Teacher Quality

What Happened To Teacher Quality?

Starting around 2005 and up until a few years ago, education policy discourse and policymaking was dominated by the issue of improving “teacher quality.” We don’t really hear too much about it the past couple of years, or at least not nearly as much. One of the major reasons why is that the vast majority of states have enacted policies ostensibly designed to improve teacher quality.

Thanks in no small part to the Race to the Top grant program, and the subsequent ESEA waiver program, virtually all states reformed their teacher evaluation systems, the “flagship” policy of the teacher quality push. Many of these states also tied their new evaluation results to high stakes personnel decisions, such as granting tenure, dismissals, layoffs, and compensation. Predictably, the details of these new systems vary quite a bit, both within and between states. Many advocates are unsatisfied with how the new policies were designed, and one could write a book on all the different issues. Yet it would be tough to deny that this national policy effort was among the fastest shifts in recent educational history, particularly given the controversy surrounding it.

So, what happened to all the attention to teacher quality? It was put into practice. The evidence on its effects is already emerging, but this will take a while, and so it is still a quiet time in teacher quality land, at least compared to the previous 5-7 years. Even so, there are already many lessons out there, too many for a post. Looking back, though, one big picture lesson – and definitely not a new one – is about how the evaluation reform effort stands out (in a very competitive field) for the degree to which it was driven by the promise of immediate, large results.

What Do Schools Fostering A Teacher “Growth Mindset” Look Like?

Our guest authors today are Stefanie Reinhorn, Susan Moore Johnson, and Nicole Simon. Reinhorn is an independent consultant working with school systems on Instructional Rounds and school improvement.  Johnson is the Jerome T Murphy Research Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  Simon is a director in the Office of K-16 Initiatives at the City University of New York. The authors are researchers at The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard Graduate School of Education. This piece is adapted from the authors’ chapter in Teaching in Context: The Social Side of Education Reform edited by Esther Quintero (Harvard Education Press, 2017).

Carol Dweck’s theories about motivation and development have become mainstream in schools since her book, Mindset, was published in 2006.  It is common to hear administrators, teachers, parents, and even students talk about helping young learners adopt a “growth mindset” --expecting and embracing the idea of developing knowledge and skills over time, rather than assuming individuals are born with fixed abilities.  Yet, school leaders and teachers scarcely talk about how to adopt a growth mindset for themselves—one that assumes that educators, not only the students they teach, can improve with support and practice. Many teachers find it hard to imagine working in a school with a professional culture designed to cultivate their development, rather than one in which their effectiveness is judged and addressed with rewards and sanctions.  However, these schools do exist.

In our research (see here, here and here*), we selected and studied six high-performing, high-poverty urban schools so that we could understand how these schools were beating the odds. Specifically, we wondered what they did to attract and develop teachers, and how teachers experienced working there. These schools, all located in one Massachusetts city, included: one traditional district school; two district turnaround schools; two state charter schools; and one charter-sponsored restart school. Based on interviews with 142 teachers and administrators, we concluded that all six schools fostered and supported a “growth mindset” for their educators.

Promoting Productive Collaboration Through Inquiry: The Limits Of Policy Mandates

Our guest author today is Robert Shand, the Novice G. Fawcett Postdoctoral Researcher in Educational Studies at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on the economics of education, teacher collaboration and professional development, and how teachers and school leaders make decisions based on data and research to improve student outcomes.

In some ways, it is hard to dispute the traditional view that K-12 teaching is a professionally solitary activity. At the end of the day, most instruction still occurs with a single teacher standing in front of a classroom. When I tell folks that I study teacher collaboration for a living, some are puzzled – other than team teaching, what would teachers even collaborate about? Some former colleagues from my time as a middle and high school teacher even bristle at the growing demands by administrators that they collaborate. These former colleagues no doubt envision pointless meetings, contrived team-based scenarios, and freeloading colleagues trying to offload their work onto others.

Despite these negative preconceptions, there is growing evidence that meaningful work with colleagues can enhance teacher productivity, effectiveness, and professional growth, and even increase job satisfaction. Teachers can share ideas and instructional strategies, divide the work of developing curriculum, learn from colleagues, and analyze data and evidence to solve instructional problems and help meet diverse student needs. The evidence for the potential benefits of collaboration is so compelling, and collaborative work in education is becoming so pervasive, that the Every Student Succeeds Act legally redefines professional development to include “collaborative” as part of the definition.

