October 2011 Archives

By guest blogger Liana Heitin

The National Council on Teacher Quality released a study today examining the "changing landscape" of teacher-evaluation policies—which have proliferated in the last two years—across the states.

The report details some of the trends I addressed in a state roundup published in July. Those trends include a dramatic increase in the number of states tying teacher evaluations to student achievement and indications that there's continued legislative interest in making evaluations more rigorous, despite the fact that Race to the Top incentives aren't currently on the table.

In a webinar for education reporters, Sandi Jacobs, vice president of Washington-based NCTQ, explained that 24 states and the District of Columbia now require annual evaluations for all teachers, while in 2009, only 15 states had that requirement.

Jacobs also said that 23 states and D.C. now require teacher evaluations to include objective evidence of student learning. Of those, 17 states and D.C. require achievement be included in a "significant" way, and 13 states require the measures to be the "preponderant" criterion (that is, no other factor can count more than student-achievement measures). Just two years ago, only four states required student-achievement measures be the preponderant criterion in teacher evaluations.

That's a lot of action for just two years, Jacobs said. "Between 2007 and 2009, we didn't really see the needle moving at all" on these policies.

However, Jacobs noted that between states, there's "a great deal of variation in design" for these teacher-evaluation systems. For instance, Delaware and Louisiana have a single statewide system, while Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, and Ohio allow districts to create their own systems. Some states offer a system and allow districts to opt-in, and others let districts design the systems but the state must approve them.

Jacobs listed what the NCTQ considers the key "early lessons" for states embarking on these sorts of policy changes. Among other things, she said:

• "Teacher-effectiveness measures don't have to be perfect to be useful. Some people are concerned that not every 'I' is dotted and they're rolling out these systems. But keep in mind how unsatisfactory the [previous] systems have been." She added that an evaluation system "doesn't have to grind to a halt to be fine-tuned." (See my recent story on Tennessee's teacher-evaluation system, which is causing an uproar among teachers because it is far from fine-tuned.)

• States are struggling with finding measures of student-growth for nontested grades and subjects.

• Teachers need feedback on their evaluations.

• Whenever possible, states and districts should use third-party evaluators.

• Teachers "are nervous; they're hearing a lot of things that are scaring them. So it's important for states to think about that communication strategy." (Again, see the Tennessee story.)

• Evaluations should focus on everyone—not just low-performers.

Jacobs pointed to D.C.'s IMPACT evaluation system as a "strong example" of where such systems should be headed.

Jane Hannaway, vice president of the American Institutes of Research and director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, followed up Jacobs' comments with praise for both the NCTQ report and the trajectory of state policies.

"I think the change that has happened in the last two years in this country is remarkable," she said. The increase in political interest around teacher evaluation represents "a real awakening."

It's important to note that AIR does have some vested interest in such systems—the group has been awarded contracts to develop student-growth measures for the evaluation systems in New York and Florida.

Posted by Liana Heitin at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The University of Michigan today unveiled a new organization that will help teacher-training programs—and the teacher-education field in general—develop a more systematic approach to preparing their candidates.

Led by Deborah Loewenberg Ball, a renowned professor and dean of the university's school of education, TeachingWorks will disseminate a set of core skills for beginning teachers, along with a curriculum, materials, and performance assessments to help teachers master 19 specific skills. It also aspires to serve as a clearinghouse of information and evidence about high-quality teacher education.

In an interview, Ms. Ball told me that the University of Michigan developed the 19 skills over the past five years. Drawing on research and experience, she and colleagues tried to identify practices that could actually be taught and assessed, rather than more general dispositions. The original list was winnowed down from 68 to 19.

So, how does this list compare to Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, or the practices outlined by educator Doug Lemov, or the CLASS framework developed by the University of Virginia, or the rubrics used by TAP and Teach For America?

Ms. Ball said the framework intersects all of them, but differs from each in some ways, too. She said she wants to develop more of a consensus about beginning teacher practice with these organizations.

"It seems sort of silly to have all these different lists out there," she said. "Teacher training in this country is in deep trouble; no other profession has 1,400 different curricula for training their teachers."

The 19 skills identified by the University of Michigan and TeachingWorks include such "high leverage" practices as:

• Making content, including texts, problems, ideas, theories, and processes, explicit through explanation, modeling, representations, and examples;
• Eliciting and interpreting each student's thinking;
• Composing, selecting, and using assessment materials to monitor learning;
• Communicating about a student with his or her parents;
• Setting up and managing small-group work.

