[Senate Hearing 110-154]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 110-154
NCLB REAUTHORIZATION: STRATEGIES FOR ATTRACTING, SUPPORTING AND
RETAINING HIGH QUALITY EDUCATORS
=======================================================================
HEARING
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,
LABOR, AND PENSIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
ON
EXAMINING STRATEGIES FOR ATTRACTING, SUPPORTING, AND RETAINING HIGH
QUALITY EDUCATORS
__________
MARCH 6, 2007
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions
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senate
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COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming,
TOM HARKIN, Iowa JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire
BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee
JEFF BINGAMAN, NEW MEXICO RICHARD BURR, North Carolina
PATTY MURRAY, Washington JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia
JACK REED, Rhode Island LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah
BARACK OBAMA, Illinois PAT ROBERTS, Kansas
BERNARD SANDERS (I), Vermont WAYNE ALLARD, Colorado
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio TOM COBURN, M.D., Oklahoma
J. Michael Myers, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Katherine Brunett McGuire, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
STATEMENTS
TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007
Page
Kennedy, Hon. Edward M., Chairman, Committee on Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions, opening statement.............. 1
Prepared statement........................................... 2
Alexander, Hon. Lamar, a U.S. Senator from the State of
Tennessee, opening statement................................... 4
Darling-Hammond, Ed.D., Linda, Professor of Education, Stanford
University, Stanford, California............................... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 7
Roberts, Hon. Pat, a U.S. Senator from the State of Kansas....... 18
Wilkins, Amy, Vice President, Government Affairs and
Communication, Education Trust, Washington, DC, on behalf of
Kati Haycock, President, The Education Trust................... 19
Prepared statement........................................... 21
Burtnett, Pamela, President, Lake County Education Association,
Florida........................................................ 27
Prepared statement........................................... 29
Solomon, Jesse, Director, Boston Teacher Residency, Boston,
Massachusetts.................................................. 32
Prepared statement........................................... 34
Maguire, Barbara, Teacher and Math Instructional Facilitator,
Park Elementary School, Casper, Wyoming........................ 37
Prepared statement........................................... 38
Young, Ph.D., Beverly, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Academic
Affairs, Teacher Education and Public School Programs,
California State University, Long Beach, California............ 40
Prepared statement........................................... 42
Watkins, Wanda J., Principal, Thurgood Marshall Elementary
School, Richardson, Texas...................................... 52
Prepared statement........................................... 54
Schnur, Jon, Chief Executive Officer, New Leaders for New
Schools, New York, New York.................................... 61
Prepared statement........................................... 64
Sanders, Ph.D., William, Senior Manager, Value-Added Research and
Assessment, SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina................ 71
Prepared statement........................................... 72
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Statements, articles, publications, letters, etc.:
Leslie Burger, American Library Association (ALA)............ 89
National School Boards Association (NSBA).................... 90
Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University................... 92
(iii)
NCLB REAUTHORIZATION: STRATEGIES FOR ATTRACTING, SUPPORTING AND
RETAINING HIGH QUALITY EDUCATORS
----------
TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:04 a.m., in
Room SD-430, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Edward M.
Kennedy, chairman of the committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Kennedy, Bingaman, Clinton, Brown, Gregg,
Alexander, Isakson, Roberts, and Allard.
Opening Statement of Senator Kennedy
The Chairman. Good morning. We'll proceed if you would be
good enough to take a seat. We've got a wonderful group of
friends here this morning to engage us in terms of the
conversation about an essential aspect of the whole educational
system and how we are going to ensure that we are going to get
good teachers that are going to be inspiring figures to help
and assist--strengthen the educational system in our No Child
Left Behind legislation and in schools across the country.
I think all of us on the panel understand the importance of
having good teachers and in good teachers, we're thinking about
not only those that have the very strong understanding in terms
of the substance of the material that they are teaching young
children but those special--those additional special qualities
that I think each and every one of us can think of when we
think about the teachers in our own lives that have inspired
us. We want to somehow capture that kind of a magic and make
sure that it is going to be available to children so that they
can be inspired in terms of their own kinds of educational
careers. It's really a challenging undertaking.
I don't think that any of us minimize the complexity and
the difficulties in attracting people to the teaching
profession. I don't think any of us minimize the challenges
that we are facing in holding good quality people in the
teaching profession, particularly in the areas of math and
science.
We've seen the numbers of those that have gone into the
profession, the serious numbers that have left teaching and we
are very, very mindful, in particular, of attracting good
quality teachers into the underserved areas and keeping them
there to try and make a difference so that we can see--as we
are trying to see the achievement and accomplishment and the
enhancement of education among children in so many of the areas
of our country and rural and urban areas that are challenged
with the difficulties of poverty.
But what we have seen and we'll hear today are a number of
different efforts that have been made locally that have been
very successful and that is what we are very interested in
hearing about. We want to hear about what is working. We are
all familiar with the challenges that are out there but I think
on this panel here this morning, we have some very creative,
imaginative and worthwhile efforts that we can really benefit
from here in this committee and hopefully the legislation can
benefit from as well as we are going through and that is our
real purpose. We want your ideas, we want your suggestions and
we are going to invite you not only to be part of this meeting
here this morning but as we continue to draft legislation
particularly in these areas to get your suggestions and get
your recommendations and get your ideas. We need your help.
So I will include my full statement in the record and ask
Senator Alexander, former head of the Department of Education,
a member of our committee who has a particular interest on the
issues on education and could be willing to say a word.
[The prepared statement of Senator Kennedy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Kennedy
I welcome our participants in today's roundtable discussion
on the No Child Left Behind Act. I'm grateful to our colleagues
on the committee, especially Senator Enzi and his staff for
helping us to arrange this roundtable.
One of the major goals of the No Child Left Behind Act is
to have a capable teacher in every classroom across the Nation.
We all know that teachers are an especially important factor in
student learning. They support, encourage, and inspire students
to do their best and become the best they can be. I'm sure all
of us here today have had great teachers whom we'll never
forget.
International comparisons show that the United States is
falling behind other countries in student achievement. The
heart of the problem is the pervasive achievement gap between
white students and other students. On the most recent test
comparing students in industrialized nations, white students in
the United States performed better than the average for all
countries, while Hispanic and African-American students did
worse. If we can close this achievement gap, and guarantee all
students a good education, we can put America back at the top
of the list.
Research also shows that the way to close this achievement
gap is to see that all children have good teachers. One study
found that having a high quality teacher for 5 years in a row
can overcome the average 7th grade achievement gap in math
between lower-income and higher-income children.
It's unacceptable that America's most at-risk students are
too often taught by the least prepared, the least experienced,
and the least qualified teachers. Students in high-poverty and
high-minority schools are twice as likely to be taught by new,
inexperienced teachers than students in less-poor and less-
diverse schools. Such teachers are less likely to receive the
pay and support they need and they often leave their school or
leave teaching all together, further destabilizing already
struggling schools.
The teacher distribution gap exists for many reasons, such
as poor working conditions, outdated facilities, large class
sizes, inadequate salaries and benefits, and better support for
individual teachers. These are all problems that can be solved.
It's especially troubling, given the global challenges we
face, that we have such serious teacher shortages in math and
science. Nearly half the math classes in high-poverty or high-
minority high schools are taught by teachers without a major or
minor in math or a math-related subject. From 1990 to 2002, the
percent of public high school math teachers with full
certification in math decreased from 90 percent to 80 percent.
We need teachers well-trained in these basic subjects who can
inspire students to study them.
Today we're here to discuss some proven strategies and
innovative approaches to meeting these challenges.
Obviously, we need to do more to recruit better teachers
for high need schools. They deserve better financial
incentives, better training, better opportunities to advance in
their careers, and stronger support in taking on the added
challenge of teaching in high-need schools.
Retention of good teachers is also a problem. In the 2003-4
school year, nearly 270,000 public school teachers left the
profession. The percent of teachers leaving the profession has
risen steadily--from 6.6 percent in 1994 to 8.4 percent in
2004. In 2004, 28 percent of those who left the field had less
than 3 years of experience. Workplace conditions, lack of
support, and lack of opportunities for professional development
are major considerations in their decisions to leave their
schools. It's clear that what we're doing now to support and
retain teachers isn't enough.
Today, we'll discuss some of the innovative models that
schools are using to overcome these problems, reduce the
teacher distribution gap, and strengthen teaching as a
profession. We'll hear about the importance of strong
leadership and better strategies for recruiting and retaining
good principals in schools where they're needed most.
We'll also hear about how to measure teacher effectiveness.
There is no scientific formula for what makes a great teacher.
Excellent educators are produced by combination of factors--
knowledge of content, good classroom preparation, the right
personality, support from other teachers and communication with
them, and continuous learning in and outside of the classroom.
Student test scores are not the only measure. A balanced
approach is needed, so that we can direct training and other
resources as effectively as possible.
All of you here today have much to contribute to this
discussion of effective strategies to meet these challenges. We
look forward to your insights, and we appreciate your
willingness to be here today.
The roundtable format enables us to hear from more people
and to have an interactive discussion. After Senator Enzi makes
his introductory remarks, we'll ask each of our participants to
describe the strategies that have been effective in their
communities for recruitment and retention of teachers, and the
types of support and professional development that are most
effective in high-need schools.
Once each witness has responded, we will open up the
discussion so my colleagues can comment and ask questions. In
order to keep the discussion moving, we request that all
participants limit their responses to any question to 1 minute.
If the need arises, we will vary the format a little to fit the
discussion.
Thank you all again for being here today. Now we'll hear
from Senator Enzi.
Opening Statement of Senator Alexander
Senator Alexander. Thank you, Senator Kennedy. First let me
thank you for organizing the roundtable in this way. This gives
us an opportunity to do something Senators don't usually do,
which is listen instead of talk so I don't want to interfere
with that mode of operation.
I'm genuinely looking forward to this and I'd like to say
it this way--yesterday Senator Bingaman and I and Kennedy and
Gregg and a number of us who have been working about 2 years on
how do we keep our brainpower advantage, asked the National
Academy of Sciences what to do. How do we keep America's
brainpower advantage? So please tell us in priority order what
to do. So they did, they gave us 20 specific recommendations. A
group of Nobel Laureates, teachers, business leaders--Norm
Augustine headed it and the priority that they put it in, they
didn't put the Research and Development tax credit first, they
didn't put more funding for university research first. They put
K-12 first and they put teaching first within K-12 and that's
sort of my view of things. I have been going to education
meetings for a long time.
My conclusion is that it mostly boils down to parents and
teachers and principals and everything else is about 5 percent.
Since I don't quite know how to have a perfect parents program,
focusing on teachers is very important. I will be interested to
hear about No Child Left Behind and rural teachers and special
ed teachers and professional developmental programs.
I would be especially interested if those of you who have
so much experience in the education community can help us see
if we can encourage finding ways to reward outstanding
teachings and outstanding principals. I know that's not easy to
do. I've tried it myself. We had a career ladder program in
Tennessee. We bemoan the fact that teachers and principals
leave, yet we have a flat pay scale that goes like this and
until we find a fair way to reward outstanding teachers and
principals, we won't keep good men and women in the classroom.
Second, we won't really be able to assign and keep these
very talented teachers to work on the low performing schools,
Mr. Chairman, who are only about 15 to 20 percent of the
schools but are where they really need to go to work. So we
can't figure that out but perhaps you can help us do that and
I'll especially be listening to your suggestions about that.
Thank you.
The Chairman. I'll ask each of the panelists if they just
have 3 or 4 minutes. We want to have a real discussion. This is
really a strategy that we are following with our former Chair,
Mike Enzi, and it seemed to have worked very well and that is
the way we will proceed, joined by Senator Gregg and Senator
Bingaman and now we'll listen.
I'll introduce four of the witnesses, then hear from those
four and then introduce the others because people might forget
the good things I say about our second set of witnesses if I
introduce nine of you in a row. We will try and keep the
message as close to the individual as possible.
So, we will start over here with Professor Linda Darling-
Hammond, Professor of Education at Stanford University. She
will discuss the importance of professional development and
strengthening the teacher workforce. She proposes an initiative
similar to medical school training for education including
residencies and extensive training.
After her, we will have Amy Wilkins, who is the Vice
President of Government Affairs at the Education Trust. Amy
will discuss the teacher distribution gap and how to get more
qualified teachers in high-poverty and high-minority schools.
Then we will hear from Pam Burtnett who is President of the
Lake County Education Association. Pam was a national board-
certified teacher, 25 years of experience teaching 6th through
12th grade. She worked 12 years as a Professional Development
Specialist at the district level, helping to improve teacher
effectiveness, literacy comprehension and assessment. She also
was a local site coordinator for the Lake County Effective
Teaching Center for 10 years. Lets just start with those three
and we'll start with you, Linda Hammond, please. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND, ED.D., PROFESSOR OF
EDUCATION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
Ms. Hammond. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be
here. I'm delighted that you are tackling this hugely important
topic. I agree with you, Senator Alexander that it's about the
teachers and the principals and then bringing the parents along
with that. So I'm going to basically argue for a systemic
approach and for attention to retention as well as recruiting
teachers. I've submitted written testimony that outlines a
number of programs. I'm not going to spend a lot of time at the
front end talking about them other than to put a couple of
benchmarks that we could talk about later.
Let me note that this problem of recruiting and retaining
teachers has been around since I entered teaching in 1973 on
the NDEA Act and you may remember that we had a flurry of
activity back then to try to recruit teachers and in contrast
to other countries that we think of as peers or competitors
that have a systemic approach and don't have ongoing shortages
of teachers. We continue to have this problem and I think it is
because we have not yet had a sustained coherent effort that
has lasted over a period of time, in the way that we have for
the medical profession or the Federal Government has had a set
of initiatives for 45 years to ensure that we get doctors into
shortage areas, that we train them in shortage fields, that we
have medical programs developed in places where they are needed
and I think we need a similar approach in teaching.
Other countries that we think of as peers that are high
achieving have equal salaries for teachers with additional
stipends for those that go to high-need areas. They have
universal teacher education at State expense, high quality,
including a year of clinical practice where you actually learn
how to teach in schools that are organized for that purpose.
Mentoring for every beginning teacher is the norm in other high
achieving countries and ongoing professional development, which
usually takes place in about 10 to 15 hours a week, where
teachers work with each other on planning lessons and so on. So
that's sort of an image where I think we need to go as we
develop systems in this country.
By contrast, we have very unequal salaries and they tend to
be lower where the kids are needier. We have unequal working
conditions. We have teachers with varying degrees of
preparation and mentoring.
The four factors that research finds matters most are
salaries, working conditions, the degree of preparation--
teachers who are better prepared stay in teaching longer. Those
who have, for example, student teaching and know about learning
are twice as likely to stay in teaching after the first year.
And mentoring--those who get a coach who works with them in the
first year of teaching are much more likely to stay in
teaching. Retention turns out to be one of the biggest problems
so we have at least 30 percent of teachers leaving over the
first 5 years. It's more in cities and poor rural areas. The
costs of attrition are estimated at about $15,000 per person
who leaves. So for non-retirement attrition in this country,
we're spending about $2.2 billion a year just to deal with the
churn mostly of beginning teachers who come in and out.
When our strategies or solutions for teacher shortages do
not give teachers enough preparation or mentoring, that just
adds to the churn and adds to the cost of attrition.
So in my written testimony, I mention a lot of programs. I
won't spend time talking about all of them but these are places
that have made a significant difference in recruiting and
retaining teachers all across the country.
I talk about the North Carolina Teaching Fellows, which is
a program that has brought thousands of teachers in, high
ability teachers who have stayed at rates of over 75 percent
over 7 years and disproportionately in math and science and in
other shortage areas. I talk about programs in California that
have provided bonuses to national board-certified teachers for
working in low performing schools that have successfully
brought those accomplished teachers into districts and schools
where they might not otherwise have been and programs that have
put resources for incentives into hard-to-staff schools for
improving working conditions, providing hiring bonuses and a
variety of other strategies to both make those places better
places to work and recruit accomplished teachers to those
schools.
I talk about programs like the Urban Teacher Residencies in
Chicago and Boston--we have Jesse here to talk about the Boston
program--which are creating very strong schools in inner-city
neighborhoods that are staffed by mentored teachers that are
excellent places to teach high-need kids well. And then
training teachers there solves one of our biggest problems
because to teach kids who have large levels of needs, you need
to be in a place where master teachers are showing you how to
do it. Those programs and professional development school
programs that some universities have started could lead us into
ways to develop an engine of supply for highly prepared
teachers for high-need districts and also reward those mentor
teachers who work there.
I talk about beginning teacher mentoring programs in States
like Connecticut and California that ensure that all teachers
get high quality mentoring and have reduced attrition as well
as in districts where unions and management have negotiated
programs that work for reducing attrition and ensuring greater
competence.
The Chairman. Let me give you just a few seconds to wrap
up, please.
Ms. Hammond. And finally, in my written testimony, I
outline sort of a marshal plan for teaching, which for the cost
of about 1 percent of the current engagement in Iraq, would I
think, give us the capacity to ensure that we have well
qualified teachers in all kinds of communities, through service
scholarships, recruitment incentives for accomplished teachers
to go into high-need schools, high quality preparation,
universal mentoring and a teacher performance assessment. So I
think that a systemic approach is possible and those are the
elements I think would be very helpful.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Hammond follows:]
Prepared Statement of Linda Darling-Hammond, Ed.D.