How Relationships Drive School Improvement—And Actionable Data Foster Strong Relationships

Our guest authors today are Elaine Allensworth, Molly Gordon and Lucinda Fickel. Allensworth is Lewis-Sebring Director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research; Gordon is Senior Research Analyst at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research; and Fickel is Associate Director of Policy at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. Elaine Allensworth explores this topic further in Teaching in Context: The Social Side of Education Reform edited by Esther Quintero (Harvard Education Press: 2017). 

As researchers at the UChicago Consortium on School Research, we believe in using data to support school improvement, such as data on students’ performance in school (attendance, grades, behavior, test scores), surveys of students and teachers on their school experiences. But data does nothing on its own. In the quarter-century that our organization has been conducting research on Chicago Public Schools, one factor has emerged time and time again as vital both for making good use of data, and the key element in school improvement: relationships.

Squishy and amorphous as it might initially sound, there is actually solid empirical grounding not only about the importance of relationships for student learning, but also about the organizational factors that foster strong relationships. In 2010, the Consortium published Organizing Schools for Improvement, which drew on a decade of administrative and survey data to examine a framework called the 5Essentials (Bryk et al. 2010). The book details findings that elementary/middle schools strong on the 5Essentials—strong leaders, professional capacity, parent-community ties, instructional guidance, and a student-centered learning climate—were highly likely to improve, while others showed little change or fell behind.

Fix Schools, Not Teachers

This post was originally published at the Harvard Education Press blog.

Both John and Jasmine are fifth-grade teachers. Jasmine has a lot of experience under her belt, has been recognized as an excellent educator and, as a content expert in math and science, her colleagues seek her out as a major resource at her school. John has been teaching math and science for two years. His job evaluations show room for improvement but he isn’t always sure how to get there. Due to life circumstances, they both switch schools the following year. John starts working at a school where faculty routinely work collaboratively, which is a rather new experience for him. In Jasmine’s new school, teachers are friendly but they work independently and don’t function as a learning community like in her old school.

After a year John’s practice has improved considerably; he attributes much of it to the culture of his new school, which is clearly oriented toward professional learning. Jasmine’s instruction continues to be strong but she misses her old school, being sought out by her colleagues for advice, and the mutual learning that she felt resulted from those frequent professional exchanges.

This story helps to illustrate the limitations of how teachers’ knowledge and skills are often viewed: as rather static and existing in a vacuum, unaffected by the contexts where teachers work. Increasing evidence suggests that understanding teaching and supporting its improvement requires a recognition that the context of teachers’ work, particularly its interpersonal dimension, matters a great deal. Teachers’ professional relations and interactions with colleagues and supervisors can constrain or support their learning and, consequently, that of their students.

Teacher Evaluations And Turnover In Houston

We are now entering a time period in which we might start to see a lot of studies released about the impact of new teacher evaluations. This incredibly rapid policy shift, perhaps the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s education efforts, was sold based on illustrations of the importance of teacher quality.

The basic argument was that teacher effectiveness is perhaps the most important factor under schools’ control, and the best way to improve that effectiveness was to identify and remove ineffective teachers via new teacher evaluations. Without question, there was a logic to this approach, but dismissing or compelling the exits of low performing teachers does not occur in a vacuum. Even if a given policy causes more low performers to exit, the effects of this shift can be attenuated by turnover among higher performers, not to mention other important factors, such as the quality of applicants (Adnot et al. 2016).

A new NBER working paper by Julie Berry Cullen, Cory Koedel, and Eric Parsons, addresses this dynamic directly by looking at the impact on turnover of a new evaluation system in Houston, Texas. It is an important piece of early evidence on one new evaluation system, but the results also speak more broadly to how these systems work.

New Teacher Evaluations And Teacher Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction among teachers is a perenially popular topic of conversation in education policy circles. There is good reason for this. For example, whether or not teachers are satisfied with their work has been linked to their likelihood of changing schools or professions (e.g., Ingersoll 2001).

Yet much of the discussion of teacher satisfaction consists of advocates’ speculation that their policy preferences will make for a more rewarding profession, whereas opponents’ policies are sure to disillusion masses of educators. This was certainly true of the debate surrounding the rapid wave of teacher evaluation reform over the past ten or so years.

