9/30/2009
NEW NCTQ RATINGS ON WESTERN ED SCHOOLS NOW AVAILABLE
With the start of the new school year, NCTQ has three new reports out rating core features of all of the education schools in three western states: New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The reports look at three areas of elementary teacher preparation: 1) admissions and exit standards; 2) reading instruction; and 3) elementary mathematics.
On the reading and math fronts, few schools stand out. The University of New Mexico, the University of Utah and Western Governors University were the only programs providing solid preparation in both areas.
These studies mark NCTQ's debut of a new set of ratings in which we examine what it takes to get into an education school in these states and what it takes to get out. In particular, we focus attention on admission standards that rely on "basic skills" tests designed to tell only how academically proficient prospective teachers are relative to each other. Given that most prospective teachers are at the academic bottom of the barrel by all measures when compared to the academic performance of all college students, we argue that these siloed comparisons do not serve the purpose of selecting for true proficiency and should be abandoned. We recommend that tests of academic proficiency that compare prospective teachers to all of the apples in the barrel--meaning all college students--and that select for those who score in the upper half should be substituted.
D.C. TEACHER LAYOFFS: NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
If you took your eye off the ball during the past two weeks, you might have missed teacher layoffs in D.C. As evidence of just how bold D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee can be, she announced two weeks into the new school year that the district had learned that it needed to lay off an undisclosed number of teachers by the end of the month.
The school system maintains that it didn't realize how dire its financial situation would be until after they had spent the spring and summer months hiring 900 new teachers--almost one-quarter of the teacher workforce. Last year about half as many were hired.
So how come D.C. isn't laying off these newbie teachers--as they'd be the first to go almost anywhere else? D.C. regulations don't make seniority the primary determinant of who stays or goes, and Rhee has seized this legal latitude, instead dismissing teachers primarily on the basis of "school needs"--regardless of how long they've been teaching. Principals have been assigned the task of rating each teacher under consideration for layoff, but they don't have to include teachers who are already on the chopping block for receiving an unsatisfactory evaluation last year.
According to a memo sent to principals describing the process to occur, "school needs" accounts for 75 percent of a teacher's rating and includes all kinds of ambiguous qualifications, such as "commitment to student achievement," "positive classroom environment" and "using data to make decisions about instruction." Notably, only 5 percent of the rating is based on a teacher's length of service and his or her (granted, virtually meaningless) evaluation ratings.
Apparently, rumor has it that a slew of veteran teachers were never assigned to their own individual classrooms this fall, instead being assigned to work with a co-teacher on the basis of poor performance. That means that when the layoffs hit, the impact on students will be minimized--which should also minimize public outcry.
The district has offered security back up for when principals have to deliver the bad news this week.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO FIRE A TEACHER?
In February 2008, a Sarasota, Florida special education teacher was arrested and charged with four counts of child abuse following allegations made by two aides in her classroom who had witnessed dozens of incidents in which the teacher hit, kicked, pushed and generally abused the severely disabled students in her class.
Eventually the teacher was acquitted on the criminal charges, but Sarasota School Superintendent Lori White still believed the teacher should be fired. The teacher fought the dismissal, the local union went to bat for her, and the case made its way up the legal ladder.
The local union argued that discharging the teacher was not justified for two reasons. First, they claimed that the district had no "just cause" for immediate dismissal because her conduct did not constitute a "real immediate danger to the district."* Second, the union maintained that her firing violated her due process rights under the district's collaborative bargaining agreement, since there weren't a lot of warnings leading up to the dismissal.
Although the arbitrator found the abuse charges "credible," he agreed with the union's argument and reversed the dismissal. After a four-week suspension and some counseling, the teacher was allowed to return to teaching and to her $80,000 a year salary.
Apparently the abuse inflicted by the teacher was not nearly as compelling to the arbitrator as the technical mistakes made by the school district in making its case against the teacher.
