Ooms With A View

From the Education Equality Project – the strange bedfellows of Al Sharpton and Joel Klein – comes a position paper on improving teacher quality.  Among it’s many virtues is that it is only seven pages, and it is well worth a complete read.

And unlike many papers that merely bemoan the state of the teaching profession, this paper offers seven policy suggestions.  As a group, this is as intelligent and cohesive list as I’ve seen.  All of it is possible.

Here are the policy suggestions, in slightly abbreviated form:

1. Cast a wider net for prospective teachers by lowering the entry barriers to the teaching profession. At the same time, teacher colleges, alternative certification programs, and districts should redouble efforts to develop more effective human capital strategies for recruiting and selecting promising teachers.

2. The federal government should require states and districts to develop longitudinal data systems that would allows school administrators and principals to use value-added data to measure and track the impact teachers have on student achievement.

3. States and districts should be encouraged and free to use a variety of outcome-based measures to evaluate teacher effectiveness, yet any system that states devise to evaluate teacher performance should include student test scores as a key measuring stick – and should not succumb to the temptation to substitute input-based measures to gauge teacher effectiveness (like licensure status and education credentials).

4. Every school and district should assess and document the impact that probationary teachers have on student learning from the moment they enter the classroom. Fledgling teachers should receive better professional development support, including on-the-job mentoring and supervision from peers and master teachers.

5. To transform tenure into a progress-based prerogative, states and districts should require tenure candidates to demonstrate that they are effectively boosting student learning – a process that should take a minimum of five years. At the same time, the least-effective probationary instructors should be denied tenure.

6. Teachers who demonstrate their effectiveness at raising student achievement should receive large bonuses for teaching in high-poverty schools and extra compensation for teaching core subjects in shortage areas, like math and science.

7. Tenured teachers should periodically be reassessed to ensure that they are still raising student achievement. Tenures instructors who are doing a good job should receive significant merit pay hikes. But persistently incompetent teachers should be dismissed – after getting a chance to improve their performance. In much the same spirit, unionized teachers should enjoy the due process protection and seniority rights afforded to other white-collar professionals – but not be shielded by excessive due-process requirements from meaningful job performance assessments or layoffs.

Some expert comments summarized by the Post’s ever-enterprising Jeremy Meyer:

Teachers stop showing signs of improvement after about four years on the job — even after a master’s degree or obtaining tenure, said Jane Hannaway, founding director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

“It’s one of our very consistent findings,” said Hannaway, presenter last week at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in San Diego, citing at least two recent studies of teacher effectiveness.

I could not find any specific report associated with her comments, but it’s also worth noting that this is not a partisan source. I’ll keep looking, and if anyone locates an associated study, please send me the link.  Testimony of hers to the DC City council is here, but it is not as direct. [UPDATE: The Urban Institute passed on the references: good-teachers-blog hat tip to Jeremy]

But what to make of this data when anecdotal opinion and other studies continue to argue that it takes 3-5 years before a teacher really hits their stride?  The point on masters degrees and tenure should by now be irrefutable, but the suggestion that there is no substantial increase in performance is new.

Part of this, of course, is how one measures performance.  The last sentence of Jeremy’s piece makes it clear that Hannaway is looking at improvements in student test scores.  While I fear this will set off the predictable debate over the ineffectiveness of test scores (or any metrics) as a perfect measurement, in lieu of other data it has to be considered relevant.

Thoughts?

A great series of perspectives on the NY Times blog.  A few random highlights:

Some years ago I read the following quote: “No one, not even a farmer, works as hard as a caring teacher, but there is nothing lazier than an uncaring one.” I felt both intimidated and comforted by this — I had the option of working hard and being socially ranked just above farmer or I could be lazier than a pillow tester.

Today more than five million newly unemployed may find themselves contemplating these options. They should be encouraged to try teaching but should also realize that there is no way of knowing if they’ll be any good at it, the statistics say there is a big chance that they will quit within five years, and the president of the United States may try to get them fired.

and

As Malcolm Gladwell convincingly pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, identifying the quality of teaching prospects is as difficult as identifying what college quarterbacks will make it in the N.F.L. “There are certain jobs,” wrote Gladwell, “where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they are hired.”

The problem with teachers is that unlike N.F.L. quarterbacks they do not perform in public; they can hide in their classrooms with their captive audience of kids. As it turns out, once teachers are hired all they have to do is rise to the level of mediocrity, and in three years’ time they will be given tenure which essentially means lifetime job security.

Enjoy.