A paper just published in the American Education Research Journal addresses directly the impact of new evaluation systems on teacher job satisfaction. It is, therefore, not only among the first analyses to examine the impact of these systems, but also the first to look at their effect on teachers’ attitudes.

New Evidence On Teaching Quality And The Achievement Gap

It is an extensively documented fact that low-income students score more poorly on standardized tests than do their higher income peers. This so-called “achievement gap” has persisted for generations and is still one of the most significant challenges confronting the American educational system.

Some people tend to overstate -- while others tend to understate -- the degree to which this gap is attributable to differences in teacher (and school) effectiveness between lower and higher income students (with income usually defined in terms of students’ eligibility for subsidized lunch assistance). As discussed below, the evidence thus far suggests that lower income students are a more likely than higher income students to have less “effective” teachers -- with effectiveness defined in terms of the ability to help raise student test scores, or value-added, although the magnitude of these discrepancies varies by study. There are also some compelling theories as to the possible mechanisms behind these (often modest) discrepancies, most notably the fact that schools in low-income neighborhoods tend to have fewer resources, as well as more trouble recruiting and retaining highly qualified, experienced teachers.

The Mathematica Policy Research organization recently released a very large, very important study that addresses these issues directly. It focuses on shedding additional light on the magnitude of any measurable differences in access to effective teaching among students of different incomes (the “Effective Teaching Gap”), as well as the way in which hiring, mobility, and retention might contribute to these gaps. The analysis uses data on teachers in grades 4-8 or 6-8 (depending on data availability) over five years (2008-09 to 2012-13) in 26 districts across the nation.

When Our Teachers Learn, Our Students Learn

Our guest authors today are Mark D. Benigni, Ed. D., Superintendent of the Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut and co-chairperson of the Connecticut Association of Urban Superintendents, as well as Erin Benham, President of the Meriden Federation of Teachers and a member of the Connecticut State Department of Education Board of Directors. The authors seek to understand how teacher learning improves student learning outcomes. 

Our students’ success and ability to graduate college and career ready from our public schools must be society's primary educational objective. The challenge lies in how we create neighborhood public schools where student learning and teacher learning are valued and supported. How do we assure our students' and staff's satisfaction and growth? And, in essence, how do we create schools where students and staff want to be?

Around the country, some districts are opting for market-based reforms such as privately supported charter schools or online school options. In Meriden we took a different approach and decided to collaborate as a springboard for innovation and improvement. The school district and teachers' union have been strong partners for almost seven years. Such trust and partnership has made possible the reforms that will be described in the rest of this post.

Collaboration facilitated development of a weekly early-release day for Professional Learning Communities to meet. During this time, teachers review individual student academic data with their data teams. However, the paucity of non-academic information about students emerged as an important area of improvement. We launched a three-phased approach to address climate and culture in our schools. Our climate suite includes: a School Climate Survey completed by students, staff, and families; a Getting to Know You Survey completed by students in the spring, with results shared in the fall with receiving teachers; and a MPS Cares online portal for students to request assistance and support.

Social And Emotional Skills In School: Pivoting From Accountability To Development

Our guest authors today are David Blazar and Matthew A. Kraft. Blazar is a Lecturer on Education and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Kraft is an Assistant Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University.

With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015, Congress required that states select a nonacademic indicator with which to assess students’ success in school and, in turn, hold schools accountable. We believe that broadening what it means to be a successful student and school is good policy. Students learn and grow in multifaceted ways, only some of which are captured by standardized achievement tests. Measures such as students’ effort, initiative, and behavior also are key indicators for their long-term success (see here). Thus, by gathering data on students’ progress on a range of measures, both academic and what we refer to as “social and emotional” development, teachers and school leaders may be better equipped to help students improve in these areas.

In the months following the passage of ESSA, questions about use of social and emotional skills in accountability systems have dominated the debate. What measures should districts use? Is it appropriate to use these measures in high-stakes setting if they are susceptible to potential biases and can be easily coached or manipulated? Many others have written about this important topic before us (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). Like some of them, we agree that including measures of students’ social and emotional development in accountability systems, even with very small associated weights, could serve as a strong signal that schools and educators should value and attend to developing these skills in the classroom. We also recognize concerns about the use of measures that really were developed for research purposes rather than large-scale high-stakes testing with repeated administrations.