What sort of fatal mistakes? First, the aides had held off reporting the abuse, as they chose instead to build a case over four months in which they kept a daily log. Their prolonged silence, the defense maintained, argued against the severity of the teacher's actions. Second, while the principal had also suspected the teacher of abusing students and warned her in a meeting not to "hit, hurt, or treat the students roughly in any way," she had never transferred that verbal warning into writing or alerted the teacher that the meeting was classified as disciplinary.
We think there's a more fundamental problem revealed in this decision, one having to do with noneducators deciding what constitutes professional behavior of educators. It doesn't seem as if it should take an educator to reach the common sense judgment that a teacher who inflicts a "back-handed slap to a student's head" should not be permitted to continue to teach children, but there's ample evidence that the court system routinely can't get it right.
What's next for this teacher? The Florida Department of Education is investigating whether or not to revoke this teacher's license--a process that could take months or even years--but for now this teacher will remain on the job.
*We didn't know that it was the district's health, not the student's health, that was at stake. Sarcasm aside, it is exactly these odd choices of words in dismissal language that ends up getting many teachers off the hook on a technicality when the case is considered in the court system. How these provisions get worded is critical.
DISPLACED TEACHERS: DENVER'S STRUGGLE TO MAKE LEMONADE
On paper, Denver principals appear to have a pretty good deal: they get to choose their own teachers and, when positions must be cut, they get to select the teachers they want to transfer out. Most districts in the United States don't technically allow teacher performance to be a factor in who gets displaced--though in reality savvy principals have long found ways to manipulate this process to move out the staff they don't want.
A recent Denver Post investigation reveals that not all principals have an equal say in whom they have to take into their building and not surprisingly, it's the most challenged schools that get saddled with the most forced placements.
Why this happens: The toughest schools are likely to have the highest turnover and consequently the highest number of vacancies in need of a teacher. They are also less appealing to new hires and internal transfers, who are likely to snatch up the few vacancies at the higher performing schools early on. As a result the teachers in the excessed pool who aren't hired by a principal at the few high performing schools will be forced placed in the schools where there are remaining vacancies--likely schools serving poor kids.
Since 2005, the Post found that three quarters of the displaced teachers got their new assignment in the poorest schools. They also found that 117 out of 592 teachers excessed over a four-year period had been forced out by different principals in two consecutive years and 22 had been forced out three years in a row.
 
And there you have it: the proverbial "dance of the lemons."
The obvious solution is that there shouldn't be ANY force placements. All teachers should be hired by schools that want them and teachers who can't find a job within one year--max--should be terminated.
If a district can't find a way to terminate teachers who don't land an assignment in a year's time, there seem to be three alternatives, but not one of them is without pitfalls:
- Place teachers who don't find an assignment in a "rubber room" a la New York. However, it's expensive and an effrontery to taxpayers that people are paid to do nothing.
- Stick to seniority, not performance, as the basis for cutting teachers from a staff. It's not exactly an approach en vogue with reformers, but it's ultimately fairer to both teachers and schools: it helps eliminate the "bad teacher" stigma associated with the excess pool, giving teachers a better shot at gaining a principal's attention and being hired. To keep it working right though, districts have to track who is getting displaced and their performance, to make sure principals are not using routine staff fluctuations as a means to pass off poor performers.
- Implement a closed-door principals' session in which principals collectively decide where to assign displaced teachers. Such an approach tends to spread both the talent and the problems more evenly as principals wheel-and-deal to get the staff that best suits their needs. Unless it's managed fairly, though some principals will always get stuck with more teachers. Importantly, the schools with the most vacancies (read: schools serving poor kids) will still get stuck with the most excessed teachers.
Denver ultimately ended up implementing the third, "horse trading" approach and has reduced the number of forced placements made in the past three years, going from 214 teachers in 93 schools in 2006 to 107 teachers in 63 schools in 2009. Whether it reduced the number of low income schools having to take excessed teachers is for another investigation.