The practices are already the focal point of the University of Michigan's teacher-training. Last year, all the teachers in its elementary education programs had to pass assessments tied to some of these competences—not to their courses, as is typically the case. TeachingWorks will develop more.

Ms. Ball said that the group's approach to assessment will be somewhat more specific than, for instance, the Teacher Performance Assessment being developed by 21 states. It won't necessarily allow teachers to decide the content of the lesson they'll teach or the types of evidence they'll assemble for their portfolio, instead requiring those aspects to be tied to competencies in the Common Core State Standards.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Both a value-added teacher-effectiveness measure and a series of scored teacher observations bear a positive relationship to students' future academic achievement, according to a recently published paper in the journal Labour Economics.

In plain English, this means that when a teacher scored well on one measure of teaching ability, she also tended to score well on the other measure. That's encouraging news as states and districts go about the difficult task of designing evaluation systems that incorporate both kinds of information.

"The value-added information is useful information, but it's imperfect; the subjective complements it and makes us more certain in the overall evaluation," said Jonah E. Rockoff, one of the study's authors. "If someone is performing highly on both of these metrics, we can be more confident they're actually truly outstanding."

For the study, Rockoff and his co-author analyzed teacher-student data from New York City between 2003 and 2008. Using a value-added method, they looked at first-year teachers' performance in the classroom.

Then, they analyzed two forms of subjective, observation-based evaluations for these teachers:
• Information from teachers hired through the city's Teaching Fellows program, who were rated on a 5-point scale based on a mock teaching lesson and other criteria; and
• Information from a district mentoring program, where mentors would periodically observe and provide monthly feedback to the new teachers, also based on a 5-point scale.

The authors then looked to see how well the measures predicted teachers' future performance.

They found that both the observations and the test-score-based measures were correlated, or related; that both types picked up effectiveness information; and that that information was complementary; that is, they gauged different facets of teacher effectiveness.

The study also found that the effectiveness calculations became more precise when they were combined, which thereby "increases our confidence in each measure," the study states.

The findings also mean that, if someone scored well on one measure and not on the other, it could point to a problem in the evaluation. For instance, perhaps the teacher got lucky on test scores that year or had an evaluator that he didn't get along with. Essentially, the two forms of information can help serve as a check on each other.

The paper underscores the importance of using observations in addition to just value-added, because they can pick up on teaching skills not captured by test scores.

Obliquely, the paper also points out the crucial role of the training of observers.

When examining the scores the mentor teachers gave out, the authors found that some were generally more lenient graders than others. Future teacher performance wasn't related to teachers' average score; it was related to how teachers were scored relative to other teachers scored by the same grader.

Ideally, you want all raters to be trained to see the same thing when observing performance. This inter-rater consistency is something long-standing teacher-evaluation systems (like Cincinnati's or the TAP system) have underscored in their training.

"The lesson here is you do need to get the training right so the norming is right," Rockoff said.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 5:16 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

UPDATED

Just when you think everyone's ready to move on from the seemingly endless debate about traditional teacher preparation vs. alternative certification, along comes something to remind you that that old war is still being actively waged.

Exhibit A comes in the form of amendments that Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is prepared to offer Wednesday on a committee markup of the Harkin-Enzi ESEA reauthorization bill.

One of the amendments would disallow teachers in alternative routes from being deemed "highly qualified," as is currently the case. Only those teachers that had "fully completed" their programs, or had passed an assessment of teacher performance, could be called highly qualified.

The other one would require districts to disclose to parents that their teachers have not completed their teacher-preparation program, and to assign a mentor to such teachers.

These amendments draw something of a line in the sand on the issue of alternative routes. Such routes would either have to restructure their programming significantly, so that students complete all their coursework before becoming the teacher of record; or districts would have to send these notices to every single parent whose child is taught by an alt-route teacher.

Dueling interests have lined up on both sides of the debate, sending letters to the Congress with their arguments pro and con.

One such letter comes from something called the "Coalition for Teaching Quality," which includes the National Education Association and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, among many others. Several of the members were heavily involved in a lawsuit over HQT in California. The coalition supports the amendments, saying teachers still in training (as most alt-route teachers are) should not be called "highly qualified."

CORRECTED: Corrects the name of the Coalition for Teaching Quality.

