Districts have tried placing their Highly Qualified and Highly Effective teachers in their lowest performing schools as measured by standardized test scores. It did not work. The students’ poor performance on standarized tests are linked more to high absentee rates than teaching abilities.

In my district, teachers in the poorest performing schools are now being evaluated on student behavior and attendance. However, the students who fail to come to school have the lowest standarized test scores in the state. It is very difficult to teach someone who does not come to school.

We have Highly Effective educators. We need Highly Effective parents and trudancy officers to insure mandatory school attendance laws are obeyed.

Thanks
Karen Daugherty
Mathematics Consultant
Ohio Dept. of Education

I would like to suggest that the individual, the school system, and the educational system need to be in alignment. The reason for this is that the top of a culture cannot escape the bottom of a culture – hence the finding that a small group of teachers disproportionally affect the whole of the education process. So we can and should work to improve the effectiveness of the individual teacher but that will come to naught if the whole of the school culture is not addressed at the same time. The individual island of excellence will eventually either be drawn back into the sea of mediocrity or leave to find a culture where they can be their best.

In our research and working with other research such as Dr. Hanusek’s, we have discovered that improving teacher performance is composed of three things:
1. teacher impact which has three components
a. the characteristics of professional excellence that each school determines according to mission and to which all faculty commit as the “way we do things here”
b. due diligence – the base line of professionalism
c. pied piperism – the way some teachers have that impels students to hang onto their legs
2. commitment, career long and day by day, to professional growth and renewal
3. value added assessment

We add these things together to create evaluation methods that are both complex and simple: a number of different aspects can be effectively measured; conceptually, it is pretty straightforward.

We cannot claim that it makes teachers any better although we believe that to be the case. We do claim that the process centrifugally spins mediocre, incompetent, and toxic teachers to the outside where they can be made available to industry. This, in and of itself, moves the bottom of the culture up thus empowering and freeing the top.

Simon Jeynes, Independent School Management
sjeynes@isminc.com
isminc.com

I disagree. When everyone who cares enough and has the resources, the parents involved, the school teachers who are in a good school/district, and everyone who is lucky enough to be advantaged exits the current schools, who will teach those other children?

We already have cities and states that can’t even graduate 50% of their population on time!

The rich get richer, and the poor get the picture. This is a public community service, and unless we act publicly, we will only disintegrate even faster than we currently are doing.

This is done by placing the money in the hands of the consumer, not by fretting over creating the best “teacher-centric” schema.

We have spent the last 50-70 years focusing on the system, and the system has only become more cumbersome an ineffective. It is time to allow the consumers to spontaneously order the education space. The controlled chaos hasn’t worked.

Will it be perfect? No. Will it easily outperform the existing system. Almost certainly.

A lot of education policy rides on the assumption that masters’ degrees in education schools improve teacher effectiveness. In your conversation, I presume you refer to master degrees in education schools, as opposed to master degrees in specialized disciplines like math, physics, English language etc. I also assume this refers to elementary and middle school teachers, which are very unlikely to have specialized master degrees.

But I have a few questions on the issue of measuring teacher quality. I am not persuaded by the argument that the best way to measure teacher quality lies in measure effectiveness, presumably vis-a-vis standardized tests. Here are my concerns:

One, rewarding teachers based on the test results of the students creates a perverse incentive for teachers to focus more on test preparation for their students – the well known ‘teaching to the test’ syndrome. This is done at the expense of a more forward-looking, structural preparation with a view of the material likely to be useful in future years – but less likely to show up on the test in the current year.

For example, in elementary math grades, students are rarely taught to express themselves in a formally correct mathematical way – because the payoff in grades 1-5 standardized tests for correct formal math is negligible. This becomes an issue for students in high school – by which time it is too late to correct the problem.

Second concern, there are examples of state standardized tests where student average performance increases, while score on the NAEP remains flat. It is, therefore, the case that some of the standardized tests cannot be trusted as an accurate measure of teacher effectiveness.

Third concern, not all disciplines can be tested. Take the example of history – there is a lot of disagreements about what the school standards should be (see the Texas school board dispute on the history standards as an example), let alone what should be tested.

Fourth concern, the standardized nature of the test requires the use of too many multiple choice questions. This is understandable, because on one hand open-ended questions are more costly to grade, and on the other, they are more subjective to grade. But test preparation for multiple-choice questions has little educational value – except that it does help beef up the student test scores. This leads to a guess-and-don’t-care mentality on the part of the students.

Incidentally, note that open-ended questions, if not carefully formulated, can sometimes elicit student preparation strategies that are just as formulaic as those for multiple-choice questions.

Now I am not writing all this simply to criticize the idea that students need to be tested, and that teacher quality cannot be objectively measured. But I would prefer an approach where tests are designed in such a way that ‘teaching to the test’ has educational value in itself. And I would like to see curricula truly aligned with the tests.

And in what regards teacher quality and bonus reward, I think the best system would institute periodic testing on the teachers themselves in academic subject matter – for each teacher, every three years an MTEL-like test with permanent salary increase tied in part to the actual test results.

The current research suggests that a major problem is a small set of very ineffective teachers.  These are teachers who are harming kids, placing them at a lifetime disadvantage.  And these are teachers who are consistently known and recognized – by principals, teachers, and parents.  Replacing the bottom teachers with average teachers would yield a real transformation.  It would be nice to replace them with exceptional teachers, but we do not know how to do that consistently, and we reap the largest gains by ensuring that ineffective teachers do not stay in the classroom for very long.

What holds effective teachers from going to hard to staff schools are the low quality leaders and instructional teams those leaders have built over time. By offering higher salaries by school we would in effect be trying to bribe a teacher into working for a ineffective boss and with uninspiring colleagues. Effective teachers, however have their pick of principals to work for know this. Perhaps that is why CMS and others have found that they have to pay such a high amount to get teachers to transfer to hard to staff schools.

Another strike against offering higher salaries by school is that doing so is strategically incoherent. If you believe it is up to the principal to build their teams and you hold them accountable for their results, then offering salaries to entice teachers to transfer out of their and into another school does a disservice to that principal of the school the teacher is leaving.

A final strike against offering higher salaries for teaching in “hard to staff” schools is that any policy that in effect focuses on cutting up the pie but not growing it is doomed to create turf wars – parents whose loose an effective teacher to another school are likely to be angry.

To get better quality teachers in “hard to staff” schools, district leaders need to turn over the ineffective leadership teams in those schools and outplace persistent underperforming teachers in those schools. Then they can offer new recruits small, one-time bonus to come work for new leaders who have the building “under new management”.

Policy levers cannot solve this. This is a management problem. Both KH and EH mention the need for “willpowere”. So the key question is, what is holding district leaders back from doing what is outline above?

For more classroom-based perspectives on evaluation and VAM, please see http://wp.me/pPltP-2d – and related posts at InterACT.