TEACHING'S PECKING ORDER: PRESTIGE ASSIGNMENTS
School administrators' hands are generally tied when it comes to handing out retention bonuses, paying higher salaries in shortage subject areas, and particularly for rewarding high performance. So what's left besides a pat on the back and a hearty "job well done"?
Offering teachers plum assignments has long been one answer. Even within suburban schools, not to mention between variously advantaged schools within districts, assignments can vary in their perceived prestige.
A discrimination and demotion lawsuit in Hagerstown, Indiana, provides a picture of the perverse effects of this default reward: After two years of positive performance reviews teaching seventh grade English, Sharon Lucero was rewarded for her success by being reassigned to 12th grade honors English, a definite step up in the teaching pecking order. Unfortunately, she bombed and was put back in the lowly seventh grade, her original assignment. She stayed in the same building, with the same colleagues, and there was no pay decrease involved, but the reassignment must have really stung--enough for Lucero to file a lawsuit against the school board and pursue it for five years. Finally this summer, the judge ruled against her on all charges.
Regardless of the merits of her case, Lucero was aggrieved by the fact that she was reassigned to a lower grade. The lower the grade taught or the lower the academic ability of the students being taught, the lower the value of the teacher. This status hierarchy may not be objective, but it is widespread, and it is bad for students.
DID L.A.'S DUFFY THROW SUBS UNDER THE BUS?
When a union president not known for his reformist tendencies looks to be getting all reformist, union dynamics get mighty interesting.
This past summer United Teachers Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy made a secret agreement with the school district that allowed some 1,800 newly laid off teachers to jump to the top of L.A.'s substitute list, giving them priority over regular and in many cases veteran substitutes for this school year.
Subs happen to be bona fide members of the 48,000-member teacher union (who knew!) and they were hopping mad. Duffy made some attempt to calm the waters, telling them in a letter that his aim had been to stabilize schools that had been hard-hit in the July layoff and that he expected most of the laid-off teachers to end up subbing back at the schools where they had been employed full time. He had even hoped that, as the district's financial picture brightened, those teachers would get their jobs back, the subs would get back to work and all would be normal. He went on to explain the secrecy as a condition to which the union and the district had agreed for contract negotiations.
Many teachers, siding with the subs, didn't buy it. In a series of union meetings across the district, union members voted overwhelmingly to get Duffy to rescind the one-year-only deal. At stake, sub leaders said, were not only their own livelihoods but the seniority protections for all teachers.
We could guess that laid-off teachers, most of whom had only one or two years of experience, liked Duffy's plan. But such nontenured teachers are a small minority among union members.
The union's representative body is to take up the matter next month.
LESS THAN A RINGING ENDORSEMENT FOR ABCTE
ABCTE, the most stripped-down route into teacher certification there is, contracted with the research group Mathematica to gauge the effectiveness of its teachers in Florida. This first time out, results were not particularly good for the privately organized ABCTE, short for the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence.
ABCTE certifies teachers based largely on whether they pass tests of content and pedagogy specific to subject and level. Despite being greeted apoplectically by the teacher preparation establishment after its formation in 2001, ABCTE has since gotten nine states on board, at least for some of its certifications.
Examining student test scores for 30 ABCTE grade 4-10 teachers in Florida found no difference in reading performance compared to students of non-ABCTE teachers. However, students of ABCTE teachers performed significantly worse in math than their peers in the classrooms of non-ABCTE teachers.
Mathematica laid out possible reasons for the lower math performance of ABCTE-taught students. ABCTE math teachers in their sample had less teaching experience than their counterparts. The researchers also noted that teachers in the sample had lower-than-average ABCTE exam scores.
Mathematica urged caution in jumping to conclusions in part because of the small sample size.
PERFORMANCE PAY WITHOUT BORDERS
While performance pay may be popular, all those messy details for making it work remain to be settled, as two new studies from India and Portugal show.
