Research & Insights

Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap
Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students by Goldhaber, Lavery, &
Theobald

Looking for a bright spot? This isn’t it.
New research confirms that disadvantaged students (whether defined as being
part of an underrepresented minority, free and reduced lunch status, or last
year’s test scores), tend to get lower-quality teachers (whether defined by
experience, licensure test score, or value added measure). No witty remark
here. We’re too depressed.
Feel like you could use a tiny glimmer of
hope? See this: TQB

As eternal optimists, we’re choosing to look on the bright side
of a disheartening new study.

Researchers Jennifer Steele, Matthew Pepper, Matthew Springer
and J.R. Lockwoodprovide additional evidence of educational inequities, finding that teachers with lower value added
measurements (VAM) are more likely to teach at schools populated by mostly
minority students—the same schools that also house a higher rate of more novice
teachers and teachers with lower college GPAs.
This graph depicts how the distribution of teachers
dramatically changes as soon as one turns from a school with a mostly white
population to one with a mostly minority population. The change is so sudden
it’s like a switch goes off.
                                              

However, the same study finds that once a teacher with a high
VAM score starts teaching in a
high-minority school, he or she is not more likely to leave—a trend
inconsistent with the popular belief that once teachers prove themselves in
urban or high-minority schools, they move on to suburban or lower-minority
ones. 
Though the high-minority schools in the study reported
relatively high teacher turnover rates, as is the case with most schools
serving high numbers of minority students, the turnover is not due to an exodus
of high-VAM teachers. The better teachers were no more likely to leave the
school than other teachers. Some (non-statistically significant) numbers even suggested
the opposite—higher VAM teachers were more
likely to stick around in these
high-minority schools once they got there. And even those high VAM teachers who
did leave didn’t go teach in lower-minority schools any more or less frequently
than other teachers (though the researchers lost track of any teacher who left
the district—which is whybroader administrative data sets are very helpful
in examining these questions).
Of course, these data come from a single unnamed school
district, so it remains to be seen if these results are replicable. Count us
excited, however, if this study is replicated and confirms that once we get
highly-effective teachers into high-minority schools they are likely to stay.

Rather than looking for the next big reform to improve teacher quality, a new study considers whether it’s time for things to stay the same. Researcher David Blazar of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard recently looked into what happens when we play musical chairs with teachers’ grade assignments.

For starters, teachers switching grades happens more often than you may think, ranging from about one in five teachers in any given year in some studies to more than one in three in others.
What Blazar finds is that this constant switching is not good for students. Using teachers’ value-added estimates, Blazar compared the average returns to experience (the measure of how much a teacher improves due to more years in the classroom) for teachers who do and don’t switch grades. Unfortunately, switching grades was almost never for the better.
For example, a teacher who switched grades between her second and third year of teaching generally reported 20 percent lower gains than teachers who had the same amount of experience but remained in the same grade. At some points in a teacher’s career, the learning losses associated with switching grades lingered for at least two years.
The type of switch matters too. Those teachers who switched to an adjacent grade (e.g., 2^nd to 3^rd grade) generally fared better than those who made a nonadjacent grade switch (e.g., 2^nd grade to 4^th grade). This makes sense: a teacher faces a steeper learning curve, in terms of classroom management techniques, curriculum, etc., when she switches to a grade very different than the one taught before, compared to what she has to learn when teaching a similar grade.
Given that changing grades means that the teacher is likely to be less effective than she would have been had she stayed put, it’s disconcerting that these grade changes were more common for less experienced and less effective teachers. Making matters worse, teachers in schools with low student achievement and higher proportions of low-income students and students of color also had higher rates of grade switching.
As Blazar makes clear, this all must be looked at in context. Grade assignments can be made for positive reasons. For example, it could be forced or chosen (a factor Blazar was unable to control for), and that intent could potentially make a difference in how well a teacher performs the following year. Nevertheless, there’s enough evidence here to suggest that a principal should think twice about changes in teacher assignment.

Welcome
to a new school year! A chance to learn new subjects, make new friends and be reminded
anew of the disparities in education.

We’ve
written a lot (see here,
here, and here)
about the mounting evidence of a particularly pernicious element of the
achievement gap—that the quality of the person at
the head of the classroom often varies depending on who’s sitting in the desks.
Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald of American Institutes for Research and Lesley
Lavery of Macalester College analyzed data from Washington State to take a more
comprehensive look at whether disadvantaged
students are being taught by the cream of the crop—or
the bottom of the barrel. Unlike past studies, which generally only looked at
one facet of teacher quality, this study is the first to include multiple
measures of teacher quality and student disadvantage across districts, schools
and classrooms.
Goldhaber,
et al. found that no matter how they measured student disadvantage
(free/reduced price lunch status, underrepresented minority status (defined as
American Indian, black, or Hispanic), or scores in the lowest quintile of the
previous year’s state assessment), disadvantaged students lost out. They were
more likely to have a teacher who had fewer years of experience, a lower
licensure score and a low prior-year
value added measure (VAM). The most consistent and significant gaps were at the
district level, but some noteworthy gaps showed up among schools within a
district and occasionally even between classes. The most pronounced difference
was in 7^th grade, where underperforming disadvantaged students were
significantly more likely to be assigned the least effective teachers.
There is
hope though—most of the significant
disparities were at the district level, where policymakers have more leverage
than schools to enact changes to attract more experienced and more effective
teachers, especially in their hardest-hit grades. While the districts may never
woo teachers as if they were top-tier athletes, incentives such as leadership opportunities,
hybrid teaching roles, consistent effective leadership, job-embedded
professional development and pay increases could entice highly effective
educators to teach in high-needs districts.