The other comes from the New Teacher Project, itself a provider of teachers. It argues the parental-notification language would effectively prevent districts from hiring alternatively certified teachers, and shut out routes to teaching that have been shown to do well on value-added analyses.

Republicans have tended to favor alternative routes, so to put it bluntly, these amendments may not have enough votes to pass out of committee. (And if Tennessee's Sen. Lamar Alexander succeeds in an attempt to strip the "highly qualified" provisions out of the bill altogether, this whole debate may also be a moot point.)

As for the research on all of this: Essentially, it's hard to draw conclusions about teacher training routes at a meta-level. Several high-quality research syntheses have concluded that there's not enough evidence to favor one avenue over the other.

There are some common-sense reasons for this basic finding. Training programs themselves are astoundingly different in what they require of candidates in terms of coursework, length of field experience, and so on. Teacher training is not like law school, where everyone essentially takes torts and contracts and con-law, and so it's probably not surprising that there isn't a whole lot that can be said in general about it.

At a more micro-level, there are, of course, good and lousy traditional programs, and there are good and lousy alternative programs. Policymakers don't yet have finely-grained ways of distinguishing among programs, but some new methods, like the value-added analyses, are starting to come online.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In a recent letter to its members, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education left no doubt of its opposition to an effort by the National Council on Teacher Quality and U.S. News and World Report to review and rank all 1,400 schools of education.

AACTE has never been particularly enamored of this project, but as of this letter, dated Oct. 12, it's clearly signaling members not to participate, asserting that the project "is so fundamentally flawed, it is not worthy of your engagement."

That's only one of the zingers in the communique, which also calls the review an "outrage," a "cause for alarm," and NCTQ's tactics "unprofessional."

The letter goes on to outline several new objections to NCTQ's methods, including the fact that NCTQ is having students collect and submit documents when institutions won't voluntarily participate. It notes that these students are often undergraduates who don't have to meet a particular grade-point average. (Of course, some education schools' own GPA requirements are also fairly low.) It also notes the high costs of complying with FOIA requests from NCTQ at nonparticipating public institutions.

And, in what could be a new wrinkle for NCTQ, the letter asserts that some institutions have received legal notice that their course syllabi are proprietary, which means they might not have to submit them.

Wondering who's in and who's out of the review? You can find all of the correspondence on NCTQ's "Transparency Watch" website. We'll try to keep you updated here at Teacher Beat, too. Here's the rundown so far:

States in which some public institutions have declared they will not voluntarily participate: Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

The list is longer than when I last wrote about this, in April. Keep in mind, though, that even when state officials have declared their schools will opt out, individual institutions have chosen to participate. New York's CUNY schools are cooperating, as are some of the SUNY schools; Two Kentucky public institutions agreed to participate; and although State University System of Florida schools said they wouldn't participate, in the end several decided to, after all.

All of this action seems to be a harbinger of what's to come in 2012. The information NCTQ will be reporting will certainly be more detailed than prior studies of teacher education, but if this letter is an indication, the council's conclusions probably aren't going to be better received by the teacher education field. Institutions appear to be gearing up to say that NCTQ's methods are unsound, so the conclusions are flawed and unreliable. We've been through this before.

One other thing worth noting: Many of the programs protesting the study state that they meet standards set by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or other program-approval standards. It's an argument that raises the related question of whether those standards are high enough or nuanced enough to reliably distinguish program quality.

Below is the full letter from AACTE.

Dear Colleagues,

The outrage continues. As you recall from previous updates citing Brian Kelly's comments at a July NCTQ event, there is a clear negative bias held by both U.S. News and NCTQ against university based educator preparation programs. This is cause for alarm and further confirmation that this is a deeply flawed endeavor. AACTE continues to learn more about the practices that NCTQ is employing to conduct its national review and the ways our members are responding to them. We are committed to collecting and sharing information with you. Thus, below are some recent developments:

Students on Campus
NCTQ's presence on your campus might be more prevalent than you realize. Although NCTQ has said it will submit official FOIA requests to institutions that are not participating, AACTE has heard from many institutions that students on their campuses have been hired by NCTQ to obtain syllabi and other course documents from education schools, including those that have chosen not to participate in the project. NCTQ is hiring these students from any year of schooling—including some that just graduated high school last spring—from any program at the university and with no GPA requirement, and asking them to collect the data that will be used to draw substantial conclusions about your institutions' education programs. This is yet another unprofessional practice by NCTQ, which consistently touts itself as a credible research body. Some AACTE members have decided to bring the matter up with their institutions' leadership to determine whether students conducting these activities are in compliance with university regulations. If you encounter these students, please let us know about your experiences.