With increased recognition that expert teachers are perhaps the
most fundamental resource for improving student learning, there is
growing interest in figuring out how to recruit and retain strong
teachers, especially in high-need schools. Unfortunately, unlike other
industrialized nations, especially those that are the highest-
achieving, the United States lacks a systematic approach to recruiting,
preparing, and retaining teachers. With few governmental supports for
preparation or mentoring, teachers in the United States enter:
with dramatically different levels of training--with those
least prepared teaching the most educationally vulnerable children,
at sharply disparate salaries--with those teaching the
neediest students earning the least,
working under radically different teaching conditions--
with those in the most affluent communities benefiting from class sizes
under 20 and a cornucopia of materials, equipment, specialists, and
supports, while those in the poorest communities teach classes of 40 or
more without adequate books and supplies,
with little or no mentoring or on-the-job coaching in most
communities to help teachers improve their skills.
Meanwhile, higher-achieving countries that rarely experience
teacher shortages (such as Finland, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands,
Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) have
made substantial investments in teacher training and equitable teacher
distribution in the last two decades. These include:
High-quality graduate-level teacher education, at
government expense, including a year of practice teaching in a clinical
school connected to the university,
Mentoring for all beginners in their first year of
teaching from expert teachers, coupled with other supports like a
reduced teaching load and shared planning,
Equitable salaries (often with additional stipends for
hard-to-staff locations) which are competitive with other professions,
such as engineering,
Ongoing professional learning embedded in 10 or more hours
a week of planning and professional development time.
In order to make headway on the issue of recruiting and retaining
teachers where they are needed most, a systemic approach is needed.
There are a number of States and districts that have undertaken
successful approaches that should be emulated. Ultimately, a national
teacher supply policy is critically needed.\1\ To begin, the nature of
the problem must be understood. In particular,
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\1\ For a fuller treatment of the design of a national teacher
supply policy, see L. Darling-Hammond and G. Sykes (2003). Wanted: A
national teacher supply policy for education: The right way to meet the
``highly qualified teacher'' challenge. Educational Policy Analysis
Archives, 11 (33). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n33/.
1. There is not an overall shortage of teachers in the United
States. In fact there are many more certified teachers in the Nation
than there are positions.\2\ There is, however, a maldistribution of
qualified teachers across States and districts--and a shortage of
teachers willing to work for low wages under poor working conditions.
Thus, part of the problem is how to equalize conditions across
districts and schools and attract teachers to the places where they are
needed. The strategies of States and districts that have turned around
shortages are detailed below. They include increased salaries alongside
increased standards, stronger pipelines to teacher preparation, and
improved teaching conditions, including mentoring and professional
development.
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\2\ In California, for example, there are about 1.3 million
credentialed teachers and about 280,000 teaching positions. Nationally,
of the estimated 200,000 teachers hired annually, no more than 125,000
are hired from the new teacher pool; the remainder are individuals who
are moving or returning to teaching from the reserve pool. The number
of new teachers currently prepared each year--roughly 190,000--is more
than enough to satisfy this demand. Furthermore, despite shortfalls in
some areas, the United States annually produces many more new teachers
than its schools hire. Only about 70 percent of newly prepared teachers
enter teaching jobs immediately after they graduate, and many report
that they cannot find jobs.
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2. There are specific fields, such as mathematics, science, special
education, and teaching of English as a second language, which have
real shortages and where strategic recruitment incentives are needed.
Unlike medicine, where the Federal Government funds medical schools to
grow programs in high-need fields and provides service scholarships for
candidates to go to into these fields and practice in high-need
locations, there is currently no such national policy in teaching.
Usually, preparation standards are lowered instead, which contributes
to higher attrition (see below), thus exacerbating rather than solving
the problem. It is critical to develop programs, like those described
below, that increase the probability recruits will succeed and stay in
the places they are needed, rather than adding to the revolving door of
in-and-out recruits.
3. Retaining teachers is a far larger problem than recruiting new
ones and a key to solving teacher ``shortages.'' The main problem is an
exodus of new teachers from the profession, with more than 30 percent
leaving within 5 years, and higher rates of turnover in lower-income
schools. An additional problem is the flight of teachers from less-
affluent schools to more-affluent schools. This is strongly tied to
working conditions--including administrative support and strong
colleagues as well as tangible teaching conditions and salaries.
Research also finds that teachers leave the profession much faster if
they have less preparation before they enter and less mentoring support
when they arrive. The costs of teacher attrition are very high--
estimated at $15,000 on average per recruit who leaves, or at least $2
billion annually.\3\ These funds should be spent strategically on
stronger teaching supports, rather than wasted on a fast-spinning
revolving door.
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\3\ A 2000 study in Texas, estimated the costs of turnover at
between $8,000 and $48,000 per recruit who leaves, depending on the
cost model used (Texas Center for Educational Research, 2000). The
organizational costs include those for termination, substitutes,
searching, managing the selection process, new training, and lost
skills. The study found that only 17 percent of this attrition was due
to retirement. More recent estimates from personnel administrators put
the range of costs between $12,000 and 20,000, with most around
$15,000. National turnover rates are about 6-8 percent annually, with
about 20 percent of that due to retirements. This amounts to about
150,000 non-retirees leaving a year, at a cost of about $2.25 billion.
Below I describe specific programs that have been successful in
addressing these issues. States and urban districts that have
successfully transformed their teaching forces have used a
comprehensive approach, including increasing salaries and standards
simultaneously, pursuing aggressive recruitment and hiring, using
subsidies to underwrite teacher preparation, creating teacher education
pipelines, ensuring mentoring for beginners, and supporting
professional development and improved teaching conditions. Several
examples of these successes are included in Appendix A. Finally, I
outline a proposal for a Marshall plan to improve teaching, which, for
the price of less than 1 percent of the costs of the intervention in
Iraq, could solve teacher shortages and establish the foundation for a
teaching quality system in the United States that would provide a
reliable stream of well-prepared teachers to the places they are most
needed.
RECRUITING WELL-PREPARED HIGH-NEED TEACHERS WHO STAY IN TEACHING
One of the most successful teacher recruitment initiatives over two
decades is the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program. Funded by the
State legislature since 1986, the Fellows program provides $26,000 in
service scholarships ($6,500 per year for 4 years) to 500 high-ability
high school seniors a year who enroll in intensive 4-year teacher
education programs throughout the State, selected for their quality and
augmented with additional training. The Fellows must teach for at least
4 years in North Carolina schools. The program has supplied over 8,000
teachers for the State's schools, a disproportionate share of whom are
males, members of underrepresented minority groups, and in high-need
fields like math and science. An evaluation following fellows over 7
years found that 75 percent were still teaching in the public schools
in the State, and many of the remainder had advanced to educational
leadership positions in schools or districts (Norris, 1998). Fellow
felt very well-prepared, and principals reported that the Fellows'
first year classroom performance far exceeded that of other new
teachers in every area assessed (Berry, 1995).
A similar program in California, the Governor's Teaching
Fellowships, targeted $20,000 service scholarships for high-ability
college graduates who would prepare to teach in under-performing
schools in particular, and recruited candidates entering 1-year
graduate level teacher education programs. This program was successful
in providing a supply of high-ability, well-trained candidates to high-
need schools in a short-time period.
RECRUITING EXPERT VETERAN TEACHERS TO HARD-TO-STAFF SCHOOLS
California also has launched a program to attract National Board
Certified teachers to high-need schools by paying a $20,000 bonus--paid
out over 4 years--to teachers who become Board-Certified and teach in
underperforming schools. This has drawn a number of accomplished
teachers to these schools. Like the Connecticut BEST program, teachers
who achieve the high standards set on the National Board's assessment
of teacher performance have been found in most studies to be more
effective in producing student achievement gains.\4\
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\4\ Bond, L., Smith, T., Baker, W., & Hattie, J. (2000). The
certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards: A construct and consequential validity study (Greensboro,
NC: Center for Educational Research and Evaluation); Cavaluzzo, L.
(2004). Is National Board Certification an effective signal of teacher
quality? (National Science Foundation No. REC-0107014). Alexandria, VA:
The CNA Corporation; Goldhaber, D., & Anthony, E. (2005). Can teacher
quality be effectively assessed? Seattle, WA: University of Washington
and the Urban Institute; Smith, T., Gordon, B., Colby, S., & Wang, J.
(2005). An examination of the relationship of the depth of student
learning and National Board certification status (Office for Research
on Teaching, Appalachian State University). Vandevoort, L. G., Amrein-
Beardsley, A., & Berliner, D. C. (2004). National Board certified
teachers and their students' achievement. Education Policy Analysis
Archives, 12 (46), 117.
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Many studies find that districts paying less than the market wage
in their local labor market tend to experience continual shortages, and
that raising salaries to market levels can quickly transform the hiring
pool if there is also a well-functioning hiring system. (See the
examples of specific initiatives in San Diego, New Haven, CA, and New
York City in the Appendix.) Some States have eliminated shortages in
urban and poor rural areas by equalizing salaries so that poorer
districts can compete in the labor market for teachers. (See the
example of Connecticut's strategy in the Appendix.) Some districts have
sought to use salary incentives to attract teachers to hard-to-staff
schools, a strategy that has had mixed success in the few places that
have tried it. In some places, this has proved a modestly productive
approach. In others where overall salaries are inadequate and working
conditions are poor, bonuses have not been enough to change the
district pool or entice teachers to schools that are poorly run and
dysfunctional. However, re-designing schools so that they are much more
supportive of teaching and learning--including creating small,
innovative high schools to replace failing factory model schools--and
improving working conditions in hard-to-staff schools (by reducing
class size, improving leadership, infusing resources for strong,
curriculum innovations) has been successful in many districts.
California created the Teachers as a Priority Program, providing
funding for improved working conditions in hard-to-staff schools to
attract and keep qualified teachers in these schools. The program
supported class size reduction, curriculum reforms, mentoring, bonuses
and other interventions to redistribute teachers.
CREATING HIGH-QUALITY TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN HIGH-NEED AREAS
Most important are models that can simultaneously improve teacher
competence and retention and meet pressing supply needs. Because many
teacher candidates choose to teach where they grew up or went to
college, it is important to have strong programs in hard-to-staff urban
and rural locations. This is why alternative programs, when they are
well-designed and offer sufficient training, are useful for building
teacher supply, since they recruit and train candidates specifically
for the districts that sponsor them.
However, many alternative programs, and some traditional programs,
fail to provide one of the most important elements of preparation--the
opportunity to learn under the direct supervision of expert teachers
working in schools that serve high-need students well. Teaching cannot
be learned from books or even from being mentored periodically.
Teachers must see expert practices modeled and must practice them with
help. However, student teaching is too often reduced or omitted, or it
is in classrooms that do not model expert practice, or it is in
classrooms that do not serve high-need students--and what is learned
does not generalize to other schools. This fundamental problem has to
be tackled and solved if we are to prepare an adequate supply of
teachers who will enter urban or poor rural classrooms competent to
work effectively with the neediest students and confident enough to
stay in teaching in these areas.
Poorly designed alternatives do not keep teachers in teaching.
Studies find that teachers leave at much higher rates if they lack key
elements of preparation. For example, teachers without student teaching
experience or preparation in curriculum, teaching methods, learning,
and child development leave at twice the rate as teachers who have had
this kind of training.\5\ A recent study \6\ that documented these
outcomes in New York City showed that students achieved less when
taught by new uncertified or alternatively certified teachers and that
these teachers left at higher rates. For example, between 2000 and
2004, more than 50 percent of New York City Teaching Fellows and other
nontraditional entrants had left by their fourth year, along with 85
percent of Teach for America teachers. This compared to only 37 percent
of college prepared teachers. Given the costs of attrition, these high
turnover rates cost the city more than $50 million.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ For a review, see Darling-Hammond, L. & Sykes, G. (2003).
Wanted: A national teacher supply policy for education: The right way
to meet the ``highly qualified teacher'' challenge. Educational Policy
Analysis Archives, 11 (33). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n33/; Henke,
R., Chen, X., & Geis, S. (2000). Progress Through the Teacher Pipeline:
1992-1993 College Graduates and Elementary/Secondary School Teaching As
Of 1997. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S.
Department of Education.
\6\ Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J.
(2006). How changes in entry requirements alter the teacher workforce
and affect student achievement. Education Finance & Policy, 1 (2); 176-
216.
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There are two kinds of initiatives that have tackled this problem
successfully. One alternative is the Urban Teacher Residency designed
in Chicago that has created new schools or completely re-staffed
existing schools with highly expert mentor teachers and then placing
mid-career recruits in the classrooms of these mentor teachers for a
year while they complete coursework in curriculum, teaching, and
learning at local universities. Rather than trying to teach without
seeing good teaching in a sink or swim model, these recruits watch
experts in action and are tutored into accomplished practice. These
recruits receive a $30,000 salary during this year and a masters degree
and credential at the end of the year. They are selected because they
want to commit to a career in urban public school teaching and they
pledge to spend at least 4 years in city schools. This model has
already shown high retention rates in teaching and strong performance
by graduates, who now staff other turnaround schools in the city.
A similar model, launched by a number of universities is the
professional development schools model. Like teaching hospitals in
medicine, these models partner universities with school sites that
exhibit state-of-the-art practice and train novices in the classrooms
of expert teachers while they are completing coursework that helps them
learn to teach diverse learners well. Many of these new models are
located in urban schools, creating a pipeline of teachers well-prepared
to teach in these districts. Highly-developed models have been found to
increase teacher effectiveness and raise student achievement.\7\
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\7\ For a summary of studies, see L. Darling-Hammond & J.
Bransford, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers
Should Learn And Be Able To Do. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005, pp.
415-416.
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Such programs can solve several problems simultaneously--creating a
pipeline of committed teachers who are well-prepared to engage in best
practice for children in high-need schools, while creating
demonstration sites that serve as models for urban teaching and teacher
education.
HIGH QUALITY MENTORING
Retention is at least as important to solving teacher supply as
recruitment. With 30 percent of new teachers leaving within 5 years
(and more in urban areas), the revolving door cannot be slowed until
the needs for beginning teacher support are addressed. Other high-
achieving countries invest heavily in structured induction for
beginning teachers: they fund schools to provide released time for
expert mentors and they fund other learning opportunities for
beginners, such as seminars, visits to other teachers' classrooms, and
joint planning time. Such strategies have also been found effective in
reducing beginning teacher attrition in the United States. A critical
component is strong mentoring, which includes on-the-job observations
and coaching in the classroom as well as support for teacher planning
by expert veterans.\8\ If even half of the early career teachers who
leave teaching were to be retained, the Nation would save at least $600
million a year in replacement costs.
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\8\ A number of studies have found that well-designed mentoring
programs improve retention rates for new teachers along with their
attitudes, feelings of efficacy, and their range of instructional
strategies (California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 1992; Karge
and Freiberg, 1992; Kolbert and Wolff, 1992; Darling-Hammond & Sykes,
op. cit.; Luczak, op. cit.)
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Districts like Cincinnati, Columbus, and Toledo, Ohio, Rochester,
New York, and Seattle, Washington have launched Peer Assistance and
Review Programs, which have sharply reduced attrition rates of
beginning teachers by providing expert mentor teachers with release
time to coach beginners in their first year on the job and evaluate
them at the end of the year. Each program was established through
collective bargaining and is governed by a panel of teachers and
administrators. The governing panel selects consulting teachers through
a rigorous evaluation process that looks for teaching skills and
mentoring abilities. These mentors, or consulting teachers, work in the
same subject area as those that they are assisting. They visit,
observe, and consult with the beginning teachers at least weekly, and
they meet regularly with one another to develop their skills as mentors
and to share resources and ideas. In all of these districts, beginning
teacher attrition has fallen as a result of this program: In each case,
first year teachers leave at rates of no more than 5 percent--most
because they have been discontinued through the evaluation process
rather than because they have become discouraged. Some of the districts
previously experienced beginning teacher attrition rates as high as 30
percent or more.\9\
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\9\ National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, What
Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future. NY: Author, 1996.
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The additional benefit of these and other mentoring programs is the
new lease on life for many veteran teachers as well. Expert veterans
need ongoing challenges to remain stimulated and excited about staying
in the profession. Many say that mentoring and coaching other teachers
creates an incentive for them to remain in teaching as they gain from
both learning from and sharing with other colleagues.
On the State level, induction programs that are tied to high
quality preparation can be doubly effective. California's Beginning
Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) Program, which provides mentors
and other supports for beginning teachers in their first 2 years, has
shown that carefully designed mentoring systems can produce rates of
beginning teacher retention exceeding 90 percent in the first several
years of teaching. The State provides $3000-$4000 in matching funds per
beginning teacher to support this program.
Connecticut--Beginning Educator Support and Training (BEST) program
for beginning teachers has also stemmed attrition and improved
competence. It requires districts who hire beginning teachers to
provide them with mentors who are also trained in the State teaching
standards and portfolio assessment system that were introduced as part
of reforms launched in 1986. (See Appendix A for a fuller discussion of
the reforms, which also greatly boosted supply and quality through
subsidies for preparation, increased salaries and standards, and
extensive professional development.) Beginning teachers must
demonstrate that they can teach through a performance assessment
modeled after the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
assessment. Studies in Connecticut have reported that teacher education
and induction programs have improved because of the feedback from the
assessment; beginning teachers and mentors also feel the assessment has
helped them improve their practice as they become clearer about what
good teaching is and how to develop it. Beginning teacher scores on the
BEST portfolio have been found to predict teacher effectiveness in
terms of influence on student learning gains.\10\ Thus, the program
enhances teacher competence and effectiveness as it shapes and improves
preparation and mentoring.