Jessica teaches Latin in the DC
Public Schools and spent her summer vacation as a Fellow at NCTQ.  Thank you, Jessica! 

People have offered many reasons for the inequitable distribution of teacher talent
and experience across schools: salary, the desirability of the
locale, recruitment, the student teacher pipeline, to name some. A new study that has gotten a lot of
attention from the Center for Education Data & Research by Dan Goldhaber,
Lesley Lavery and Roddy Theobald adds to the log pile: the seniority rules
spelled out in collective bargaining agreements. 

The
central question: are teachers (especially experienced ones) more likely to
leave high-minority schools
if the
district’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) has strong seniority
protections?
Districts generally pick one of four options for the role of
seniority in transfer decisions: 1) prohibiting it from being used, 2) allowing
it as one of several factors to consider, 3) letting it serve as a tiebreaker
and 4) making it the only factor that can be considered. 

Tracking
some 60,000 teachers’ transfers, Goldhaber et al. find what we’re used to
seeing, that more teachers transfer out of high-minority schools and it’s the
teachers with more seniority who are most likely to leave those schools (see
Figure 1).

              

But then
new ground gets plowed. Contracts specifying that seniority must be the
tiebreaker make the pattern
illustrated in the graph all the more pronounced.  Novice teachers are more likely to transfer
out of low-minority schools and even less likely to transfer out of those with
large populations of minority students (see Figure 2).  In other words, factoring in seniority means
that novice teachers have less leverage to transfer out of high-minority
schools.

For
voluntary transfers (those requested by a teacher), novice teachers are 50
percent more likely to transfer out of those schools with large proportions of
minority students, all else equal, if they teach in a district that does not
address seniority than if it is a tiebreaker. We see a similar pattern for
teachers who are involuntarily transferred out of their schools.

             

Some
possible solutions?  Obviously, districts
can work to remove seniority as a factor from transfer decisions and instead
base decisions on merit and fit for the position, rather than only years of
service.  Or, some districts have
implemented an interview process to help with matching teachers to schools
during the transfer process. Finally, in order to incentivize senior teachers
to stay in disadvantaged schools, districts can also offer leadership positions
or other rewards to those teachers.

To learn
more about how seniority factors into district policies, see NCTQ’s
Teacher Trendline on the topic and take a look at the school
districts in your state in our
Teacher Contract Database. 

Some
students are more apt to be assigned better or more experienced teachers than
other students. That’s not news. Past studies have found that lower-income and minority students tend to be assigned to
teachers with less experience than their peers.
A new study by Rebecca Wolf of SRI
International plays this pattern out but goes a step further to see whether
some schools or, more intriguingly, grades within schools get a larger share of
novice teachers.

Wolf
finds that the biggest apparent driver of differences in who gets the newest
teachers within a school was the student’s grade level—not whether students were high or low performing. While the level
of student achievement played some role, the effect size was relatively quite
small (students who scored basic on the state math test were about only one
percent more likely to be taught by a new teacher than a higher-achieving
student was). However, a 9^th grade student was 10 percent more
likely than a 12^th grade student, regardless of her academic
standing, to be taught by a novice math teacher. Sixth grade was the exception
to this finding, with student achievement having a bigger impact than grade
level. A low-achieving 6^th grade student (the first grade of middle
school for most schools in the district) was much more likely to have a novice
teacher than other 6^th grade students.

So
why does assigning the newest teachers to the lowest grades in a school,
especially to the lower-performing students in those grades,
matter? The problem is that success in 6^th and 9^th
grades, the years referred to as “transition grades,” has significant
implications for students’ long-term educational attainment and engagement.
Studies show that student experiences during these years have a relationship to
drop-out and student achievement rates that can persist for years into
students’ academic careers.
Wolf’s study may mean that
principals should think twice about where they’re placing their newest
teachers.

This
year, Clark County School District in Las Vegas started the year in
a pinch: district-wide, there were over 600 teaching vacancies and student
enrollment continued to grow. In response, the district pulled out all the
stops to recruit new teachers (see ads in
airline magazines and a zip-lining superintendent) and is now rethinking how to deploy
existing staff.
Taking
lessons from Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture program as well as other
school districts and charter management organizations, Clark County is piloting
two staffing models in which effective teachers take responsibility for an
expanded group of students. They’ve launched a pilot program that includes a
blended learning model and a “teaching and learning model” in which
excellent teachers are responsible for their own classrooms as well as leading
other teachers. Clark County School District is applying the same principle to
their principals. Next year, two excellent principals will be leading two
schools each in an effort to “franchise” their approach to
leadership.
We expect that there will
be tweaks to the models for both teachers and principals, but we applaud the
Clark County School District’s effort to take risks, try new ideas and learn
from other systems. Watch this space in the coming months to see what we can
learn from them.

