Primary Findings: 2011 State Teacher Policy Yearbook

Key Findings:

1. NCTQ awards its highest teacher quality grades ever to seven states — largely driven by new state policies for identifying effective teachers and exiting ineffective teachers.

   • Florida, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Tennessee lead the nation on teacher quality policy. Florida received the highest overall teacher policy grade with a B; Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Tennessee earned B minuses.
   • Indiana, Michigan and Ohio received C-plus grades — a marked improvement over 2009, when the highest grade received by any state was a C, and Florida was the only state to earn it.
   • States topping the list for the most progress on teacher policy include Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and Rhode Island.
   • 28 states improved their grades for 2011.
   • Alaska, California, Mississippi, Missouri and Montana made no progress on their teacher policies since NCTQ's last review.

2. There has been an unprecedented effort across the states to adopt policies that use student achievement as a significant or preponderant criterion in measuring teacher effectiveness.

   • Just about half of all states (24) have adopted policies to consider classroom effectiveness—as indicated by objective measures of student achievement such as value-added or growth data — as a part of how teacher performance is evaluated.
   • In 12 of those states, student achievement/growth is required to be the most significant criterion in teacher evaluations.

3. In some states, a new era in teaching has begun, when performance evaluation will no longer be regarded as simply a formality and teacher effectiveness in the classroom will become a matter of consequence.

   • Thirteen states now specify, either through dismissal or evaluation policy, that ineffectiveness in the classroom can lead to teacher dismissal.
   • States also are beginning to recognize tenure as more than a mere formality. Twelve states showed progress towards weighing a teacher's effectiveness in the classroom, not just his/her time on the job, in deciding whether to grant a teacher permanent status.
   • In 2009, not a single state awarded tenure based primarily on teacher effectiveness; 8 states now require that the performance of a teacher's students be central to the decision of whether that teacher is awarded tenure.
   • Eleven states require districts to consider teacher performance, not just seniority, in making decisions about layoffs.
   • Three states—Florida, Indiana, and Michigan—have adopted policies requiring that teacher performance be factored in the salary schedules for all teachers.

4. While states have made progress on evaluating the effectiveness of their existing teacher workforce, they've done much less to ensure the quality of teachers entering the profession.

   • The tests used by the vast majority of states to confer teaching licenses lack rigor and fail to ensure that teachers are knowledgeable in all the subjects they will teach.
   • The majority of states (32) have no requirements for assessing teacher proficiency in the science of reading. Just nine states require an adequate assessment of these skills, although that is more than twice the number that had such a test in the past.
   • Just two states in the nation—Indiana and Massachusetts—require adequate mathematics preparation for aspiring elementary school teachers.
   • Licensure loopholes in all but nine states allow teachers to teach for some period of time without passing all required licensing exams.
   • Thirty-nine states allow secondary-level science teachers to teach science courses with a general or combined science subject license.
   • Sixteen states offer a generalist K-8 license and six more offer it in some circumstances, allowing teachers to teach grades 7 and 8 with preparation identical to that of a teacher certified to teach first or second grade.

Other findings:

• Looking across the U.S., just half of the states (25) collect any meaningful objective data on teacher preparation program effectiveness. However, six states—Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas—more states than ever before, are judging the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs based on the effectiveness of the teachers they graduate.
• The financial health of state teacher pension systems continues to be a dramatic area of policy decline and a growing crisis. A full 35 of the states' teacher pension systems are in peril, with 29 states losing ground on financial sustainability since NCTQ's 2009 report.
• States' requirements for the preparation of special education teachers continue to be abysmal. Thirty-five states allow special education teachers to earn a completely generic special education license to teach any special education students in any grade, K-12; this broad license is the only license offered in 19 of those states.
• States have made little progress in broadening the pipeline for attracting effective teachers into the profession through alternate routes. Just seven states offer genuine alternate routes that set high expectations for candidate entry into programs followed by accelerated, streamlined and flexible pathways into the teaching profession for talented individuals.