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\10\ Wilson, M. & Hallum, P.J. (2006). Using Student Achievement
Test Scores as Evidence of External Validity for Indicators of Teacher
Quality: Connecticut's Beginning Educator Support and Training Program.
Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley.
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Although requirements for beginning teacher induction have
proliferated, with more than 30 States now requiring some kind of
induction program, many are not funded and do not provide the kind of
mentoring and coaching described here.\11\ Two recent analyses of a
large-scale national teacher survey revealed that the most important
predictor of teacher's ongoing commitment to the profession is the
quality of the mentoring and support they receive, rather than the mere
existence of a program, which often does not provide intensive coaching
or planning support.\12\
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\11\ (NCTAF, 2003).
\12\ Ingersoll, 1997b; Luczak, 2005.
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WHAT CAN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DO? A MARSHALL PLAN FOR TEACHING
A strategic Federal role is needed to create an infrastructure for
strong teaching across the country. Individual innovative programs at
the local level will not alone solve the problems we face. Federal
strategies for enhancing the supply of teachers have precedents in the
field of medicine as well as teaching. Since 1944, Washington has
subsidized medical training to meet the needs of underserved
populations, to fill shortages in particular fields, and to build
teaching hospitals and training programs in high-need areas. This
consistent commitment has contributed significantly to America's world-
renowned system of medical training and care.
Intelligent, targeted subsidies for preparation coupled with
stronger supports at entry and incentives for staying in high-need
schools are needed to ensure that all students have access to teachers
who are indeed highly qualified. A serious national teacher quality and
supply policy could be accomplished for $3 billion annually, less than
1 percent of the more than $300 billion spent thus far in Iraq, and, in
a matter of only a few years, could build a strong teaching force that
would last decades.
In the long run, these proposals would save far more than they
would cost. The savings would include the more than $2 billion now
wasted annually because of high teacher turnover, plus the even higher
costs of grade retention, summer school, remedial programs, lost wages
and prison costs for dropouts \13\ (increasingly tied to illiteracy and
school failure)--all of which could be substantially lowered if we
committed to ensuring strong teachers in the schools that most need
them. Such a plan should focus on:
\13\ The costs of dropouts, in terms of lost wages and taxes,
health and social welfare costs, plus incarceration costs (most inmates
are high school dropouts and more than half are functionally
illiterate) are estimated to exceed $50 billion annually.
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Increasing the supply and quality of teachers targeted to
high-need fields and locations through:
1. Service scholarships for entering teachers, with special focus
on high-need fields and locations (40,000 @ $25,000 each = $1 billion
annually).
2. Recruitment incentives for expert, experienced teachers to teach
in high-need schools (50,000 teachers x $10,000 stipends ($500 million)
+ $300 million to improve teaching conditions in high-need schools =
$800 million).
3. Improved preparation for teaching high-need students and for
programs in high-need areas ($500 million, including $200 million for
state-of-the-art ``teaching schools'' partnered with universities in
hard-to-staff communities).
Improving retention and mobility of well-qualified
teachers through:
4. Mentoring for all beginning teachers through investments in
State and district mentoring programs (150,000 @ $4000 each = $600
million).
5. A high-quality, nationally available teacher performance
assessment to guide training, improve quality, and facilitate
interstate mobility ($100 million).
INCREASING TEACHER SUPPLY AND QUALITY IN HIGH-NEED FIELDS AND LOCATIONS
While most States have long had surpluses of candidates in
elementary education, English, and social studies, there are inadequate
numbers of teachers trained in high-need areas like mathematics,
physical science, special education, bilingual education and English as
a Second Language (ESL), and there are problems getting well-prepared
teachers to where they are most needed. Shortages in poor urban and
rural schools are usually met by lowering standards--an especially
dysfunctional response because the students in these schools need the
most highly skilled teachers if they are to close the gap, and because
high turnover rates for untrained teachers cost urban districts
hundreds of millions of dollars in attrition costs. Because fully
prepared beginning teachers are twice as likely to stay in teaching as
those who enter without complete training, district shortages could be
reduced rapidly if such districts could hire better prepared teachers
(as fewer would need to be hired each year to replace those who left
and a more adequate supply would be available). Two kinds of targeted
incentives are needed to attract qualified teachers to schools and
areas that historically have been underserved.
1. First, the Federal Government should maintain a substantial,
sustained program of service scholarships that completely cover
training costs in high-quality pre-service or alternative programs at
the undergraduate or graduate level for those who will teach in a high-
need field or location for at least 4 years. (After 3 years, candidates
are much more likely to remain in the profession and to make a
difference for student achievement.) While some Federal grants are
currently available, there are too few of them and they are too small
in scope to serve as an adequate incentive to candidates.
Service scholarships (as opposed to post hoc forgivable loans) can
be targeted to high-ability candidates who might not otherwise enter
teacher preparation. These incentives can be used proactively to
recruit candidates to the fields and locations where they are needed.
Nearly all of the vacancies currently filled with emergency teachers
could be filled with talented, well-prepared teachers if 40,000 service
scholarships of up to $25,000 each were offered annually. These should
be designed to cover up to 2 years of undergraduate or graduate teacher
education, including alternative programs for mid-career recruits, and
should be:
Allocated on the basis of academic merit and indicators of
potential success in teaching, such as perseverance, capacity and
commitment;
Targeted especially to areas of teaching shortage as
defined nationally and by individual States; and
Awarded in exchange for teaching for 4 years in priority
schools, defined on the basis of poverty rates and educational needs
(e.g. language minority status).
2. Second, recruitment incentives for high-need schools are also
needed to attract and keep expert, experienced teachers in the schools
where they are most needed, both to teach and to mentor other teachers.
This requires a combination of salary incentives and improvements in
working conditions, including the redesign of dysfunctional school
organizations to support smaller pupil loads, and time for teachers to
work and plan together.
Federal matching grants to States and districts should provide
incentives for the design of innovative approaches to attract and keep
accomplished teachers in priority low-income schools, through
compensation for accomplishment and for additional responsibilities,
such as mentoring and coaching. Five-hundred million dollars would
provide $10,000 in additional compensation for 50,000 teachers annually
to be allocated to expert teachers in high-need schools through State-
or locally-designed incentive systems, recognizing teacher expertise
through such mechanisms as National Board Certification, State or local
standards-based evaluations, and carefully assembled evidence of
contributions to student learning. (Matched by State and local
contributions, this program would provide incentives to attract 100,000
accomplished teachers to high-poverty schools.)
To keep high-quality teachers in high-poverty communities, schools
need to offer working conditions that support teacher and student
success. An additional $300 million should be allocated on a State/
district matching grant basis to improve teaching conditions,
including, as warranted, smaller classes and pupil loads,
administrative supports for necessary materials and supplies, and time
for teacher planning and professional development--all of which attract
and keep teachers in schools.
3. Third, just as the Federal Government has undertaken in
medicine, the Marshall plan should fund improved preparation for
teaching high-need students and for programs in high-need areas. For
this purpose, the plan would allocate $300 million to improve
preparation for teaching reading and literacy skills at all grade
levels, mathematics and science, special education, and English
language learners.
An additional $200 million of these funds should be targeted for
state-of-the-art teacher education programs in hard-to-staff
communities that incorporate ``teaching schools'' partnered with
universities, including urban teaching residencies and professional
development school models. In these programs, candidates would take
coursework focused on teaching challenging content to diverse learners
while engaged in practice teaching in schools staffed by expert
teachers and designed to model state-of-the-art practice. Since many
teachers have a strong preference to teach close to where they grew up
or went to school, this approach would also enhance the pool of local
college graduates prepared to teach in their communities. Funding for
200 programs at $1,000,000 per year per program (for 5 years), each
serving an average of 150 candidates annually, would supply 30,000
exceptionally well-prepared recruits to urban teaching each year who
would provide long-term commitment and leadership in these districts.
IMPROVING TEACHER RETENTION AND MOBILITY
Most of the teacher supply problem in the United States is actually
a problem of retention. Attrition is highest in the early years of
teaching: About one-third of new teachers leave within 5 years, and the
rates are much higher for teachers who enter with less preparation and
those who do not receive mentoring. Current estimates average about
$15,000 per teacher who leaves, totaling at least $2 billion each year.
Because beginning teachers are generally less effective than those with
3 or more years of experience, continual high turnover of beginning
teachers also significantly reduces educational productivity. Stemming
this attrition is critical, as recruitment efforts are otherwise like
pouring water into a leaky bucket, rather than repairing it.
4. Providing mentoring for all beginning teachers would reduce
attrition and increase competence. A matching grant program could
ensure support for every new teacher in the Nation through investments
in State and district mentoring programs. Based on the funding model
used in California's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program,
a Federal allocation of $4000 for each beginning teacher, matched by
States or local districts, would fund a mentor for every 10-15
beginning teachers. At 125,000 new teachers each year,\14\ an
investment of $500 million could ensure that each novice is coached by
a trained, accomplished mentor with expertise in the relevant teaching
field.
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\14\ About 250,000 teachers are hired each year, but typically only
40-60 percent of them are new to teaching. The others are experienced
teachers changing schools or returning teachers who are re-entering the
labor force.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Finally, this preparation and mentoring can be strengthened if
they are guided by a high-quality, nationally-available teacher
performance assessment, which measures actual teaching skill in the
content areas, and which can facilitate interstate mobility. Current
examinations used for licensing and for Federal accountability
typically measure basic skills and subject matter knowledge in paper-
and-pencil tests that demonstrate little about teachers' abilities to
practice effectively. Furthermore, in many cases these tests evaluate
teacher knowledge before they enter or complete teacher education, and
hence are an inadequate tool for teacher education accountability.
The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium
(INTASC), sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers,
created teacher licensing standards adopted by most States and piloted
performance assessments tied to the standards; several States,
including Connecticut and California, have incorporated such
performance assessments in the licensing process. These assessments
have been found to be strong levers for improving preparation and
mentoring, as well as determining teachers' competence. Federal support
of $100 million for the development of a nationally available,
performance assessment for licensing would not only provide a useful
tool for accountability and improvement, but it would also facilitate
teacher mobility across States, if it were part of an effort to unify
the current medieval system of teacher testing that has resulted in 50
separate ``fiefdoms'' across the country. Because teacher supply and
demand vary regionally, teachers need to get easily from States with
surpluses to those with shortages, which requires license reciprocity.
With a purposeful focus, a Marshall Plan for Teaching could help
ensure within only a few years that the United States has developed an
infrastructure comparable to those in other countries for providing
highly-qualified teachers to all children in all communities.
Appendix A.--Lessons from State and District Experiences\15\
A number of States and local school districts have fashioned
successful strategies for strengthening their teaching forces. A few
are outlined here.
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\15\ This is drawn from L. Darling-Hammond and G. Sykes (2003).
Wanted: A national teacher supply policy for education: The right way
to meet the ``highly qualified teacher'' challenge. Educational Policy
Analysis Archives, 11 (33). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n33/. Citations
to research about these programs can be found there.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A. STATE APPROACHES
Beginning in the 1980s, Connecticut and North Carolina enacted some
of the Nation's most ambitious efforts to improve teaching. On the
heels of these efforts, these States, which serve sizable numbers of
low-income and minority students,\16\ registered striking gains in
overall student learning and narrowed achievement gaps between
advantaged and disadvantaged pupils. During the 1990s, for example,
North Carolina posted the largest student achievement gains of any
State in math and sizable advances in reading, putting it well above
the national average in 4th grade reading and math, although it had
entered the decade near the bottom of State rankings. Of all States
during the 1990s, it was also the most successful in narrowing the
minority-white achievement gap (National Education Goals Panel, 1999).
In Connecticut, also following steep gains throughout the decade, 4th
graders ranked first in the Nation by 1998 in reading and math on the
NAEP, despite increased poverty and language diversity among its public
school students. Its minority-white achievement gap, too, narrowed
notably. The proportion of Connecticut 8th graders scoring at or above
proficient in reading was first in the Nation. In the world, moreover,
only top-ranked Singapore could outscore Connecticut students in
science (Baron, 1999).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\16\ In the fall of 1999, Connecticut had 30 percent students of
color, including the 12th largest Hispanic enrollment in the Nation,
and in 2002, 36 percent of students attended Title I schools. In the
same years, North Carolina had 38 percent students of color, including
the 8th largest enrollment of African Americans, and 38 percent of
students attended Title I schools (NCES, 2001, table 42; NAEP State
Data, 2002, retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
statedata).
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Among the reforms that contributed to such gains were the
significant improvements in both States' teaching forces, including in
inner cities and rural areas. How did they accomplish this? With
ambitious teacher initiatives that introduced standards, incentives and
professional learning for teachers, along with curriculum and
assessment reforms for schools (Darling-Hammond, 2000a; Wilson,
Darling-Hammond, & Berry, 2000).
Both States strengthened teacher education and licensure. For a
teaching license, for example, Connecticut insisted on additional
preparation at entry, meaning a major in the content area taught and
more pedagogical training as well as learning to teach reading and
special-needs pupils and passing basic skills and content tests before
entry to teaching. The State also eliminated emergency licensing and
toughened requirements for temporary licenses. Teachers must complete a
master's degree and a rigorous performance assessment modeled on that
of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to gain a
professional license.
North Carolina likewise increased licensing requirements for
teachers and principals, in the form of increased coursework in content
and pedagogy as well as licensing tests, required schools of education
to undertake professional accreditation through the National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), invested in
improvements in teacher education curriculum, and supported creation of
professional development schools connected to schools of education.
Both States also developed mentor programs for beginning teachers that
extended assistance and assessment into the first year of teaching, and
both introduced intensive professional development for veteran
teachers.
These efforts were successful because both States created strong
labor market incentives linked to their teacher standards. Among
measures they adopted:
Increased and Equalized Salaries, Tied to Standards. Both
States coupled major statewide increases in teacher salaries with
improved pay equity across districts. In Connecticut, for example, the
average teacher salary climbed from $29,437 in 1986 to $47,823 in 1991,
with the equalizing nature of the State aid making it possible for
urban districts to compete for qualified teachers. Because
Connecticut's State teacher salary assistance could be spent only for
fully certified teachers, districts had greater incentives to recruit
those who had met the high new standards, and individuals had greater
incentives to meet these standards. North Carolina created standards-
based incentives by adopting notable salary increases for teachers to
pursue National Board Certification, so that North Carolina now has
more teachers certified by the National Board than any other State.
Recruitment Drives and Incentives. To attract bright young
candidates, both States initiated programs to subsidize teacher
education in return for teaching commitments. The highly selective
North Carolina Teaching Fellows program, for example, paid all college
costs, including an enhanced and fully funded teacher education
program, for thousands of high-ability students in return for several
years of teaching. After 7 years, retention rates for these teachers
exceeded 75 percent, with many of the remaining alumni holding public
school leadership posts (NCTAF, 1996). Connecticut's service
scholarships and forgivable loans similarly attracted high-quality
candidates and provided incentives to teach in high-need schools and
shortage fields, while the State also took steps to attract well-
trained teachers from elsewhere. By 1990, nearly a third of its newly
hired teachers had graduated from colleges rated ``very selective'' or
better in the Barron's Index of College Majors, and 75 percent had
undergraduate grade point averages of ``B'' or better (Connecticut
State Board of Education, 1992, p. 3).
Support Systems. Both States bolstered support systems
that make a difference in stemming teacher turnover. North Carolina
launched a mentoring program for new teachers that greatly increased
their access to early career support (National Education Goals Panel
Report, 1998). Connecticut provided trained mentors for all beginning
teachers and student teachers as part of its staged licensing process.
For existing teachers, North Carolina created professional development
academies, a North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and
teacher development networks such as the National Writing Project and
analogous institutes in mathematics. This was in addition to its
incentives for National Board Certification. Connecticut, among other
things, required continuing professional development, including a
master's degree for a professional license.
Such teacher reforms began paying off early on. After Connecticut's
$300 million 1986 initiative, for instance, the higher salaries and
improved pay equity, combined with the tougher preparation and
licensing standards and an end to emergency hiring, swiftly raised
teacher quality. An analysis found, in fact, that within 3 years, the
State not only had eliminated teacher shortages, even in cities, but
also had created surpluses (Connecticut State Department of Education,
1990). Even as demand increased, the pool of qualified applicants
remained solid. A National Education Goals Panel report (Baron, 1999)
found that in districts with sharply improved achievement, educators
cited the high quality of teachers and administrators as a critical
reason for their gains and noted that ``when there is a teaching
opening in a Connecticut elementary school, there are often several
hundred applicants'' (p. 28).
These teacher initiatives occurred alongside other education
changes--increased investments in early childhood education and in
public schools generally, as well as wide-ranging, standards-based
reform--which also contributed to the States' student achievement
gains. There is little doubt, however, that higher-quality teachers
supplied to all schools were substantial contributors to these other
reforms as well as to the overall achievement increases. Both States
sought to increase not only salaries and the quality of preparation for
teachers, but also the incentive structure for distributing teachers to
fields and locations. Both sharply reduced hiring of unlicensed and
underprepared staff. Most notably, both held to the course of teacher
improvement over a sustained period--more than 15 years in each case.