First, in India where some positive results were found: There, 300 schools offered their teachers a bonus of 3 percent over their monthly salaries for either producing above average test results from their own classrooms or as a result of school-wide improvements. Students taught in those schools scored significantly higher on tests than a control group of 100 schools. Students in group incentive schools and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but students in the individual incentive schools did better in the second year.
Now to Portugal, where the results were negative: After a 2007 national pay reform in that country, teachers began competing to be put on a higher salary scale based on their students' test scores and classroom grades--along with a few other features of teachers' work, such as attending training sessions. Student achievement declined in comparison with schools where the pay reform was not yet available. While the test scores went down, classroom grades, however increased, suggesting grade inflation--or just plain cooking the books by teachers. The study theorizes that the drop occurred because teachers were so busy vying for a limited number of promotions that they were less inclined to work with other teachers even when it was in students' best interest to do so.
SHOULD STUDENTS HAVE A SAY ON TEACHER EVALUATIONS?
In Rhode Island a group of students are advocating that high schools deserve to have a voice in the evaluations of teachers.
Karen Feldman, the director of Young Voices, a Rhode Island nonprofit group that grooms high school students to be community advocates, says her group supports a set of long overdue reforms currently being considered by the Board of Regents, but also wants to see the addition of a first for Rhode Island and perhaps for the nation: a component of the teacher evaluation completed by students.
The student contribution would not be not for the purposes of altering a rating or to influence disciplinary actions, but "to influence teachers' professional development choices" says Feldman.
The Rhode Island Federation of Teachers has not taken a formal position on on whether student input should be included. Marcia Reback, president of the union, cautioned that "there are students who key teachers' cars or assault teachers out of anger, and some will take their anger out in the opportunity to evaluate." But she expressed confidence that policymakers would weigh the student input component fairly, if it is even included in the final evaluation standards.
Here's our Q&A with Young Voices student leaders Heiry Borrell and Jennifer Ventura, juniors at Classical High School in Providence.
How do you think adults in your school would respond to the idea of a student voice in teacher evaluations and what would you say back to them?
Hiery: I think there would be a lot of negative feedback from adults--they'd say that we are immature. They'd say that kids are biased because maybe a student hates a teacher because that teacher gave the student detention or something. But we are mature enough to evaluate our teachers fairly.
Jennifer: I think that students should be allowed to evaluate teachers because we are with them 180 days, and if we feel that we are not learning anything and the teacher is not being effective, in the end that hurts us.
Why is student voice so important to include in teacher evaluations?
Heiry: Teachers might change the way they teach if they see students are involved in evaluations. When just administrators are in the class for 20 minutes, the teacher acts differently than he does the rest of the time.
Jennifer: When teachers get evaluated by adults, some of them put on a persona that is not them. They switch everything up a little and make it seem like the class is really perfect, but sometimes I have some teachers that aren't that way. They just lecture all day. If we were able to evaluate them we could tell the truth: that we don't learn anything.
Do you think if teachers saw their student feedback, they would change the way they teach?
Jennifer: Yes, because teachers would realize that their teaching isn't as good as they think. If students could evaluate teachers, then they could see that there might be something missing in what they are doing, and they could improve.
Do you think student evaluations will happen?
Heiry: I am hopeful because we are fighting for it and we are going to be very persistent.
With or without the student piece, the Regents intend to approve evaluation standards by year's end. An overhaul is long overdue. Currently a tenured teacher in Rhode Island can go for five or more years without being formally observed, and the state has no policy on whether teachers with unsatisfactory evaluations can be dismissed.
DO CADILLAC INDUCTION PROGRAMS SELECT CHEVY MENTORS?
Last year, we were discouraged about the findings of a federal Institute for Education Sciences study which compared comprehensive induction services modeled after (but not identical to) those of the highly respected New Teacher Center and the Educational Testing Service with the standard district induction fare. In one year of study, researchers found no differences in the outcomes most of us care about, namely teacher attrition rates and student progress.