Every district HR department looks to find
ways to limit the number of time-consuming interviews of new teacher
applicants. A few weeks ago, Politico
ran a story about “Big Data” tools
designed to give districts a better idea of who is “interview worthy”
based on the perceived skills of candidates (e.g., Teacher Match) and next gen
versions of the old school questionnaires that attempt to elicit the
“attitudes” of teacher applicants (e.g., Gallup’s TeacherInsight
Assessment and the Haberman Star Teacher).
An encouraging new study from Dan
Goldhaber and colleagues examines the Spokane
School District’s home-grown, skills-based screening process. It argues
that by using a two-stage evaluation process that relies heavily on data
generated from letters of recommendation, principals are able to limit precious
interview time to only higher-caliber applicants, resulting in better hiring.                  
The process seems to be working: scores on
the second stage of the pre-interview screening positively (and with
statistical significance) predict value-added measures of effectiveness. Also,
teachers hired by Spokane School District showed higher rates of
retention as opposed to those not hired by Spokane
who were teaching elsewhere in Washington
State.
Ratings on
applicants’ classroom management skills stand out as having the most predictive
power, piquing our interest in what exactly Spokane principal/supervisor screeners are looking for in
applicants with regards to classroom management. The bottom line: even though
the district’s rubric related to classroom management is fairly cryptic (i.e.,
“effective[ly] handl[e]… large/small, ethnically/sociologically diverse
groups”), it appears that screeners are still able to zero in on enough in
the letters of recommendation to identify candidates who are most likely to be
effective.
Given how unsystematic Spokane’s protocol appears to be— screeners receive no training on
how to apply the rubric—it probably helps that 71 percent of hired teachers
have had some previous experience in Spokane
as an employee, a student teacher or both; the study’s authors note that
“screeners may be familiar with those who are writing the letters of
recommendation.”
We have one minor quibble. We wonder how much
better Spokane could do in hiring if
it tightened up the protocol for evaluating classroom management skills and
used more structured interviews to evaluate applicants.

Way back in 2010, NCTQ released Human Capital in Boston Public Schools: Rethinking How to Attract, Develop and Retain Effective Teachers in partnership with the Massachusetts Alliance for Business Education. The typical life span of such a report might be about a year or two— yet five years later, we’re learning it still has considerable legs, largely due to the leadership of Boston’s top-notch interim superintendent, John McDonough. Boston, you are making us proud.

Dallas Independent
School District
hires approximately 2,000 new teachers each year. It is transforming the way
its human capital team works, adopting data-driven strategies for recruitment,
selection and hiring. One of the many sources of evidence Dallas ISD uses is the Teacher Prep Review.
The district first evaluated past recruitment
efforts based on NCTQ rankings to determine quality and whether they would have
a future presence for recruiting season at the previously considered schools.
Some schools have moved down or off of the list, while schools that previously
were not targeted in the recruitment plans will become more of a focal point.
The talent acquisition team travels near and far to find top talent to educate
students. The team analyzed the NCTQ rankings carefully identifying the standards
that best fit the districts needs and projected a strategic distribution for
early contracts.
The new recruitment plan this year will strategically include places
such as University of Houston , Arizona State University and Northwestern State University of
Louisiana based on their rankings from NCTQ. Top students at these
universities can look for early contracts from Dallas. These new teachers have had the training and preparation
that will prepare them to meet the district’s needs and they’ll be welcomed
into a district whose goal is to develop, support and reward their teachers for
effectiveness in the classroom.

If one Teach For America (TFA) corps member can boost student
test scores at a higher rate than other teachers in the same school, would
multiple TFA corps members in the same school result in even higher student
scores?
New research by Michael Hansen, Ben Backes, Victoria Brady
and Zey Xu addresses this question by looking at Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where
TFA teachers are purposefully clustered into a targeted set of disadvantaged
schools.* This notion — that TFA’s impact on high poverty schools could really
blossom if more corps members were clustered in a school — is one TFA has
suggested in the past.
This study, like those that come before it, finds that TFA corps
members pack a lot of punch in mathematics, consistently producing nearly three
months’ more achievement in mathematics over a single school year than their
non-TFA peers. When it comes to reading
scores, though, the authors continue to find what other research has found: there
isn’t much difference.   
So, is their largely positive impact greater than the sum of its
parts? In a word, no. The study found no spillover effects on the performance
of non-TFA colleagues. Student achievement in math increased only by the amount
of each additional TFA teacher and no more. Clustering the corps members had
the effect of concentrating these gains in placement schools, but TFA’s total
impact in the district would have been the same had the corps members been
dispersed evenly throughout the district.
*For more information on
teacher distribution in Miami-Dade
County Public Schools, be sure to read NCTQ’s recent paper, Unequal
access, unequal results.

New research shows that the answer may rest with the preparation program.