They demonstrate what State policy in support of good teaching can
accomplish.
B. DISTRICT APPROACHES
District success stories reflect the importance of recruiting,
inducting and supporting qualified teachers using policy tools
available at the local level and leveraging State assistance. Following
are four examples of what urban districts have done.
New York City. New York City illustrates how a focus on recruiting
qualified teachers, coupled with necessary salary increases, can have a
large effect in a brief period. The city long had hired thousands of
underprepared teachers, typically filling as many as half of its
vacancies with uncertified applicants, many well after September. The
State, however, pressured the city to hire qualified teachers and
mandated that uncertified teachers could no longer teach in low-
performing schools. This, plus awareness of pending NCLB requirements,
led to the improvements. The district focused on more aggressive
recruiting and hiring of qualified teachers and implemented a steep
increase in salaries--averaging 16 percent overall and more than 20
percent for beginning teachers--to make them more competitive with
surrounding suburban districts. With these policies, 2002-3 vacancies
were filled by July, and 90 percent of new hires were certified, up
from 60 percent the year before. The remaining 10 percent were in
programs that would lead to certification by the end of the school year
(Hays & Gendar, 2002).
Community School District #2. Much earlier, New York City's
Community District #2 was an oasis widely heralded as a turnaround
story, with a strategic emphasis on professional development for
teachers and principals. But student achievement gains clearly relied
on both a development recruitment strategy (Elmore & Burney, 1999). In
1996, after a decade of reforms focused on strengthening teaching, this
``majority-minority'' district--which serves large numbers of low-
income and immigrant students--realized sharp achievement gains that
ranked it 2nd in the city in reading and math.
Sweeping changes instituted by Superintendent Anthony Alvarado
stressed continuing professional development for teachers and
principals, coupled with a relentless concentration on instructional
improvement. At the same time, Alvarado recognized the need for more
talented and committed teachers and principals. Backed by the teachers'
union, he replaced nearly half the teacher workforce and two-thirds of
principals over a period of years through a combination of retirements,
pressure and inducements. Meanwhile, the central office carefully
managed the recruitment, hiring and placement of new teachers and
principals. It ended the hiring of unprepared teachers and sought
recruits from several leading teacher education programs in the city,
forging partnerships for student teaching and professional development
with these institutions as well. Similar programs for developing
principals were launched. The district's growing reputation for quality
also attracted other teachers. Salary changes were not within the
district's purview. Its strategies, rather, involved recruiting
aggressively, creating university partnerships to develop a pipeline of
well-prepared teachers, and supporting teachers with strong mentoring
and professional development.
New Haven, California. California success stories are particularly
notable because that State in recent years has ranked first in the
Nation in the number of unqualified teachers. In this high-demand
context, with State policies that were, until recently, relatively
unsupportive (e.g., low expenditures, lack of reciprocity with other
States, restricted teacher education options), some districts have
nonetheless achieved significant staffing improvements. New Haven
Unified School District, just south of Oakland in Union City, which
enrolls 14,000 mostly low-income and minority students, is one that has
succeeded while neighboring districts have not. New Haven combined high
salaries, aggressive recruiting and close mentoring with a high-quality
training program worked out with area universities. Although not a top-
spending district, it invested its resources in teacher salaries and
good teaching conditions. In 1998, for example, New Haven's salaries
were more than 30 percent higher than nearby Oakland's, where large
numbers of unqualified teachers were hired, even though New Haven's
per-pupil spending was below Oakland's (Snyder, 2002).
Thus, over an extended period it built a well-prepared, highly
committed and diverse teaching staff. For the 2001-2 school year, 10 of
its 11 schools had no uncredentialed teachers. The district averaged
0.1 percent uncredentialed teachers--while some neighboring districts
averaged more than 20 percent (Futernick, 2001). New Haven uses
advanced technology and a wide range of teacher supports to recruit
from a national pool of exceptional teachers and to hire them quickly.
The district was one of California's first to implement a Beginning
Teacher Support and Assessment Program that assists teachers in their
first 2 years in the classroom; all beginning teachers get help from a
trained mentor, who is given release time for the purpose. In addition,
New Haven collaborated with California State University-Hayward on the
right kind of alternative-certification program, combining college
coursework and an internship, including student teaching, conducted
under the close supervision of university- and school-based educators.
As a result of these initiatives, the district has a teacher surplus in
the midst of general shortages.
San Diego, California. Using similar strategies, San Diego City
Schools recently overhauled its teacher recruitment and retention
system, aggressively recruiting well-trained teachers, collaborating
with universities on new training programs in high-need fields, and
creating smooth pathways with local schools of education. It offers
contracts to well-prepared teachers as early as possible (sometimes as
much as a year in advance of hiring) and reaches out to teachers in
other States. In addition, the district streamlined the hiring process,
putting the entire system online, improving its capacity to manage
hiring data, vacancy postings and interviews that had slowed the
process and caused many candidates to give up and go elsewhere. In the
fall of 2001, districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles hired
hundreds of uncredentialed teachers, and the State as a whole hired
more than 50 percent of novices without full credentials. But San Diego
filled almost all of its 1,081 vacancies with credentialed teachers,
eliminating all but 11 of the hundreds of previously hired emergency
permit teachers who had been assigned largely to high-minority, low-
income schools.
The Chairman. Very helpful. Senator Roberts has a schedule
conflict and asked to be able to say a word and of course, we'd
welcome his words.
Opening Statement of Senator Roberts
Senator Roberts. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and
thank you and Senator Enzi for holding this and I want to thank
the panel members for taking time out of your very valuable
schedule to come and give us your expertise.
As a former teacher myself, a drafted former teacher, my
experience hopefully is not that unique but I had a newspaper
in Phoenix on the West Side and one of the teachers became ill
so the superintendent asked if I would simply take over, which
I did. I was the journalism teacher and then found that I was
the speech teacher and then found I was teaching English and
then found I was in charge of the newspaper and then found I
was in charge of the annual and then found I was in charge of
the forensics competition and then was the assistant basketball
coach.
[Laughter.]
Which would make Senator Gregg laugh, I know, because of
our personal experience on the basketball court when we were in
the House. But at any rate, I'm interested in the back door and
that's just the basic speech that I want to make or comment
that I want to make and I think that there are a number of very
quality people, especially in math and science and I know under
No Child Left Behind, we have troops as teachers and we tried a
fast track to the certification process--it takes about 5 years
in Kansas. The average teaching certification process takes 4
years to complete. I found after being drafted that the tail
was wagging the dog. I was not only trying to run this weekly
newspaper but I was also trying to teach during the day and
then run the newspaper at night, et cetera, et cetera. That
finally got to be impossible but it was quite an experience for
me in gaining firsthand knowledge on the value of being a
teacher and the time that you have to put in and I'm just
trying to figure out if there is a better way on certification,
if we couldn't get more career professionals in every segment
of our society. It doesn't have to be military--it could be
business, it could be education, it could be anything to become
a teacher.
So my questions were to be more specially to Ms. Burtnett,
who is a graduate of the every-optimistic fighting Jay Hawks
and my question was, what components of the teacher
certification process do you think are essential in initially
preparing a teacher for the classroom and then Mr. Solomon, in
your experience as a director of a teaching program, do you
think there are ways to prepare a retired career professional
at a quicker rate in order to get them into the classroom
early. What I'm talking about is after I taught all those
subjects and was--I think I was paid $5,200 for that experience
and then $200 for the newspaper and $200 for the annual, et
cetera, et cetera. You remember, I guess, those days but you
know, Ed Psych I, Ed Psych II and then my favorite--Standard
Deviation. Do you remember Standard Deviation? Have all of you
taken this? Have you ever used it? Has anybody ever used
standard--you have? Why on earth did you do that?
[Laughter.]
Who uses standard deviation? But it's under a course called
Test and Measurement, Mr. Chairman and I would access that no
Senator could possibly do this. Staff could do this. But it
takes forever to do this. This is the test and you are supposed
to have criteria here so that you do standard deviation on all
of your students when they take tests to figure out where the
hell you are on the bell curve in terms of criteria, et cetera,
et cetera--nobody uses this.
Then we have, of course, by E.F. Skinner, who figured out
that--a long story short--if you have pop quizzes, that really
will keep the students alert as opposed to one every Friday or
one every whatever--I mean, if you're in the Marine Corp and
you're going to have an inspection, your rifles are clean. If
they inspect on Friday, they are clean on Thursday. If the DI
comes in anytime, your rifles are clean all the time. And yet
we had to have a whole course on that by Mr. Skinner, who is
the God of Ed Psych II. I don't even--I think the man is still
alive. I don't know if he is or not. I'm just trying to say
that there has to be some way to figure out in a 2-year
timeframe, where somebody could be a teacher that wants to come
in through the back door--you know, that has a gift--that has a
love for this because after all, that is a labor of love
because of teacher salaries.
So if any of you have any ideas on the back door, on how we
get people in that would like to be a teacher after they've had
another profession and add to the cadre of very fine teachers
that we have. I don't want to do anything to alarm anybody
about the certification process, making the teaching profession
a profession. I understand that. I know you have to go through
all of the various hurdles to get your salary increased and I
think part of that is good but part of it I think is totally
unnecessary.
So that's my pitch and that's my rant and rave for this
morning, Mr. Chairman. I've already posed the questions and I'm
going to have to leave here pretty quick and I thank you for
interrupting everybody here that was before me and certainly
interrupting all the panels. But that's what I do on this
committee.
The Chairman. Amen, Amen. Thank you, Senator Roberts. We
always are interested in what your comments are and you raise
some important questions and I hope our panel will respond to
them if you are necessarily absent.
We'll go ahead with Amy Wilkins. We'll talk about that
teacher distribution gap and particularly focus on qualified
teachers in high-poverty areas.
STATEMENT OF AMY WILKINS, VICE PRESIDENT FOR GOV-
ERNMENTAL AFFAIRS AND COMMUNICATION, EDUCATION TRUST,
WASHINGTON, DC.
Ms. Wilkins. Thank you, Senator. I am sitting in this
morning for Kati Haycock, my boss, who is sick and 3 minutes is
probably more than I want to talk right now.
Good teaching makes an enormous difference, as Senator
Alexander said and it especially makes an enormous difference
for low-
income kids who have less to fall back on at home. Research
tells us time and again that highly effective teachers can
outweigh the effects of poverty, can outweigh the effects of
language spoken at home and is probably the single most
important factor in student achievement, yet the very students
who most need highly effective teachers are less likely to get
them. The American education system is virtually rigged to
ensure that the students who most need highly effective
teachers are the least likely to get them, sort of no matter
how you cut it, based on whether the teacher is teaching in a
subject area that she actually studied herself in college,
whether that teacher is a novice teacher and whether that
teacher is certified. Low-income kids always end up with the
short end of the stick. Then we sort of wonder, well, why
aren't they achieving?
If we really hope to close the achievement gap in this
country, we have to do something to drastically change the
teacher distribution patterns such that the kids who most need
highly effective teachers indeed get them.
In our written testimony, there is a lot of theories that
support those points but I want to jump directly to two big
issues--what you try to do when you originally authorized NCLB
and where that fell short and how you need to move forward from
there.
NCLB was very, very, very important in the teacher
distribution question in that it finally put the question on
the table in a very real way. But there were really three
problems with the law. The first was that the Department of
Education all but refused to implement the provisions that you
all passed. Second that the States resisted those provisions
strenuously and third, there were some problems in the statute
itself.
We hope that you use this reauthorization to fix the
problems in the statute and also press the Department of
Education for better implementation.
When you look at what the Senate and the Congress need to
do in reauthorizing this law, we have several recommendations.
One is that in order to identify the kind of effective teachers
that Senator Alexander talked about, we can't begin to put
really good teachers in our high-poverty schools until we're
able to identify them. Dr. Sanders, along with others, has done
some very pioneering work in value-added systems. We think that
the States need to move to value-added systems to look at the
effectiveness of their teachers. Since it seems that the States
are clamoring for growth models to replace AYP, this is an
opportunity to do that because the data that the States will
need to go to growth models, if paired with teacher records,
will give us information about the effectiveness of teachers
and we can begin to distribute better teachers between high-
and low-poverty schools.
You also need to fix title II. Title II was a huge
opportunity to boost the effectiveness of teaching in our high-
poverty schools. Since the law was passed, nearly $15 billion
has been put into title II and instead of being targeted at
improving teaching in high-poverty schools, it has become a
slush fund at the district level, spread widely across
districts, not only serving high-poverty kids but serving all
kids and serving any number of program needs, according to a
GAO study. So tightening the targeting on title II is also an
important thing to do.
The last thing I'm going to mention is probably the most
important--single most important thing you can do in
reauthorizing this law, is to fix the comparability provisions
of the law. The ESCA is based on a fiction. You all say that
before districts can get title I money to provide extras to
low-income children, districts have to demonstrate that they
are indeed, with their own dollars, providing an equal funding
base across high- and low-poverty schools. The law requires
that demonstration be made by demonstrating that the district
has a single salary schedule--that is, all teachers are paid
sort of lock-step. Well, what happens in fact and you can see
this in almost every school district across the country, is
that as teachers gain experience and as their salaries
increase, they migrate away from high-poverty schools and start
teaching, because of the prerogatives that the contracts give
them, start teaching in sort of more desirable schools.
As they leave the high-poverty schools, they take those big
paychecks with them, leaving lower paid, novice teachers at the
high-poverty schools and that gap between what novice teachers
are making at high-poverty schools and what the more
experienced teachers are making at more affluent and more
desirable schools, actually represent a theft from low-income
kids and your title I dollars are not providing extras to low-
income kids but are in fact, being used by districts to begin
to fill the gap between their own dollars that are migrating.
You have to amend the comparability provisions in the law
such that when districts are required to demonstrate
comparability of funding across school districts, they require
to count teacher salaries as part of that equation.
So with that, I'll shut up and we'll move on.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Wilkins follows:]
Prepared Statement by Amy Wilkins, on behalf of Kati Haycock
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Enzi, and members of the committee, thank you for
providing me with the opportunity to testify before you this morning.
INTRODUCTION
Others on this panel will talk with you today about the pressing
need to dramatically increase the effectiveness of America's teaching
force. I could not agree more. For the record, though, I want to
emphasize that much more is at stake than simply meeting the goals and
timelines of No Child Left Behind. Literally mountains of research now
tell us that our efforts to maintain world leadership in any number of
spheres are fundamentally dependant on whether or not we have the
courage to confront the issue of teacher effectiveness and to do what
it takes to provide every student with quality teaching in every
subject, every year.
As pressing as the overall teacher effectiveness issues are,
however, my job this morning isn't to talk with you about the general
problem, but, rather, about the very specific problem of teacher
effectiveness in our high-poverty schools. For the sorry fact is that
the American system of education is rigged to all but ensure that low-
income children--the very children who need the most effective teachers
to help them achieve their potential and catch up with their peers--
don't get the teachers they need.
Certainly, there are some literally spectacular teachers teaching
in our highest poverty schools. And their results serve as proof of how
very big a difference strong teachers can make for even the poorest of
children.
But these exceptional teachers are exactly that--exceptions. They
willfully swim against the powerful, systemic tide that relentlessly
sweeps our best teachers away from the kids who need them the most. Too
often, they have to sacrifice pay and professional status to work in
the most challenging schools instead of working at better-equipped
schools with children who are sometimes easier to teach.
Our task as a country must be to match their private commitment
with a public commitment: to turn that tide and create systems,
supports and conditions that will attract a significant proportion of
our very best teachers to work with and for the children who need them
the most.
In passing No Child Left Behind, Congress made an historic and
critical attempt to address this very need. Despite the sincere efforts
of many on this committee, however, I think it is quite clear to all of
us that the law has not been a sufficiently powerful tool in creating
greater equity in teacher distribution. Some of the failure is due to
flaws in the statute itself, some is due to utterly inadequate
implementation efforts by the Department of Education and some is due
to massive resistance to equity from powerful adult stakeholders.
I urge you to use the opportunity that this reauthorization offers
to fix the flaws in the law, to add more power to the teacher equity
provisions, and to send a clear signal that this Congress will not
stand by while the life chances of millions of children are diminished
by teacher distribution systems that are fundamentally unjust and
absolutely within our power to change.
GOOD TEACHERS MAKE AN ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE
While our inequitable patterns of teacher distribution are
absolutely changeable, they are also deeply ingrained. Changing them
will rile up all kinds of stakeholders and, accordingly, demand
creativity and unflagging effort on your part.
This is tough stuff and not for the faint of heart. Accordingly,
those of us who ask you to take up this challenge owe you evidence that
all the hard work will make a difference.
Fortunately, the research evidence is overwhelming. In just the
last 5 years alone, researchers all around the country have provided
strong evidence from a wide range of communities that there is, indeed,
a payoff in providing low-income students with great teachers. And it's
a very big one:
Researchers in Texas concluded in a 2002 study that
teachers have such a major impact on student learning that ``. . .
having a high quality teacher throughout elementary school can
substantially offset or even eliminate the disadvantage of low socio-
economic background.'' \1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Rivkin, S. G., Hanushek, E. A., & Kain, J. F. 2002. Teachers,
Schools, and Academic Achievement, University of Texas-Dallas Texas
Schools Project.
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A recent analysis of Los Angeles data concluded that
``having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher 4
years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score
gap.'' \2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Gordon, R., Kane, T. J., & Staiger, D. O., 2006. Identifying
Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job. Washington, DC.: The
Brookings Institution.