The second year results appear to be equally discouraging. There still is no impact on teacher retention and student achievement, relative to routine induction programs, even if teachers get two full years of high quality induction. Is it time to write-off "Cadillac" induction programs? Our conclusion: not yet.
One issue that deserves a closer look is how the mentors get selected, the attention given to mentors' credentials, but not necessarily their track record in the classroom. The report notes that almost anyone who volunteered to be a mentor got the job, never a good sign. They all had master's degrees, which means nothing in terms of their quality. They all mentored previously, which also indicates nothing. There was reportedly a large share of National Board-certified mentors, but how many is unclear and the research on National Board doesn't lead us to think they were necessarily the highest performers. In sum, not enough is known about the level of performance these mentors delivered in their own classrooms.
Moreover, there is no consistency between year one and year two in terms of the nature of support provided to treatment teachers relative to control teachers.
Here's where this research leaves us: Mentor programs that offer uneven support provided by full-time mentors who have good credentials don't seem to improve student achievement or teacher retention relative to run-of-the-mill induction programs offering uneven support by mentors of uncertain qualifications who are not working full time at it. Got it?
NCTQ IS MOVING AND TQB IS TAKING A BREAK
Because we're moving our office next month 100 yards across the street, NCTQ will not publish an October issue of the Teacher Quality Bulletin. We'll be too busy hand carrying our barely living plants and making sure the plastic laminate on our pressed wood conference table doesn't get scratched.
Effective November 1, our new address will be 1420 New York Avenue, Suite 800, Washington, D.C. 20005. All other contact info will stay the same.
TQ Bulletin Volume 10, Number 9
| TQBulletin is a monthly publication of the National Council on Teacher Quality, nonpartisan research and advocacy group committed to restructuring the teaching profession, led by our vision that every child deserves effective teachers. |
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Cartoons by David Flanagan
To subscribe to or unsubscribe from TQ Bulletin, or to send questions, comments, or suggestions, please e-mail TQBulletin@nctq.org.
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2009 State Teacher Policy Yearbook |
| NCTQ's annual 52-volume report on state policies that impact the teaching profession. This year's edition is a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of states' teacher policies including key policy areas such as teacher preparation, evaluation, tenure and dismissal, alternative certification and compensation. |
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+ Visit the 2008 website |
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+ Visit the 2007 website |
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Tackling the STEM crisis: Five steps your state can take to improve the quality and quantity of its K-12 math and science teachers, June 2009 |
| Strong K-12 math and science preparation ensures that college freshmen are capable of diving into demanding STEM* majors rather than treading water in remedial courses. That's better for them and for our nation's future. State laws and regulations can help to build a bigger and better pipeline of K-12 teachers who will savor, not skirt, rigorous math and science instruction.
*Science, technology, engineering and mathematics |
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No Common Denominator: The Preparation of Elementary Teachers in Mathematics by America's Education Schools, June 2008 |
| American students' chronically poor performance in mathematics on international tests may begin in the earliest grades, handicapped by the weak knowledge of mathematics of their own elementary teachers. NCTQ looks at the quality of preparation provided by a representative sampling of institutions in nearly every state. We also provide a test developed by leading mathematicians which assesses for the knowledge that elementary teachers should acquire during their preparation. Imagine the implications of an elementary teaching force being able to pass this test. |
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Teacher Rules, Roles and Rights |
| Explore the intricacies of collective bargaining agreements, board policies, and teacher handbooks. TR3 has data from 100 school districts and all 50 states. These 100 districts represent 20 percent of public school students in the United States. |
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Alternative Certification Isn't Alternative, September 2007 |
| A new report from NCTQ and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, examines the current realities of alternate routes, originally intended as a fast track way to get talented individuals into teaching. |
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What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning |
| In this groundbreaking report, NCTQ studied a large representative sampling of ed schools to find out what future elementary teachers are--and are not--learning about reading instruction. The report, the most comprehensive of its kind, determined that education schools are ignoring the principles of good reading instruction that would prepare prospective teachers how to better teach reading. |
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