Proprietary Status of Syllabi
Several members have raised the important issue of whether syllabi are considered the proprietary property of faculty and, therefore, not allowed to be shared or sold by students back to NCTQ for commercial purposes. In some circumstances, members have vetted this topic with their institutions' legal counsel and have received confirmation that syllabi are considered proprietary.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
Institutions have begun receiving FOIA requests from NCTQ, mandating the submission of documents for the national review. We are hearing a wide range of costs associated with staff time and production of the requested materials, from $2,000 to more than $25,000. Rightfully, many institutions have billed NCTQ back for the costs, but to our knowledge, NCTQ has not yet reimbursed one of these programs. It could be helpful to find out if your state is one that requires anyone who submits a FOIA request to pre-pay those they are seeking information from—before they can receive the requested information. Please let us know how your institution is handling FOIA requests from NCTQ.

AACTE continues to assert that this initiative is so fundamentally flawed that it is not worthy of your engagement. However, we do understand that some programs will be required to participate for reasons beyond your control. Please stay in touch with us to share your experiences so that we can keep the entire membership informed. [E-mail of AACTE staffer removed.-TB]

Sincerely,

Sharon P. Robinson, Ed.D.
President and CEO
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The most recent draft of a Senate ESEA proposal would ditch a requirement for states and districts to revamp teacher evaluations, making it an optional activity for most. It would be required only for districts that win Teacher Incentive Fund grants.
UPDATED, Oct. 18: Eagle-eyed readers say it's also an incentive under Race to the Top, which would be codified in the bill.

All states and districts would still be expected to report on teachers' experience levels and whether they are teaching in their area of certification and have completed teacher preparation programs, and to equalize the distribution of teachers with those qualifications. (These metrics were in the earlier draft too, but were supposed to be a "transitional" form of reporting until the new evaluation systems kicked in.)

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers both quickly praised the change, as did Republicans, who argue that federally mandated teacher evaluations are an overreach.

This is truly an interesting development. When No Child Left Behind passed, a coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans pushed through the school accountability provisions. With the parties ever more divided, that center doesn't seem to exist anymore. Both right and left, seem intent on scaling back a muscular federal role in education reform, though for very different reasons.

AFT and NEA want still more flexibility on the school-turnaround models; neither union wants the staff replacement provisions carried over from the Duncan administration's version of the School Improvement Grants program.

NEA and a bunch of other groups, meanwhile, say they want to go still further and reduce reliance on annual testing (which would also make growth models and value-added measures well nigh impossible). So far, this is something that even Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander's proposals have retained.

Interestingly, the latest version of the bill proposed by Senate education committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, retains changes to the Title I "comparability" requirements, which, as I've written before, would have some serious consequences for districts and schools.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Liana Heitin

In a vague press release, the National Education Association announced that it has linked up with the Alexandria public schools in Virginia to review the district's employee-compensation model, claiming this to be "a first of its kind partnership."

Superintendent Morton Sherman cleared things up for me in a phone interview, explaining that the partnership evolved from a casual conversation he had with NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. At the time, Sherman, who emphasizes that he is firmly against merit pay because there have been "too many failed experiments" with it, said he was "looking for other ways to move the salary schedule ahead." He found out that Van Roekel had instituted a career ladder while heading the Arizona Education Association and he proposed that the two team up. "How many superintendents have crossed the threshold at the president of the NEA's office to talk about compensation?" asked Sherman. "We had a good conversation and agreed to work together on shaping something. I had one condition: The NEA could not come with an agenda. And we could not come with an agenda."

Van Roekel recently agreed to provide the district with NEA staff members at no charge to attend meetings with a committee of the school system's teachers and administrators. The committee will discuss policies related to salary and benefits, career paths, recruitment, evaluation, professional development, and retention. It also plans to tackle ideas around extending school time, which Sherman says he favors.

The superintendent first presented some of his ideas for a new compensation model to the school board last November in a document you can see here. The recommendations were in part a response to the district's struggles to meet federal benchmarks. ACPS' only high school, T.C. Williams, was deemed persistently low-achieving in March 2010.

Sherman said he hopes to implement compensation and policy changes for the 2013 school year. "I don't want to rush into this. I want to spend time doing it well."