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A second study in Texas showed that the teacher's
influence on student achievement gain scores is 20 times greater than
any other variable, including class size and student poverty.\3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ As cited by Fallon, D., 2003. Case Study of A Paradigm Shift
(The Value of Focusing on Instruction). Education Research Summit:
Establishing Linkages, University of North Carolina.
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BUT THE STUDENTS WHO MOST NEED GOOD TEACHERS DON'T GET THEM
Despite these and other studies that document the tremendous power
that great teachers have to help students overcome the burdens of
poverty and racism, we persist in providing those who need the most
from their teachers with the teachers who have the very least to offer
them.
Nationally, fully 86 percent of math and science teachers
in the Nation's highest minority schools are teaching out of field.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Jerald, C. 2002. All Talk, No Action: Putting an End to Out-of-
Field Teaching. The Education Trust. Available: www.edtrust.org.
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Students of color and low-income students are also twice
as likely as white and affluent students to be assigned to
inexperienced teachers.
In Texas high schools with the most African-American
students, ninth grade English and Algebra courses--key gatekeepers for
high school and college success--are twice as likely to be taught by
uncertified teachers as are the same courses in the high schools with
the fewest African-American students. Similarly, in the State's highest
poverty high schools, students are almost twice as likely to be
assigned to a beginning teacher as their peers in the lowest poverty
high schools.\5\
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\5\ Fuller, E. (2004). Unpublished data. University of Texas at
Austin.
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And let's not just pick on Texas: Researchers reported
recently that advantaged fifth grade students in North Carolina were
substantially more likely than other students to be matched with highly
qualified teachers.\6\ Across the State, African-American seventh
graders were 54 percent more likely to face a novice teacher in math
and 38 percent more likely to have one for English, with the odds even
greater in some of North Carolina's large urban districts.\7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ Clotfelter, C. T., Ladd, H. F., & Vigdor, J. L. (2006).
Teacher-student matching and the assessment of teacher effectiveness.
Journal of Human Resources, 41(4), 778-820.
\7\ Clotfelter, C. T., Ladd, H. F., & Vigdor, J. L. (2005). Who
teaches whom? Race and the distribution of novice teachers. Economics
of Education Review, 24, 377-392.
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In Tennessee, one of few States to have a ``value-added''
metric of teacher effectiveness, the Department of Education has been
tracking which students are taught by the high, average and below-
average teachers. Poor and minority students are getting the worst when
it comes to teachers' effectiveness. There, the ``least effective''
teachers in high-poverty, high-minority schools are even less effective
than the ``least effective'' teachers in low-poverty, low-minority
schools.\8\
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\8\ Tennessee Department of Education. March 2007. Tennessee's Most
Effective Teachers: Are They Assigned to the Students Who Need Them The
Most?. Research Brief.
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Education leaders in Florida also found inequitable
patterns in the distribution of teachers in Florida, with schools
receiving ``F's'' in the State accountability system much more likely
than other schools to have concentrations of teachers whose student
growth rates put them in the bottom 5 percent of the State.
Recent research conducted by the Education Trust and
stakeholders in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois found similar inequitable
distribution problems.\9\ In Illinois, for example, 84 percent of the
schools with the most low-income students were in the bottom quartile
in teacher quality, with more than half in the very bottom 10 percent
of teacher quality. Among low-poverty schools, only 5 percent were in
the bottom quartile of teacher quality.\10\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ Peske, H. & Haycock, K. 2006. Teaching Inequality: How Poor and
Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality. The Education
Trust. Available: www.edtrust.org.
\10\ Presley, J., White, B., & Gong, Y. 2005. Examining the
Distribution and Impact of Teacher Quality in Illinois. Illinois
Education Research Council. Policy Research Report: IERC 2005-2.
Available: http://ierc.siue.edu.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 2000, teachers in the highest poverty schools in New
York City were almost twice as likely (28 percent) to be in their first
or second year of teaching compared to teachers in the lowest-poverty
schools (15 percent). Similarly, more than one in four (26 percent)
students of color were taught by teachers who had failed the general
knowledge certification exam compared to only 16 percent of white
students.\11\
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\11\ Loeb, S., & Miller, L. C. (2006). A Federal Foray into Teacher
Certification: Assessing the ``Highly Qualified Teacher'' Provision of
NCLB. Available: http://devweb.tc.columbia.edu
/manager/symposium/Files/98_LoebMiller_%20Nov%20Nov%201.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE EFFECTS OF THESE UNJUST DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS ON ACHIEVEMENT IS
DRAMATIC AND DEVASTATING
In high-poverty, high-minority high schools in Illinois
with above-average teacher quality, students were almost nine times as
likely to demonstrate college-ready academic skills as their
counterparts in schools with lower teacher quality. Indeed, students
who completed mathematics through Calculus in schools with the lowest
teacher quality were less likely to be college ready than their
counterparts who completed mathematics only through Algebra II in
schools with medium teacher quality.\12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ Presley, J. B., & Gong, Y. (2005). The Demographics and
Academics of College Readiness in Illinois. Illinois Education Research
Council. Policy Research Report: IERC 2005-3. Available: http://
ierc.siue.edu/documents/College%20Readiness%20-%202005-3.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Research in Tennessee shows that teacher effects
accumulate. Students who start the third grade at roughly equal
achievement levels are separated by roughly 50 percentile points 3
years later based solely on differences in the effectiveness of
teachers to whom they were assigned. Students performing in the mid-
fiftieth percentiles assigned to three bottom quintile teachers in a
row actually lost academic ground over this period, falling to the mid-
twentieth percentiles.\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\13\ Sanders, W., & Rivers, J. (1996). Cumulative and Residual
Effects of Teachers on Future Academic Achievement. Technical Report.
University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center.
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What about students who start off low-achieving, as do so
many low-income students? Researchers from the Dallas public school
district concluded: ``A sequence of ineffective teachers with a student
already low-achieving is educationally deadly.'' \14\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\14\ Presley, J. & Gong, Y. (2005).
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NCLB: AN ATTEMPT TO CHANGE THE PATTERNS
Many of these effects were already clear when Congress passed NCLB.
Common sense alone made it obvious that achievement gaps couldn't be
closed without addressing gaps in teacher quality. Accordingly, there
was strong bi-partisan consensus on the need to focus the attention of
State and local education leaders on assuring teacher quality and
turning around unfair and damaging teacher distribution patterns.
The teacher-related provisions in No Child Left Behind embody three
basic principles:
1. That all students are entitled to qualified teachers who know
their subject(s) and how to teach them;
2. That parents deserve information on their children's teachers;
and,
3. That States, school districts and the national government have a
responsibility to ensure a fair distribution of teacher talent.
To accomplish these goals, Congress increased funding for teacher
quality initiatives by 50 percent, from $2 billion to $3 billion per
year--on top of significant increases in title I, which can also be
used to improve teacher quality. These new dollars were targeted to
high-poverty school districts, and local leaders were given nearly
unfettered discretion to spend the money in ways that were tailored to
local circumstances.
Most observers, I suspect, will agree that the law has focused
unprecedented attention on issues of teacher quality and distribution.
But most will also agree that these historic provisions have not had
their full and intended impact.
Some of that is probably attributable to the sad fact that change
in education always takes much longer than anybody thinks it should.
But some of the problem can be traced to three sources:
Poor quality implementation by the U.S. Department of
Education;
Massive resistance by some powerful adult stakeholders;
and,
Limits of the statute itself.
Flawed Implementation by the Department of Education
The teacher quality provisions of NCLB were supposed to stimulate
States to revisit the question of whether they had appropriate
definitions of teacher quality in place and whether there was an
adequate supply of teachers in all subjects and for all students. The
intention was to introduce a new bargain: if a school persistently had
a problem recruiting and retaining enough qualified teachers, then the
district and the State had a problem, too.
Unfortunately, for the first 4 years after NCLB was enacted, the
U.S. Department of Education refused to exert any leadership in this
arena. Though there were early signs that States were abusing the broad
discretion granted to them in defining what constitutes a ``highly
qualified'' teacher, the Department repeatedly failed to issue
guidance. And when it finally did, the guidance was inconsistent and
confusing.
Consider the seemingly straightforward issue of the application of
the law to ``new'' and ``not new'' teachers. The law mandates that
``new'' elementary teachers demonstrate their knowledge of the subjects
they teach by passing a test of content knowledge and teaching skills.
Teachers who were ``not new'' to the profession were allowed to either
pass a test or complete a State-developed HOUSSE process.
The clear intent of the law was to apply one set of rules to
teachers who were hired after the passage of NCLB, and to reserve more
flexible HOUSSE provisions for veteran teachers who had joined the
profession before the law was adopted.
Unfortunately, the Department never issued guidance or regulations
to clarify this definition. The consequence is that some States hire
non-highly qualified teachers and then declare them to be ``not new''
to the profession under the highly qualified definition after a year of
teaching. These teachers are then permitted to demonstrate content
knowledge under the less-rigorous HOUSSE process that was designed for
teachers who were in the profession prior to NCLB, rather than
demonstrating their subject knowledge by passing a test or taking
additional coursework. The Department's neglect has allowed States to
ignore altogether the requirement that new teachers demonstrate they
know their content.
Only recently, in the spring of 2006, did the Department actually
begin to actively monitor the implementation of the teacher provisions.
And, despite Congress' explicit command to focus on equality of
opportunity, it was only in the past year that the Department even
mentioned the teacher equity provisions, which extend well beyond the
distribution of ``highly-qualified'' teachers. For a full 4 years, many
States simply had no idea that these provisions existed, let alone that
they were responsible for developing a plan to ensure that low-income
and minority children were not disproportionately taught by
unqualified, inexperienced, or out-of-field teachers.
Implementation of title II also represents lost opportunity on a
grand scale. Congress recognized that certain schools would need extra
resources to raise teacher quality--either through additional supports
for current teachers or incentives to attract higher-caliber faculty.
So Congress created title II, which has provided almost $3 billion per
year since NCLB was enacted--close to $15 billion thus far--that was
supposed to help States and districts to ensure students in high-
poverty schools got their fair share of the best teachers and that
teachers who didn't meet State quality requirements had the help they
would need to meet those requirements.
Instead, according to GAO, the money mostly has been used for
generic programs that weren't targeted to the teachers or schools that
need the most help. The U.S. Department of Education has issued no
regulations, offered virtually no guidance, and conducted scant
monitoring in how this money has been spent. As a consequence, instead
of representing much-needed support for hard-to-staff schools and the
teachers in them, title II money often has been used as State and
district slush funds.
Widespread Resistance to the Spirit of the Law
NCLB granted States broad discretion in the area of teacher
quality. Instead of using this latitude to innovate different
approaches to the issue, far too many States took advantage of the
USDOE's lax oversight and completely undermined the spirit and
substance of the law.
Two years after the law was enacted, Education Trust staff examined
State compliance with the teacher quality provisions. We found that
many States had abused their discretion, papering over problems and
making it seem as though all students had fully ``highly qualified''
teachers, when in fact many students continued to be taught by teachers
with substandard preparation.
Take Wisconsin, for example, which had never had content-knowledge
tests as part of its licensure/certification. Instead of trying to
determine which teachers needed to take a test or some coursework in
their teaching area, Wisconsin simply declared that any teacher who
graduated from an accredited teacher preparation program had
demonstrated content knowledge in whatever subject(s) they were
assigned to teach--regardless of whether their degree or coursework was
related to their teaching assignment. Wisconsin officials openly
flouted NCLB, claiming that they were keeping internal records on
teachers who weren't fully qualified and had created the watered-down
definition merely for reporting compliance with Federal law.
California offers another example. The State lowered the bar for
the ``highly qualified'' definition so far that requirements were
virtually indistinguishable from the requirements for an emergency
permit. Worse still, while California's emergency permit required
teachers to be enrolled in credentialing programs, the ``highly
qualified'' definition did not. Pretending that virtually all teachers
were ``highly qualified'' allowed California to obscure well documented
inequities in access to genuinely qualified teachers. It took
Congressman George Miller's direct involvement, as well as a court
order, to get California to revisit its definition. In many States,
however, this kind of gaming has gone unchallenged.
These are not isolated examples: many States have resisted fully
acknowledging their teacher quality problems. By deeming virtually
every teacher highly qualified, these States have not only made raising
teacher quality under the law all but impossible--they also blunted
efforts to more fairly distribute teacher talent. Why? Because if
virtually every teacher is highly qualified, the distribution problem
vanishes into thin air.
In taking actions like these, States have snubbed their noses at
congressional intent, blunted the impact of the law, and cheated their
children out of the opportunity for academic success. Sadly, they've
also cheated their own teachers out of the help that they deserve to
improve their effectiveness. Congress should use this reauthorization
to set things right.
Limits of the Statute Itself
In crafting NCLB, Congress rightly recognized that the term
``Highly Qualified Teacher'' needed to be defined before the businesses
of distributing such teachers more fairly could be taken up
effectively. Most of the details of such definitions were left to the
States. But Congress did set parameters for State definitions, as well
as identify certain teacher characteristics that it would monitor in
its efforts to assure a fair distribution of teacher talent.
Limits of the research on teacher quality and effectiveness at the
time the law was crafted forced members of Congress to rely on proxies
of teacher quality (e.g. degree in field, State certification, novice
status) rather than real indicators of teacher effectiveness. These
proxies can tell us a lot about broad patterns of distribution, and
there is no excuse for not acting on that information now.
But proxy measures are far less helpful in evaluating the quality
of an individual teacher or the impact that she has on her students.
Among other things, definitions based on proxies for effectiveness
don't allow education leaders to account for terrific new teachers or,
for that matter, burned-out veterans. As Congress moves toward
reauthorization, you'll want to act on the core suggestion of the
latest research: that, rather than looking just at qualifications, you
incorporate measures of teachers' actual impact on student achievement.
The use of proxy measures, however, is not the only problem in the
statute itself. It turns out that an even bigger problem is bound up in
congressional willingness to let the demands of adults too often trump
the needs of students. Two examples will help illustrate what I mean.
The HOUSSE Provisions
The first of these surround the law's ``High Objective Uniform
State Standard of Evaluation'' (HOUSSE) provisions. As members of this
committee know, the HOUSSE provisions were included in the law to
address concerns that teacher unions and others had about veteran
teachers who did not possess proper credentials or ``paper proxies''
required to meet the definition of a ``highly qualified teacher.'' The
concern was that such teachers would be unduly burdened by a
requirement to obtain them.
But the loophole created by these provisions turns out to be so
large that it significantly undercuts the law's power to provoke
change. Through broad (and unimagined use) of these provisions, States
have been able to obscure the fact that many veteran teachers,
especially in science and mathematics, lacked adequate content
knowledge. In most States, almost every teacher has been deemed highly
qualified and the status quo has been defined as satisfactory even
though substantive challenges remain unaddressed.
Comparability Provisions
Title I is premised on the fiction that local school districts
provide ``comparable'' opportunities in title I schools before the
application of Federal funds, so that the Federal money can be used to
provide additional time and support for low-income students. But the
truth is that local budgets consistently shortchange high-poverty
schools, and title I schools often get less money than schools with
more affluent students in the very same school districts. This has to
do with arcane budgeting rules that ignore differences in teacher
salary across schools. Schools that are stacked with the most senior,
high-paid teachers don't offset this expense elsewhere in their budget,
and schools with novice teachers don't get extra money even though
their spending on teacher salaries is much lower than other schools.
Federal law actually provides cover for these unfair budgeting
practices in its comparability provisions. Indeed, NCLB includes a
provision stating that if a school district has a single-salary
schedule for teachers, which virtually every district does, then it has
demonstrated compliance with the comparability requirement. This is a
hold-over from another era, before research had documented so clearly
the devastating impact of lower teacher quality in high-poverty and
high-minority schools. The current comparability provisions work to
perpetuate disparate and lower-quality educational opportunities in
high-poverty and high-minority schools.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Ensure Data Systems for Evaluating Progress on Teacher Quality
A major impediment to meaningful improvement efforts is the lack,
in most States, of data systems that are capable of analyzing teacher
effectiveness and tracking the distribution of qualified and effective
teachers. Indeed, when USDOE finally asked States to comply with
teacher equity provisions in Summer 2006, most States were unable to
report even the most basic information on whether poor and minority
students were taught disproportionately by inexperienced and
unqualified teachers.
Better data systems and technology will allow States to identify
which of their teachers are most effective, and learn from them. Such
systems also allow administrators to better target supports to teachers
who need to improve their practice. Some forward-thinking districts
such as Chattanooga, Tennessee are already using information generated
by such systems in just this way. Unfortunately, the small, competitive
grant program Congress has established to support longitudinal student
data systems has not required longitudinal data on teachers to be
included.
Congress should provide dedicated funds to each State for the
development and operation of education information management system
and set minimal requirements for such systems. One such requirement
should be that the systems have the ability to match individual teacher
records to individual student records and calculate growth in student
achievement over time.
There could hardly be a better moment to take this step. As States
implement growth models for accountability purposes, they will need to
develop more sophisticated data systems. If the Federal Government
allows this shift in accountability, it should insist that States
simultaneously link student records to their teachers. It would be a
shame to evaluate schools based on student growth but continue to
ignore information on individual teachers' contributions to that
growth.
