eight districts had more top-performing teachers at low-poverty schools. But in at least one district, the number of highly effective teachers was actually much greater at the highest-poverty schools.

The districts range from 40 percent to 100 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

The scholars point out that the findings can't be extrapolated from the 10 districts to apply to the nation, but they are certainly suggestive. And they're interesting to consider in light of another study, put out by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, on where highly effective teachers are located.

That study, based on data from North Carolina and Florida schools, found that schools serving primarily poor students do have some great teachers, but that, overall, the talent spread is wider in such schools than in more-affluent schools. Read more about it here.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The zeitgeist around teacher-quality policy these days is clearly "teacher effectiveness," as measured through standards-based observations of teachers coupled with some aspect of student growth.

There's good reason to believe that whatever happens with a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it will include some policymaking on this topic. Take the Obama administration's Blueprint as just one of the policy possibilities.

That still leaves the folks on Capitol Hill with the puzzling question of what to do with the current "highly qualified teacher" requirements in ESEA.

HQT has not been on the radar screen lately, and honestly, if there is one part of ESEA that everyone loves to trash talk, it's gotta be this part. No matter where people stand on teacher quality, they generally agree that the HQT standard is pretty low, and that the implementation and enforcement of the provisions leave a lot to be desired.

It's possible that HQT will go away altogether in favor of some effectiveness measure, but that would pose new problems. For instance, if you want to use value-added as one measure of teacher skill, you need at least a few years of data to do so. Beginning teachers aren't going to have that.

Some advocates say it's important to continue to have a baseline quality standard for beginning teachers until they can be mentored and evaluated.

That was the basic point made yesterday by a variety of civil-rights groups, including the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, the NAACP, the National Council on Educating Black Children, and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, at a panel discussion on Capitol Hill. Representatives from those groups said at the meeting that Congress should tighten the HQT as one part of an overall strategy for better distributing qualified and effective teachers.

Many studies over the years have shown that poor students tend to get inexperienced teachers or teachers with lesser qualifications. In particular these civil rights groups are peeved at what they see as federal capitulation in those patterns. They're protesting a 2002 U.S. Department of Education regulation that allowed states to consider teachers who were still in alternative routes to certification as "highly qualified" for a limited number of years.

This regulation, you may recall, was the basis of a California lawsuit in which parents said their children's civil rights were violated by being taught disproportionately by intern teachers who, while technically "highly qualified," were still learning the ropes. A panel of judges ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and against the Education Department.

But late last year, Congress codified the regulation in a stop-gap measure, essentially rendering the California situation moot. In response, the groups presenting at yesterday's panel discussion shot off a strongly worded letter of protest to President Obama, the U.S. Secretary of Education, and the House and Senate education committees.

At the event yesterday, the groups said that the rewrite of ESEA should require districts to disclose to parents which teachers are still in training, to make sure that poor and minority students have access to "fully prepared" teachers, and to stop what they deemed the "race to the bottom" in teacher qualifications.

Is it that easy in practice? Well, research on the topic of entry qualifications, specifically preparation and certification, is notoriously difficult to parse. There does seem to be some evidence that specific kinds of experiences, like student-teaching, do matter, and that all other things being equal, qualifications—and the time at which teachers finish their formal preparation—can exert an influence on student achievement.

A study on North Carolina data found that teachers with "regular" licenses tended to do somewhat better than "lateral entry" teachers still taking coursework, for instance. Yet, when compared to a broader set of factors, teachers' licensure type in that study was less closely related to how their students did than factors like number of years of teaching experience and licensure test scores.

Generally, there is so much variation within both alternative and traditional education programs that it's hard to say anything universal about them at the 30,000-foot level where policy is made. Differences in routes also seem to even out somewhat over time as teachers gain experience: At least one research synthesis has basically called a draw on the matter saying there's not much evidence that students taught by alternative route teachers are, on average, better or worse than those taught by traditional routes.

So, for Hill staffers, the question is: What do you value? Is there a way to set a better minimum standard for teachers without shutting out potentially good routes to teaching?

Bottom line, revising the HQT standard isn't going to be a cakewalk. Far from it. It does seem like these civil-rights groups have gotten an ear on the Hill: The event was "co-sponsored" (whatever that's supposed to mean) by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Finally, a few things were more or less left out of this discussion. The event was very focused on loopholes in the HQT standards for beginning teachers. But there was almost no discussion about all of the other work-arounds in the law for veteran teachers.

If, for instance, you were a veteran teacher, you could skip taking a test or content credit hours and complete an alternative, state-set standard known as the HOUSSE to demonstrate content competency. States' HOUSSE options were widely considered to be fairly poor in quality. Teachers' unions are among those who have endorsed efforts to beef up the HQT standards—but they were also among the groups who fought to keep the HOUSSE option in place when the Education Department tried to close it in the mid-2000s.

When I posed a question to the panelists about raising the bar for existing teachers, they suggested that new teacher evaluations could help serve that purpose.

That makes some sense, when you consider that the research is pretty clear that teachers' skill levels do vary considerably, and that things like qualifications don't seem to predict much of that variation. Much of the work on teacher evaluations could lead to a better sense of what makes for effective practices.

Still, the panelists didn't go into much depth about what new teacher evaluations should look like—other than underscoring that such systems should be based on multiple measures.

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