Posted by Liana Heitin at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Senate education chairman Tom Harkin has finally released his committee's bill for renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now known as No Child Left Behind.)

Here's a look at the key pieces with respect to teacher-quality policy:

Teacher Evaluation

The big federal debate with regard to teacher evaluations has been whether the federal government will require, as a condition of receiving Title II teacher-quality funds, states and districts to set up new evaluation systems; or whether it will merely encourage them to do so.

The bill goes for the former option. Every state receiving a cut of Title II funds would have to create at least four statewide ratings categories for teachers and principals, and could also set other parameters.

Districts, to receive subgrants from the state, would then have to create the teacher-evaluation systems, based "in significant part" on evidence of improved student achievement, as well as teacher observations. The bill defines student achievement as information from state tests in subjects and grades where they exist, and other measures that are "rigorous and comparable" across schools. Districts would need to have their systems in place within five years of a completed law's passage.

It's worth noting that this requirement would still leave some room for locals to experiment. Think of it as similar to Colorado's approach to teacher evaluation, which sets out some basic requirements but lets districts flesh out many of the details.

The bill stands somewhat in contrast with the teacher-quality bill outlined by Republican Senator Lamar Alexander and others. That proposal made teacher evaluation reform an allowable use of federal teacher-quality funds, but not a requirement.

Clearly, this will be an area ripe for some discussion up on Capitol Hill. So far the National Education Association seems to prefer Sen. Alexander's approach making evaluation reform optional, not mandatory. The American Federation of Teachers, on the other hand, has been pretty quiet so far about how it feels about all of these proposals.

As for actual spending, districts could use their funds to set up the evaluation system, support mentoring and induction, performance pay or career ladders, or make personnel decisions about teachers.

'Equitable Distribution' of Teachers

The bill puts an emphasis on requiring states and districts to use the results of their teacher evaluation system to report on the percentage, by performance category, and retention rate, by performance category, of the teacher force. They'd be required to try to equalize disparities among high- and low-poverty and high- and low-minority schools, and would have the allowable uses of teacher-quality funds curtailed if they didn't make progress.

Class Size Reduction

One of the under-the-table debates about teacher quality has been whether districts could continue to use their teacher-quality funds to reduce class sizes. (Something like a third of Title II-A funds are used for this purpose.) The bill would allow this but only insofar as it aligns to the research on class size, which most likely means the findings from the STAR study, where the K-3 classes studied were quite small (13 to 17 students).

It is worth noting that similar parameters were put on the federal class-size-reduction program in the late 1990s but removed when No Child Left Behind came along, so this would basically tighten things up again.

Comparability

The bill would require teachers' salaries to be taken into account when performing the Title I comparability calculation. (Basically, this would require districts to send more of their own money up front to schools where teachers are paid less, in order to draw down federal funds).

Competitive Programs

For the competitive teacher quality programs, the bill would:

• Move Troops to Teachers to the Department of Defense;
• Authorize the Teacher Incentive Fund, a differentiated-compensation initiative; and
• Authorize a new "Teacher Pathways" program, similar to the one that the Obama administration has proposed. It would give grants to nonprofits or higher education institutions who work in partnerships with districts and states to selective recruit teacher candidates, train them in high-needs subjects and place them in high-needs schools.

'Highly Qualified' Teachers

The bill would keep these provisions in place, but would waive them (except for new teachers) once districts had operational teacher-evaluation systems in place.
It would also permit teachers still in alternative routes to be considered highly qualified for up to three years. (This exception was not in the NCLB statute; Education Department regulations permitted it, to the dismay of some.)

HQT, you'll remember, is absent from Sen. Alexander's bill.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Bryan Toporek

What would the NFL look like if it ran on a teacher-tenure system?

"The on-field product would steadily decline," former NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton wrote in an opinion piece published earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal.

Tarkenton uses this example to slam the concept of teacher tenure in his editorial, saying that tenured employees have no incentive to perform better.

Read the rest of the post on the Schooled in Sports blog.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By Guest Blogger Liana Heitin

Stephen thought his readers would be interested in a post over at Teaching Now about new-teacher induction.

At a conference in Washington on Tuesday sponsored by the Alliance for Excellent Education, advocates for strengthening new-teacher supports gathered in an effort to shift the teacher-effectiveness discourse—at least for the moment—from evaluation to induction, with some arguing that reform efforts should focus on developing great teachers rather than laying off ineffective ones.

Read the rest of the post here.

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