Move From Measuring Teacher Qualities to Teacher Effectiveness
Research confirms that there are massive differences in the
effectiveness of individual teachers, but the proxies that are
currently most popular in measuring teacher quality have only limited
power to predict who will be effective. To better and more fairly
evaluate individual teachers, we need to move from measuring teacher
qualities to teacher effectiveness.
Data on teacher effectiveness has implications for everything we do
to raise teacher quality, from evaluating teacher preparation programs
to ensuring that our most effective teachers are recognized and
rewarded for their outstanding contributions.
Given that low-income students are more likely to be assigned to
less effective teachers, Congress should be especially focused on using
value-added information to ensure these students get their fair share
of effective teachers. States and districts should be required to
ensure that title I schools aren't disproportionately saddled with the
least effective teachers.
Close HOUSSE Loophole to Ensure New Teachers Demonstrate Content
Knowledge
It is not unreasonable to require teachers to demonstrate content
knowledge in the subject(s) they teach. Teachers who join the
profession today understand this expectation. Yet when the HOUSSE
provisions are abused, as they have been frequently, States are allowed
to ignore the reality that some teachers need help to shore up their
content knowledge. As a consequence, teachers who need help don't get
it. When NCLB is reauthorized, the HOUSSE provision should be stripped
entirely from the law.
Overhaul Title II to Focus the Federal Investment on High-Need Schools
This $3 billion should be re-purposed to provide well-designed
support and meaningful incentives to raise teaching quality in the
highest poverty schools--and nothing else. Some of the money should be
allocated for differential pay, so that hard-to-staff, high-poverty
schools can provide generous incentives for effective teachers. Another
portion should be used for research-based curricula and teacher
professional development in how to implement those curricula.
Amend the Title I Comparability Provisions to Include Teacher Salaries
Federal investments cannot ensure meaningful equity in public
education unless State and local districts use their own resources
equitably. But, by not including teacher salaries in assessing
comparability, current title I law allows school districts to
shortchange students in high-poverty schools, to cover up this theft
with opaque accounting practices, and in the end to redirect title I
funds away from the low-
income students Congress intends to help.
Federal law should not contain loopholes that exclude teacher
salaries from the determination of comparability across schools. If
Congress does nothing else in this reauthorization to improve teaching
and learning in title I schools, it should amend the comparability
provisions to ensure true funding equity at the district level by
requiring that teacher salaries be included in the assessment of
school-to-school comparability.
The Chairman. Good. That was very thoughtful. Pam Burtnett
is President of Lake County Education, Florida and we look
forward to your testimony on teacher development. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF PAMELA BURTNETT, PRESIDENT, LAKE COUNTY EDUCATION
ASSOCIATION, FLORIDA
Ms. Burtnett. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, members of the
committee, thank you for inviting me to speak.
The Chairman. Bring that mic up a little closer, if you
would, please.
Ms. Burtnett. For inviting me to speak with you today. My
name is Pam Burtnett and I am the President of the Lake County
Education Association. It is an affiliate of the Florida
Education Association, the AFT NEA.
It is with great pride that I tell you that I am and have
been a classroom teacher of English Language Arts for over 25
years, in Kansas, Illinois and Florida. I earned my National
Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification and
I've also--was the Lake County, Florida Teacher of the Year.
I am pleased to be with you here today to discuss what is
of great importance to all of us--teacher quality. As all of
you have said, teachers make a huge difference in the lives of
children.
We're going to talk about the factors that help attract and
retain a high quality teaching force in hard-to-staff schools,
high quality professional development, growth systems, teacher
incentive pay, mentoring and coaching and school leadership.
In addition, it is important to recognize that teachers
want what is good for students. That is what they do. They want
a safe environment and they want adequate facilities so that
they can teach and children can learn. I want to focus my
comments on two areas--teacher retention and professional
development.
Lake County, Florida has three main programs that have been
effective with teacher retention. I want to highlight one of
these for you. The Lake County Effective Teaching Center was
started 22 years ago as a combined venture between the Teachers
Union and the School District. We used Foundation money to
begin it. Every year, approximately 120 teachers are given 5
days of release time to participate in educational research and
dissemination. This 5-day intensive learning opportunity helps
the teachers build their knowledge, current knowledge, current
research, to exchange ideas and to leave the Center and
implement those ideas the following day. It also gives them
time to network and learn from each other.
Senator Kennedy's Teacher Center's Act of 2006 recognized
the importance that teacher centers like ours in Lake County
can have in helping teachers help students.
I just want to mention one other small program. Due to the
commitment in Florida, there is support for National Board
process, the National Board Certification process. We now have
153 National Board-certified teachers in Lake County and those
teachers help support the new teachers that come into the
county. Last year, we had 350 new teachers so 153 board-
certified teachers helped them. That mentoring is critical.
As a result of my experience, I believe States should
require high caliber teaching induction systems, using mentor
teachers as coaches and that because we expect new teachers to
provide the same kind of teaching as experienced teachers. We
expect that and so this is the way that we can bridge that gap.
Professional development cannot be looked at in isolation
from the school environment. Teachers are no different from
other professionals in what they would like and expect. They
want a safe learning environment, up-to-date and adequate
facilities, high quality research-based training, the
opportunities to collaborate with knowledgeable leadership.
Providing these basics will greatly support teachers and
students in the classroom.
In terms of professional development, the No. 1 strategy
boils down to time and timing. Leaders need to find the money
and resources to give teachers time during their work day,
their work week, their work year to focus on student learning
and leaders must also provide resources needed so that teachers
gain knowledge and data analysis.
Timing is a priority as well. Teachers are asked to make
curricular decisions. If they do not have access to real time
data, then they cannot make the best decisions for their
students. In Florida, decisions affecting the classroom and
curriculum, which often have professional development
implications, are made in the summer after test scores are
released and teachers go home. As a result, they are made by
school and district leadership without teacher input, strictly
based on test scores and not necessarily on curriculum.
We can and must do better. My written testimony contains
recommendations on how the Federal Government can play a more
meaningful role in improving teacher quality. I know from
decades of experience that the one thing we do not need are
additional Federal mandates and hoops for teachers to jump
through. They need to spend time planning and delivering
instruction for students, not recordkeeping.
If we are willing to have an honest conversation about what
is right for students and better ways to attract and retain
teachers, we need to discuss the benefits of providing enhanced
professional development for our teachers, particularly those
working in high-need schools and with limited experience. Thank
you very much.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Burtnett follows:]
Prepared Statement of Pamela Burtnett
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for inviting
me to speak with you today. It's with great pride that I tell you that
I have been a classroom teacher of English Language Arts for over 25
years, teaching in grades 6-12. Additionally, I have taught in a middle
school drop-out prevention program and was a coordinator in my
district's staff development center. I have earned National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards certification and have also been a Lake
County, Florida Teacher of the Year. I graduated from the University of
Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas with a Bachelor of Science in Education and
hold advanced degrees from Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas
with a Master in Education, Theatre and Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
with a Master in Fine Arts, Theatre. Currently, I am a full-time
release President for the Lake County Education Association, which is
an affiliate of the Florida Education Association and both the National
Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
I am pleased to be with you here today to discuss what is of great
importance to all of us in education--teacher quality--including
factors to help ensure a high quality teaching force, professional
development, attracting teachers to, and retaining them in, hard-to-
staff schools, growth systems, teacher incentive pay, mentoring and
coaching, and school leadership. In addition, it is important to
recognize that teachers want what is good for students, a safe
environment and adequate facilities. When teachers are given the
resources to do their jobs, are respected for what they do, are excited
about what they do and are given the time to collaborate and work
together, they are put in the best possible position to help their
students achieve at their highest potentials.
I was asked to focus my comments on two areas of questioning, as
follows:
Question 1. What specific strategies, programs or polices have been
effective in addressing the need for qualified educators in your
community? What outcomes or progress--with respect to the recruitment
or retention of these educators--have been made as a result of these
strategies?
Answer 1. Lake County, Florida had three main programs that have
been effective with teacher retention. They are as follows:
The Lake County Effective Teaching Center was started 22
years ago as a combined venture between Lake County Education
Association and the School Board using foundation money from the Conrad
Hilton Foundation. Every year, approximately 120 teachers are given 5
days of release time to participate in an education research and
dissemination program. The program focuses on pedagogy and helping
teachers develop the deep understanding of how students learn. The
information is timely, research-based and relevant; one can use the
information immediately upon returning to the classroom. It is
concentrated time when teachers do not have students present and they
can attend to developing their skills. This time element is of utmost
importance because during the school day, the school year,
opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share knowledge is
painfully lacking. When students are present, teachers need to attend
to them; they do not have the time for professional development. This
5-day intensive learning opportunity helps to build teachers' knowledge
base while giving them the time to network and learn from each other.
Senator Kennedy's Teacher Centers Act of 2006 recognized the importance
that teacher centers like ours in Lakeland can have in helping
students--particularly those in greatest need--reach their highest
learning potential.
The National Board Support System is another strategy that
we have in place in Florida. The State provides money to districts in
order to help Board certified teachers access additional professional
development or learn how to become district coaches. As a Board
certified teacher, I am able to use the knowledge and skills I have
gained to assist other teachers and help them understand the importance
of probing their own thinking about learning and examining curricular
and instructional decisions before, during, and after lessons. This
type of coaching is designed to help teachers reflect on their
students' needs and where the students are on the trajectory of
learning, and to then adjust their instruction to help students
continue on the trajectory of achievement.
Lastly, Lake County Schools has a curriculum department
that offers professional development at school sites after school and
during the summer. The district made a commitment--and has kept its
promise--to provide an opportunity for educators to participate in
professional development on a regular basis. Based on this commitment,
schools implemented early release Wednesdays specifically so that
educators can participate in professional development programs. This
period of time is crucial for educators so that they have access to
quality programs that help them improve their instruction on an ongoing
basis throughout the school year.
These programs have had a positive effect on teacher retention,
which research has shown to reduce teacher turnover. We know that
support of teachers, particularly new teachers, is key for retention
and helping them deliver high-level instruction. As a result, we have
long argued that States should require high-caliber teacher induction
systems to ensure that new teachers receive the support they need to
provide effective instruction during their beginning years. The three
programs described above demonstrate how supports can mean the
difference for an educator.
There is more work to do, however, even though these programs have
offered support and improved instruction. For example, the Lake County
Effective Teaching Center re-energizes 120 teachers per year and gives
them the skills and tools to be successful with children in the
classroom. However, more needs to be done to change the school's
culture and to provide more time for teachers to share the practices
they learned at the Teaching Center. In addition, every teacher,
paraprofessional, and school staff member needs to have access to these
types of programs. Consequently, more energy should be devoted to
making sure that the resources are available to provide all educators
with opportunities for continual improvement and growth, as we have
done in Florida through these programs.
Question 2. What strategies do you believe are the most effective
in terms of providing professional development and support for
educators in high need schools? Has professional development been
targeted to educators to respond to their needs, and if so, on what
criteria or data was the targeting based?
Answer 2. As a classroom teacher, I can tell you that professional
development cannot be looked at in isolation from teachers' working
conditions. Teachers are no different from other professionals in what
they expect. They want a safe learning environment; up-to-date and
adequate facilities; high quality, research-based training; and support
from their leadership. Providing these basics will greatly assist
teachers in the classroom.
Teachers need to work with a strong leader with a clear vision, and
the time to collaborate as a team so they can focus and work together.
If given the time, the resources, and a strong leader who can create a
climate of collaboration, then professional development can achieve
sustained results that have lasting effects on student learning.
The No. 1 strategy boils down to time and timing. Strong leaders
need to find the money and resources to give teachers time during their
school day--not after school or weekends--to focus on student learning;
and obtain the resources necessary so that teachers can begin to
understand how to analyze data and make decisions using the data.
Timing is a priority as well because teachers may be asked to make
curricular decisions, but if they do not have access to real-time data,
then they may not be making the best decisions for the instruction of
their students.
In addition, if educators are to do their best work, they must be
viewed as valuable partners in the educational system. Policies should
ensure that States, school districts, and schools actively involve
teachers and other educators in the planning, development,
implementation, and refinement of standards, curriculum, assessments,
accountability and improvement plans because their training and
experience represent a valuable resource in designing programs that
work for students.
Building on that theme, it is critical that educators be consulted
when professional development programs are designed and selected for
them. I think districts often try to respond to the professional
development needs of teachers, but due to many factors, they miss the
mark. For example, depending on a district's testing schedule, the data
they are using in order to make professional development decisions
could be last year's data--it may or may not be relevant to the current
needs.
Furthermore, if educators are not involved in the decisions
regarding their own professional development, the educators may not
feel the programs selected for them are beneficial. In Florida, for
example, decisions affecting the classroom, which often have
professional development implications, are made in the summer after
test scores are available when the teachers are not present and have no
technological way to be connected to the school. As a result, decisions
are made by the school and district leadership without teacher input--
strictly based on test scores. Teachers usually are unhappy with the
decisions that are made and some are not readily accepting of the
professional development that follows from these decisions. We can do
better--and we have to do better. Educators are partners in the system
and should be viewed as such.
We all agree that recruiting and retaining accomplished teachers
for high-needs schools is a difficult problem. Nevertheless, I think we
can say that if accomplished teachers are given the time to
collaborate, learn and support each other, are given the resources to
teach the way they know how and respected for their expertise, are able
to work with strong leadership, and are then supported with effective
professional development, we will see more teachers not only staying in
the profession, but also willing to go to and stay at high needs
schools.
The Federal Government can play a meaningful role in improving
teacher quality by including the following policies in the
reauthorization of ESEA:
Providing financial incentives to school districts to
provide teachers with time for collaboration on a regular basis.
Legislation such as S. 3710, the Teacher Center Act of 2006, introduced
last year by Senator Kennedy, would give teachers across the Nation
access to high-level, ongoing, high-quality professional development
programs that are designed and delivered by expert, practicing
teachers.
Expanding support for high-quality, research-based
professional development for all teachers. These programs should be
developed in a collaborative fashion between school districts' leaders
and the local teachers to ensure that teachers--and other educators--
receive professional development that is directly linked to their and
their students needs and tied to the school's and district's curriculum
and instructional needs and strategies.
Continuing to provide support for the National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards to assist more teachers to obtain
National Board Certification. In addition, the Federal Government could
provide financial incentives for board-certified teachers to go to and
stay in hard-to-staff schools.
Supporting and funding high-quality induction programs for
new teachers so they have the assistance they need to be successful in
their jobs.
Providing incentive grants to districts to develop peer
assistance programs that focus on the improvement of staff knowledge
and skills.
Providing incentives for local districts to develop
compensation systems for teachers and paraprofessionals that have a
competitive base pay and benefits for all and, when supported by both
management and staff, provide opportunities for staff to improve their
salary through the performance of additional responsibilities.
Providing financial incentives for districts to help
recruit and retain high-
quality teachers in hard-to-staff schools.
Require States to develop a ``learning environment index''
for all schools, and require districts and States to address the
problem areas identified for schools not making adequate yearly
progress. Many of the schools not making AYP do not have adequate
facilities, safe conditions, teacher retention incentives, and the
financial and professional supports needed. The learning environment
index should identify and measure teaching and learning conditions in
each school.
Title II (the Teacher Quality State Grant program) should
be amended to allow districts to work with local teacher unions to
survey principals, teachers, and other school staff about their working
conditions. Such surveys can be powerful tools to obtain information
that can identify improvements needed in schools throughout the
district to help spur student achievement. North Carolina has been a
leader in using teacher working condition surveys. Other States that
have utilized this tool include Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and Ohio.
Additional information on teacher working conditions surveys can be
obtained from the Center on Teacher Quality at: http://
www.teachingquality.org/twc/whereweare.htm.
Directly support efforts to improve working conditions
through grants for smaller class sizes, and school repair, renovation,
and modernization.
I know from my decades of experience that the one thing we do not
need are additional Federal mandates and hoops for teachers to jump
through. Teachers are motivated by their desire to help their students
learn. In addition, teachers are always open to improving their
instruction because they know it will benefit them, and more
importantly, their students. If we are willing to have an honest
conversation about what is right for students, I believe we can find
the strategies for success for providing professional development and
support for educators in high-need schools.
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Thank you. We are going
to move along as we're stretching a little beyond the 3 minutes
and I think we're going to have a vote a little later in the
morning. We want to make sure we have some good interaction
with our members. So to the extent that we can--everything that
has been commented on has been directly related to the subject
matter so it is difficult to say that anything that's been said
hasn't been absolutely on point but we'll see if we can move
along.
Jesse Solomon, Director of the Boston Teacher Residency,
has been Director since the program started in 2003. The
program came about as a partnership between the Boston Public
Schools and its strategic grant partners, which provided
initial funding. Well, we've heard from those who completed the
program just how valuable the residency year was. He'll discuss
how induction of residency programs help prepare the teachers
for the classroom so that they'll be more likely to succeed.
It's good to see you. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF JESSE SOLOMON, DIRECTOR, BOSTON TEACHER RESIDENCY,
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Mr. Solomon. Good morning and thank you for having me here
this morning. I'm going to talk a little bit about a program
called the Boston Teacher Residency, which is the Boston Public
Schools' own teacher preparation program and I think the first
question that we've been asked about this program is why would
the Boston Public Schools need to start its own teacher
preparation program? We have many, many institutions of higher
education, many teacher preparation institutions within 10 or
15 miles of our central offices. The superintendent at that
time, Superintendent Payzant, made the decision to start the
Boston Teacher Residency, not because we had a shortage of
teachers but because we had a shortage of the right teachers.
He was trying to address, I think, four problems. The first
is that the teachers he was getting, as we've talked about this
morning a little bit, were in the wrong areas. So we needed
math and science teachers, we needed special education
teachers, we needed ESL teachers, we need teachers of color and
we were not getting those teachers in the numbers that we
needed.
The second is that we, like most big cities, had a
revolving door at the front end of our teaching profession. So
we lost about 50 percent of all new teachers within the first 3
years. So coupled with the numbers that you are hearing, we
calculated about $17,000 a teacher that it was costing us to
have each of those teachers walk out the door.
The third thing and in some ways, maybe the most difficult
problem to address is that the teachers who were coming were
often not prepared for the realities and demands of teaching in
an urban school. They were often in for quite a shock when it
came to what it would actually take to help all the students in
their class reach grade level standards.
Finally, the folks that were coming did not necessarily
know the district's work so they often spent their first year
or two learning the district's curriculum, instruction, those
kind of things instead of coming in sort of ready to hit the
ground running.
So we run a 13-month so it's quicker than 4 years but
it's--I don't know if it's quick enough but I was thinking
maybe you were interested after you finished here and coming
through our program and becoming a teacher up in Boston. So I'm
not sure if that's----
The Chairman. Now, wait a minute----
[Laughter.]
Mr. Solomon. There's no recruiting?
The Chairman. I would take unanimous consent that we just
don't have that.
Mr. Solomon. We're always recruiting as you can tell. So we
run a 13-month teacher preparation program, which as Dr.
Darling-Hammond described, is very much based on the medical
residency model and I'll give you a couple of key features of
the program.
First of all, we try to be quite selective on the front
end. We take about one in seven applicants at this point, folks
who come with their content knowledge pretty firmed up before
they even set foot in the door. Our folks spend a full year in
a classroom with a mentor teacher, a skilled, trained
supportive mentor teacher and they work in partnership with
that teacher for a full year, from before the date school
starts to the last day of school so that they really have the
experience of being in a Boston Public School for an entire
year.
They work in cohorts and we prepare them from the moment
they come to our program that the job of teaching, which used
to be isolated and used to be a door closed can't exist that
way and so that teaching really needs to be something that you
do in collaboration with others.
The program is very rooted in practice so we try to get
away from some of the courses you are describing and try to
make our courses both literally and figuratively be based at
the school site, based in practice so the things that people
are learning about are the kinds of things that they are
experiencing in their schools.
We make it affordable. Folks get a stipend to come, they
get health insurance. We loan them the tuition for the program
and then for every year they teach in the Boston Public
Schools, we forgive a third of that loan. So if people do the
program right, they don't pay us anything. They get a Master's
Degree, they get a teaching license. They actually get a dual
license in special education and they get that for free if they
complete their 4-year commitment with us.
And finally, we're selective on the back end. We don't
graduate everyone and we try to be very clear with people
coming into the program that getting into the program is not
the same thing as getting out of the program--that what we have
is we basically have a year-long job interview that is not done
on the backs of kids the way sometimes first year teaching is
done so that people have a chance to learn to teach but we also
have a chance to see them in action before we make a hiring
decision.
So far, they are staying. Our first big goal was retention.
We have about 96 percent of our grads whom have stayed in
teaching. We're early on in the program but that's exciting and
the principals like them and want them. We survey the
principals.
What's missing for us and what we are in the process of
developing is a value-added model that actually gets at what
kind of an effect on student achievement our grads have and one
of the things we're advocating for in the State is for all
teacher preparation institutions to be accountable for their
graduates.
A couple lessons----
The Chairman. Go ahead, quickly.
Mr. Solomon. Okay. First is that we've found that this
residency year allows our graduates to bypass some of the kind
of first year jitters and they enter--I would say not as
second-year teachers but they enter as sort of first and a
half-year teachers. That's what principals report to us.
As I said before, they know how the districts work. They
come in ready to hit the ground running. Finally, as a program,
we're accountable for those people. We are based in the
district. We work closely with the principals, with the human
resources department. If we recommend someone, if they have our
name stamped on them, if anything goes wrong with that person,
if that person turns out not to be a great teacher, it comes
back to us. So there is a higher level of accountability in
terms of us recommending that person for licensure and
recommending them for a job in the district.
I'll try to end with a few ideas, I think, that would be
broader. The first is that I think all the work we do is rooted
in practice and we've tried to be very clear about that. The
second is that no amount of preparation is enough if folks are
not constantly getting skilled, regular feedback in their
classrooms about their teaching. So it's not enough to do
workshops or PD outside of the classroom. It has to take place
in a classroom. It has to involve regular feedback from skilled
professionals.
And I think I will stop there.
[The prepared statement of Jesse Solomon follows:]
Prepared Statement of Jesse Solomon
1. What specific strategies, programs or polices have been
effective in addressing the shortages of teachers in your school or
district? What outcomes or progress--with respect to the recruitment or
retention of teachers--have been made as a result of these strategies?
Four years ago, Boston Public Schools (BPS) superintendent Thomas
Payzant made the critical decision that the BPS would begin to recruit
and prepare its own teachers. Frustrated by the inability of local
institutions of higher education to help the district fill openings in
high-needs areas, and facing a 50 percent turnover rate for teachers in
their first 3 years, Superintendent Payzant decided that the district
would compete directly with higher education. Payzant was concerned
that too many of the teachers coming through existing routes were
under-prepared for the realities of urban teaching and not committed to
Boston for the long term. Further, existing routes were not producing
enough teachers in the high-needs areas of math, science and special
education, and too few of the program graduates were teachers of color.
Superintendent Payzant started the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) to
recruit and prepare the teachers the district desperately needed but
was not getting. His aim was to recruit people committed to Boston,
prepare them to know the district's work, and support them to stay in
Boston, all the while pushing higher education to change its practices
in response. Payzant's creation of BTR in 2003 has dramatically altered
the way BPS recruits, prepares and retains teachers.
MODEL
BTR tackles a crucial urban school district problem in an
innovative way: It places teacher preparation in classrooms rather than
in the academy. A site-based school of education anchored in the BPS,
BTR is highly selective, and recruits talented and committed people
from diverse backgrounds who want to be urban teachers. [Last year,
there were 425 applicants for 65 slots.] These aspiring teachers,
called Teacher Residents, spend a full school year working with a
Mentor teacher in a BPS classroom 4 days per week. Residents serve as
interns under the supervision of the Mentor, they are not teachers-of-
record. Residents participate in a specialized curriculum tailored to
BPS's reform agenda on Fridays, after school, and in summer sessions
before and after the school year. They earn a Massachusetts Initial
Teacher License in their primary academic content area, partial credit
toward dual licensure in special education, and a master's degree in
education from the University of Massachusetts/Boston. During their
preparation year, Residents receive a $10,900 stipend and health
insurance (primarily supported through AmeriCorps) to help defray
living expenses and incur no cost for the degree or licensure; in
return, they commit to teach for at least 3 years in the BPS. BTR
continues to support its graduates for these 3 additional years,
helping them develop from novice teacher to teacher-leader with the
goal of building a critical mass of like-minded, effective teachers
equipped to bolster school and district improvement efforts. BTR is in
the midst of an aggressive scale-up plan. Having prepared cohorts of
12, 36 and 48 teachers, BTR is currently preparing 60 teachers in
SY2006-2007 and plans to grow to prepare 120 teachers in SY2008-2009,
which represents an estimated 30 percent of the total teachers Boston
will hire.
RATIONALE
Underlying BTR is the knowledge that there is one educational
reform which we know works: good teachers. Using a medical residency
model, BTR draws on the knowledge that effective teachers hold, just as
medical interns learn from consulting physicians. BTR's structure
marries practice and theory, requiring prospective teachers to wrestle
daily with the real-world dilemmas of teaching in a high-pressure,
high-support situation. By clustering cohorts of Residents at select
host schools, BTR builds strong support networks for both Residents and
Mentor teachers. BTR also changes the traditional consumer-producer
relationship between school systems and institutions of higher
education and ends BPS's total dependence on outside institutions for
its teachers. BTR is structured to focus on meeting the BPS's
particular needs, to support the Residents to stay in teaching and
interrupt the cycle of high teacher turnover, and to raise the quality
and consistency of new teachers. Given recent research by Thomas Kane,
Jonah Rockoff, Douglas Staiger and others--which suggests strongly that
teacher effectiveness increases over the first years of a teacher's
career--BTR believes that high retention rates of our graduates will be
directly connected to improved student outcomes. BTR also addresses the
district's goals of recruiting teachers in high-needs areas--teachers
of color and teachers of math, science, and special education--and to
keeping them by finding Residents with a strong commitment to Boston
and to teaching its children as a long-term career choice.
OUTCOMES
BTR measures its success through key outcomes:
1. Resident placement. BTR has placed over 95 percent of all
successful Residents in BPS teaching jobs.
2. Teacher retention. Overall, BPS retains only 53 percent of its
new teachers for a full 3 years. BTR has to date placed 89 graduates in
positions in the BPS; 86 are still teaching in the BPS (a 96 percent
retention rate).
3. Recruitment in high-need areas. In its first four cohorts, over
half of all BTR Residents have been people of color and over half of
middle and high school Residents teach in the areas of mathematics and
science.
4. Scale. BTR aims to prepare 30 percent (120 of 400) of Boston's
new teachers by SY2008-2009.
5. Teacher Quality. In a recent survey, principals/headmasters
considered 88 percent of their BTR-prepared teachers as or more
effective overall than other first-year teachers at their school, and
considered the majority (55 percent) to be ``significantly more
effective.'' Moreover, when asked to compare their BTR-prepared
teachers to their teaching faculties overall, principals/headmasters
rated the majority (64 percent) as or more effective than their overall
teaching faculties, despite graduates' lesser experience as teachers.
6. Improved student achievement. BTR has begun to develop a value-
added system in conjunction with Professor Tom Kane at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education to design a study to track student
performance data for the students in its graduates' classes. BTR's
ultimate measure of success is the academic achievement of the students
in our graduates' classrooms.
There are a few key aspects of the program design worth
emphasizing:
1. We do not allow un-chaperoned teaching. Because our ultimate
goal is the academic achievement of our students, we are careful not to
place the burden of preparing new teachers for our neediest students on
the backs of those very same students. Instead, by pairing BTR
Residents with excellent, veteran teachers, we seek to add to the
experience of the students in the classrooms while preparing the next
generation of teachers.
2. We do not graduate everyone; we believe that there is a healthy
level of churn. We tell Residents that getting into the program does
not guarantee that they will get out. We see the residency as a year-
long job interview in which key district personnel can observe the
Residents and make a determination as to whether they are strong enough
teachers to receive an offer of employment in the district.
3. We need methods of measuring the value-added student achievement
attributable to our graduates. As it now stands, our State does not
have such a system. Further, there are many opponents who would point
out the flaws in value-added systems. What this does is perpetuate a
system in which institutions of teacher preparation cannot be held
accountable for the quality of their graduates. We are working to
develop our own such system. However, we would benefit from Federal
help in this area: perhaps requiring States to establish such systems
and funding their development.
4. A residency year working with a skilled mentor allows our
graduates to bypass some of the first-year teacher challenges. Our
graduates and their principals describe their first year of teaching as
if it was their ``first-and-a-half '' year. The first year of teaching
is difficult for all first year teachers regardless of preparation,
there is no way to get past that reality. However, the fact that BTR
graduates know the district's curricular and instructional initiatives,
know the students and the city, and know how the district works, means
that they do not face the same shocking experience as so many first
year teachers. They are better prepared, they enter with a network of
colleagues, and they are more likely to stay.
5. The fact that BTR is district-based allows us to advocate for
and leverage other key changes in the district. For example, the
district investment in teacher preparation has led it to re-think, and
eventually radically overhaul, how it takes on teacher induction. BPS
now has a comprehensive induction program for every new teacher hired.
2. What strategies do you believe are the most effective in terms
of providing professional development and support for teachers in high
need schools?
We now have three cohorts of program graduates working in BPS
classrooms and are preparing a fourth cohort. We have learned a few key
lessons:
Teachers need to be part of a strong cohort. Working in a
school with a cohort of like-minded colleagues is critically important
to retention. Too many of our graduates report to us that the biggest
issue they face in their schools is isolation. They want colleagues
with whom they can share ideas and questions, test out hypotheses, and
exchange critical feedback. Too often, school cultures do not support
those types of interactions among teachers. As they work to change
school cultures (a long-term goal), these recent graduates need a
critical mass of colleagues with whom they can collaborate. The people
that we are recruiting and preparing want to work in creative,
energetic places with other smart people who are similarly dedicated
and keep them growing and challenged. BTR works to place all of its
graduates in cohorts once they are prepared and licensed. These cohorts
then can in turn help change schools. We see the strong effect on
certain schools of an influx of energetic teachers.
Teachers need regular, skilled, professional feedback
based in their classroom teaching. All new teachers--even the ``best''
teachers, the ones principals do not worry about--need regular feedback
and opportunities to improve. Too many BTR graduates report to us that
they rarely--if ever--have an experienced, skilled supervisor in their
classrooms to observe and provide feedback. They wonder how they will
improve as teachers without that kind of feedback. BTR provides all of
our graduates with in-class coaching for 3 years following their
residency.
Teachers need to see exciting and challenging career
paths. All teachers, and especially the most talented teachers, need to
see a set of opportunities for leadership and career differentiation.
The kind of people our urban schools want and need in teaching could do
anything--they have the skills and credentials which would gain them
entry in practically any company--and we need to make the teaching
profession attractive enough for them to stay. We hear from our
excellent second and third year graduates that they are looking around
for ways to stay engaged and growing. They need to be given additional
responsibility and reward for taking on critical tasks within their
schools and the district. BTR creates roles for Mentors and Site
Directors, which provide opportunities for a number of excellent,
veteran BPS teachers. These roles need to be expanded and further
formalized across the district.
The Chairman. That's good. Thank you very much. Barbara
Maguire is a teacher and math instructional facilitator, Park
Elementary School, Casper, Wyoming will talk about recruiting,
supporting teachers from rural areas and strategies the State
of Wyoming are implementing.
Yes?
Senator Enzi. Can I ask one question?
The Chairman. Sure.
Senator Enzi. What percentage of Boston teachers actually
go through your program?
Mr. Solomon. Right now, it's about 10 or 15 percent. It
will grow each year to reach about 30 percent.
Senator Enzi. Thanks.
STATEMENT OF BARBARA MAGUIRE, TEACHER AND MATH INSTRUCTIONAL
FACILITATOR, PARK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, CASPER, WYOMING
Ms. Maguire. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to be
here. For a small town girl from Casper, Wyoming, this is quite
an event.
Wyoming is a unique State with 510,000 people spread over
97,000 square miles. So we have some challenges that other
States don't face and some benefits as well. Our State
legislature funded with the oil and gas taxes, has been able to
put forth a lot of money toward the teachers in Wyoming. They
financed some pretty hefty raises last year, which certainly
helped to attract some teachers. In my district, we were able
to fill 170 positions between May and August. So for a city of
50,000 people that was a pretty tremendous event.
Also, they have begun to pay back teacher loans for
teachers of math, science, foreign language and special
education, again a way to attract some teachers to our State.
But in line with what some of the others have said, we have
also been able to start an instructional facilitator and mentor
program. So my work as a mathematics instructional facilitator
means that as we implement new programs, I am working side-by-
side with both new teachers and experienced teachers in the
classroom to make sure that those programs are implemented to
the best benefit of children.
But instead of all of those programs that our State has
talked about, I want to talk a little bit about the Wyoming
National Board Certification Initiative, which is funded by the
John P. Ellbogen Foundation, a private foundation led by a man
whose dream was to make sure the best teachers were in the
State of Wyoming. Mary Ellbogen Garland, whose daughter is the
president of the foundation and I work for them as an
instructional workshop facilitator and also as an advisory
board member. What Mary and the Advisory Board have done is to
fund the fees for National Board Certification for teachers, to
fund workshops for National Board Certification process across
the State and to provide professional development opportunities
for our National Board Certified teachers.
I can tell you as a National Board Certified teacher that
was, without a doubt, the most effective professional
development for me in 26 years of teaching. I had to look at my
teaching critically. I had to look at what I know about my kids
and apply that information to my instruction. So we talk about
raising test scores and we talk about the importance of those
numbers but I think sometimes we miss the impact of knowing our
individual students. Our kids are much more than a number and I
think sometimes we get away from that personal piece and to me,
that's where you get a quality teacher--somebody who cares so
deeply about those kids that they will do absolutely anything
to help their education.
One of the things that has been beneficial in Wyoming
because of our rural nature is that this Board Certification
Initiative has brought together teachers from around the State.
We meet multiple times throughout the year. We talk about
education. This past weekend, I worked with two teachers from
about 150 miles away who came to Casper for the weekend only to
talk about how to improve instruction in their writing process
with their kinder-
garteners and how to integrate mathematics and science and
those are the kinds of conversations that help to make our
rural State seem not quite so big.
I would encourage anything we can do to help teachers take
part in the National Board Certification process because it is
one of those things that comes from the inside rather than
being from external forces. Again, I would say that has been
the most powerful piece for me and anything we can do to
improve teaching in the sense of getting those master teachers
out there to help our beginning teachers is going to be
beneficial.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Maguire follows:]
Prepared Statement of Barbara Maguire
Chairman Kennedy, Senator Enzi, and members of the Senate Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee: It is truly an honor to share
my experience as a teacher at this roundtable addressing Strategies for
Attracting, Supporting, and Retaining High Quality Educators. I am a
kindergarten teacher and mathematics instructional facilitator--I am
living my dream.
Wyoming is in a unique position. Our State government provided
funding a year ago to put programs into our schools which were designed
to support and retain teachers. First, they funded a substantial pay
raise. My district was able to fill 170 teaching positions between May
and August of last year, largely due to the increase in pay. Many of
those positions were new positions the legislature felt would increase
student learning in our schools--instructional facilitators, tutors and
mentors. Our district now supports an institute model of staff
development, with intense training followed by regular support provided
by the instructional facilitators in each school. Teachers are given
continual support as new programs are implemented. In addition,
instructional facilitators offer direct interventions for teachers who
are struggling. Daily support, modeling and feedback from master
teachers provide intensive, personal interactions designed for each
teacher's specific needs. Administrators and instructional facilitators
work hand-in-hand to build a ``culture of coaching'' where all teachers
work together to impact learning in their schools. In addition to
instructional facilitators, a cadre of experienced mentors works very
closely with teachers new to the profession. These mentors meet with
groups of new teachers to work through common issues and concerns. The
support of mentors and fellow teachers alleviates some of the sense of
isolation felt by new teachers struggling to juggle the
responsibilities and pressures they face in this time of high stakes
testing. Through these programs, we have made strides in improving the
conditions teachers face in our schools.
We are fortunate to have great financial support for public schools
in Wyoming, but we face unique challenges as well. Our population of
510,000 people is spread over 97,000 square miles. Many of our teachers
work in rural communities, where isolation becomes a frustration. There
are fewer colleagues with whom to work and many teachers are asked to
teach in subject areas for which they are not well prepared. In
addition, traveling to conferences or workshops is often limited
because of the great distances involved. We must create our own
professional development or bring it in to our communities at great
cost.
In addition to the support of our legislature, a private foundation
has come to the forefront in supporting professional development in our
State. Throughout his adult life, John P. ``Jack'' Ellbogen believed
profoundly in the importance of quality education for all Americans. He
also believed that quality classroom teaching was key to superior
student learning. During the later years of his life he became most
concerned over continuing international tests that showed American
students were falling behind in learning and comprehension, especially
in math and science. Observing this trend, he felt a strong obligation
to get involved in the public school education process. His research
indicated that the program for National Board Certification of teachers
was considered a proven professional development vehicle to improve
teaching skills. In March 2004 The John P. Ellbogen Foundation, led by
Jack's daughter Mary Ellbogen Garland, began a statewide initiative for
Wyoming National Board Certification. This initiative provides funding
for certification application fees, statewide workshops and support for
candidates, and recognition and leadership development for National
Board Certified Teachers.
To achieve National Board Certification a teacher must complete
four portfolio entries, three of which are classroom based with videos
and/or student work provided as part of the entry. In addition, the
teacher must demonstrate content knowledge in response to six exercises
developed for each certificate area. These 10 exercises are evaluated
based on evidence of accomplished teaching as defined by the National
Board for Professional Teaching Standards. It is a rigorous process.
Independent studies have shown that students of National Board
Certified Teachers do better on standardized tests than students of
non-National Board Certified Teachers. For example, students of
National Board Certified Teachers score 7 to 15 percentage points
higher on year-end tests than students of non-National Board Certified
Teachers (D. Goldhaber, University of Washington) and students of
National Board Certified Teachers showed learning gains equivalent to
spending an extra month in school. (L. Vandervoort, Arizona State
University) The research also shows that National Board Certified
Teachers consistently outperform their peers in knowledge of subject
matter, ability to adapt instruction and ability to create challenging
and engaging lessons. (L. Bond, University of North Carolina,
Greensboro)
Without hesitation I will say that the National Board Certification
process is the most powerful professional development I've experienced
in my 26 years as an educator. I critically examined my teaching,
connecting the knowledge of my students' individual needs to my
instruction. I began to reflect on my practice, looking for strategies
that were effective and changing those that were not. I became
painfully aware that every decision I made had consequences, forcing me
to be very deliberate in my decisionmaking. Most importantly, I learned
how to analyze lessons ``on the fly'' so that I could provide the most
effective instruction possible for my students.
Currently, I am a member of the Advisory Board of the Wyoming
National Board Certification Initiative, as well as its lead workshop
facilitator. Since 2004, the initiative has made great strides in
promoting National Board Certification in our State. We have 77
National Board Certified Teachers in Wyoming and 197 teachers presently
registered as candidates. The work of the Initiative has created a
National Board ``family.'' Candidates come together at workshops in the
summer or early fall to learn the specifics of the process and begin
work on portfolios. A work session in January gives candidates another
chance to come together to discuss teaching and learning. Many of
Wyoming's NBCTs have worked together as candidate support providers to
help those presently in the process. This work in collegial groups has
helped to lessen the feeling of isolation so common in Wyoming. We are
creating a network of teachers who understand the importance of
continuing to challenge ourselves. We are helping good teachers become
great teachers.
In addition to providing ongoing professional renewal through the
National Board Certification process, the Initiative is dedicated to
supporting leadership development for National Board Certified
Teachers. For those needing a career advancement track, National Board
Certification can open doors and provide opportunities for teachers to
take leadership positions while remaining in the classroom. An annual
incentive bonus coming from the State may also help retain good
teachers, as it is only available to those in full-time teaching
positions.
Most professional development funded by my school district is based
on student needs drawn from scores on State and local assessments.
These opportunities are not responsive to the individual needs of
students or teachers. The training tends to be impersonal and often
ineffective, as teachers fail to see the connection between new
learning and their students. National Board Certification addresses
both student assessment data and the connection to the students. It
comes from a teacher's inner desire to grow personally and
professionally, rather than being driven by external demands. It
requires teachers to analyze instruction and its effectiveness, and use
personal knowledge of students along with assessment data to make
decisions for teaching.
As evidenced by the National Board Certification process, the
measure of a teacher cannot be made through test scores alone. While
local, State and national assessments provide information about how
we're doing, they cannot stand on their own. It is important to
recognize our children and our teachers as individuals, and work to
find ways to meet their unique needs. We know that we can learn new
strategies and skills for teaching, but we must also value our teachers
as artists, as they nurture the medium that is our youth.
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Dr. Beverly Young,
Assistant Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs at Cal State
University. Dr. Young works at 23 campuses in the Cal State
system to improve teacher preparation, particularly in math and
science. She also serves as a representative in the California
Commission on Teacher Credentialing and Dr. Young will discuss
the critical need to increase the number of math and science
teachers, focusing on what Cal State is doing to meet the
challenge.
Dr. Young.
STATEMENT OF BEVERLY YOUNG, PH.D., ASSISTANT VICE CHANCELLOR OF
ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, TEACHER EDUCATION AND PUBLIC SCHOOL PROGRAMS,
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
Ms. Young. Thank you and thank you, Chairman Kennedy and
members of the committee. Thanks for inviting the Cal State
University to talk about our work. I have to say that the work
of this committee has so many areas I'd love to talk with you
about, that I've heard about and that--the definition of a
highly qualified teacher, the NCLB provisions, the distribution
of teachers that Amy was talking about, program accountability
and evaluation, which the CSU is very much into, the issues of
college and career readiness, value-added models of
accountability--all of those things I'm so interested in but--
--
The Chairman. Okay, for the panel. We are focusing,
obviously, you know, on the teacher but you all have experience
in these other areas. We'd welcome your comments on those, too,
if you want to submit additional comments. You just listed an
important list so we'd welcome having the additional but we're
giving the focus on this topic today. But for others that want
to give recommendations to the committee on these other items,
we'd welcome them. Thank you.
Dr. Young.
Ms. Young. Okay. Well, I'll stick to the math and science.
I won't even talk about standard deviations but maybe I'll come
to back to some of those other things.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. Thank goodness.
Ms. Young. The California State University is the largest
4-year university system in the country. We award about 84,000
degrees every year and about 13,000 teaching credentials, which
represents about 10 percent of the country's total. In math and
science, we've launched a new initiative to increase the number
of fully qualified math/science teachers and have increased our
production by almost 38 percent over the last couple of years.
We have about 1,000 new math and science teachers graduate from
the CSU every year.
As part of this initiative, we've identified seven
strategies. They are all outlined very specifically in the
written testimony that provide a comprehensive, systematic
approach to this. I'm going to describe three of these central
strategies for you.
The first, our campuses have focused very heavily on----
The Chairman. Move your mic just a little closer, if you
would, please.
Ms. Young. On developing new pathways, new potential routes
for math and science teachers who will be fully trained and
their credential preparation includes a full major in their
discipline--math and science teachers who really understand
math and science and how to teach math and science.
In California, they've developed a new credential for math
teachers that bifurcates the requirement that allows math
teachers who are only going to teach up to middle-school level
math, to have less preparation, less math background than high-
school math teachers, who are teaching things like advanced
calculus and statistics and standard deviations. We've
increased our production of middle-school math teachers by 84
percent, which is a huge shortage area, middle-school math
teachers.
The second approach we've taken is a collaboration with
community colleges. California has 109 community colleges and
that represents the largest pool of future teachers. Seventy
percent of our graduates start their educational career in the
community college. A huge, diverse pool for our math and
science teachers--we've developed articulation for seamless 2-
and 4-year programs to reach into the community college and
bring those people into the CSU and into credentialing.
We rely a great deal on those efforts on National Science
Foundation grants and opportunities there.
The third approach we focus on is provision of financial
aid and support for math and science teachers. We use
scholarships, grants, loan cancellation--these are all critical
for math and science teachers. We use loan assumption programs
to cancel student debt. We feel that students preparing for
math and science teaching careers should have their tuition and
fees covered as they earn their credential. We use NSS--
Scholarship Program. Eleven of our campuses participate in that
program and more are currently applying.
Finally, in math and science, I would mention two elements
about professional development that are also critical. Math and
science both are fields that are constantly changing. It's not
enough to get more good qualified teachers out there. We need
to keep them current in their field and keep them motivated to
stay. Two strategies that we find that are particularly
effective for that are long-term partnerships between the
universities and the school districts so you are providing
professional development that is based in research but grounded
in practice. Second, sustained professional development within
teacher learning communities that allow the teachers to
participate in the development of their programs.
I think I'm at the red light. I'll stop. But I look forward
to answering any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Young follows:]
Prepared Statement of Beverly Young, Ph.D.
INTRODUCTION
Chairman Kennedy, Ranking Member Enzi, and members of the
committee, thank you for inviting me to discuss the efforts of the
California State University (CSU) system to double its production of
credentialed math and science teachers. The CSU commends the committee
for its attention to this critically important task.
THE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY--BACKGROUND
Few, if any, university systems can match the scope of the CSU
system. The CSU is the largest 4-year university system in the country,
with 23 campuses, approximately 417,000 students and 46,000 faculty and
staff. The CSU's mission is to provide high-quality, affordable
education to meet the ever-changing needs of the people of California.
Since the system's creation in 1961, it has awarded about 2 million
degrees. We currently award approximately 84,000 degrees and 13,000
teacher credentials each year.
The CSU plays a critical role in preparing outstanding candidates
for the job market. Our graduates help drive California's aerospace,
healthcare, entertainment, information technology, biomedical,
international trade, education, and multimedia industries. The CSU
confers 65 percent of California's bachelor's degrees in business, 52
percent of its bachelor's degrees in agricultural business and
agricultural engineering, and 45 percent of its bachelor's degrees in
computer and electronic engineering. The CSU also educates the
professionals needed to keep the State running. It provides bachelor's
degrees to teachers and education staff (87 percent), criminal justice
workers (89 percent), social workers (87 percent) and public
administrators (82 percent). Altogether, about half the bachelor's
degrees and a third of the master's degrees awarded each year in
California are from the CSU.
One key feature of the CSU is its affordability. For 2006-7, the
CSU's systemwide fee for full-time undergraduate students is $2,520.
With individual campus fees added, the CSU's total fees average $3,199,
which is the lowest among any of the comparison public institutions
nationwide.
Close to 60 percent of the teachers credentialed in California (and
10 percent of the Nation's teachers) each year are prepared by the CSU.
Chancellor Charles Reed and the CSU Board of Trustees have made high-
quality teacher preparation one of the highest priorities of the
system. Following a decade of unprecedented growth and reform in public
K-18 education, the CSU Board of Trustees in 1998 embraced systemwide
efforts to improve teacher preparation in a policy entitled CSU's
Commitment to Prepare High Quality Teachers.
THE CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY AND MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE
TEACHER PREPARATION
The California State University (CSU) has brought together its
range of programs in science and mathematics leading to a baccalaureate
degree and to a teacher education credential to address severe teacher
shortages in these fields. In 2005, CSU awarded 651 math, 1,930
biological sciences, and 516 physical sciences (chemistry, geosciences,
and physics) undergraduate degrees. Although these are only some of the
fields that are precursors to teaching credentials in mathematics and
science, they provide evidence of an institutional capacity to address
the challenges the State faces.
THE CSU MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE TEACHER INITIATIVE \1\
As a system, CSU's goal is to at least double the production of
math and science teachers during the next 5 years. This means
increasing from a baseline figure of approximately 750 new math and
science teachers produced annually to a minimum of 1,500 new teachers
produced in these fields by 2009-10.
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\1\ See http://www.calstate.edu/teachered/MSTI.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CSU's Math and Science Teacher Initiative began in 2004-5 through a
planning process involving all of its 23 campuses. A seven-part action
plan was developed that is focused on meeting ``one goal through
diverse pathways.'' Each campus is committed to a specific plan based
on regional needs and strengths. Plans designate a numerical goal for
increased credential production. They include a variety of promising
strategies and programs for reaching goals.
Component #1. Comprehensive Recruitment Aimed at Expanding
and Diversifying the Pool of Candidates
Objective: To significantly expand recruitment of new math and
science teacher candidates.
Programs: Comprehensive, sustained, and innovative recruitment and
marketing initiatives.
The first component of CSU's action plan is directed toward
substantially expanding and diversifying the pool of qualified
candidates for math and science teaching. It is a broadly-based
recruitment effort targeted to college students and recent graduates,
community college and high school students, mid-career and pre-
retirement professionals, recent retirees, and teachers with the
potential to change fields. Campuses are using a wide range of print
and electronic tools for comprehensive and innovative marketing and
recruitment approaches using a variety of media. The CSU Teacher
Recruitment Projects, for which $75,000 of lottery funds are allocated
annually to each campus, offer advising, test preparation, and
financial aid to students.
Component #2. Creation of New Credential Pathways
Objective: To establish multiple new pathways to mathematics and
science teaching credentials.
Programs: A broad range of new programs beginning at the freshman
level and continuing through fast-track post-baccalaureate options.
A central part of the CSU strategy to expand math and science
teacher production is the creation of new credential pathways. The
purpose is to establish multiple points of entry into these fields for
individuals at different educational and career stages. New pathways
include, for example, (1) the new Foundational Level math credential
for middle school teachers and (2) blended programs for undergraduates
in which an academic major and teacher preparation are integrated in an
articulated program of study. These blended programs are particularly
promising because teacher preparation begins well before California's
traditional post-baccalaureate program, and college students can
typically complete these programs in slightly more than 4 years.
Several campuses are planning new pathways that will enable
professionals in math and science-based fields to transition to careers
in math and science teaching--including efficient, fast-track paths to
the State's recently established specialized science credentials. These
enable individuals with Ph.D.s to earn a teaching credential rapidly.
Other approaches are focused on assisting credential candidates
initially enrolled in different fields and current teachers in other
fields to obtain a teaching authorization in math or science.
Component #3. Internet-Supported Delivery of Instruction
Objective: To create systemwide Internet-supported math and science
credential preparation resources.
Program: A new online-supported teacher preparation program in
mathematics and science.
To accommodate the needs of diversified pools of candidates,
flexible preparation options are needed. Anytime, anyplace instruction
is particularly advantageous for candidates who are career changers and
currently fully employed. Learning from the infrastructure created for
CalStateTEACH (the CSU statewide site-based credentialing program),
CSU's initiative includes development of Internet-supported instruction
to be available to candidates and programs statewide. California
Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo is leading the development of
this effort.
Component #4. Collaboration with Community Colleges
Objective: To implement integrated 2-year/4-year math and science
credential preparation programs with California's community colleges.
Programs: Partnerships with community colleges that align lower
division and upper division math and science teacher preparation and
institutionalize early recruitment and academic advising in these
fields.
California's community colleges represent one of the largest
potential recruitment pools of future math and science teachers in the
State. A central component of campus plans is collaboration with
community colleges in integrated 2-year to 4-year programs that provide
an articulated and continuous sequence of preparation for math and
science teaching. CSU campuses are working with their regional feeder
community colleges to establish articulated programs. The Chancellor's
Offices of the CSU and of the California Community College System have
entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that identifies the
system-level strategies to be implemented in support of 2-year to 4-
year articulated pathways.
Component #5. Financial Support and Incentives
Objective: To provide financial support for new math and science
teachers through the full array of available fiscal mechanisms.
Programs: Scholarships, loan assumption programs, paid tutoring,
service learning, school district internships.
An important component of CSU's strategy--one essential for its
success--is having sufficient support for candidates through
scholarships and loan assumption/cancellation programs, paid tutoring,
and internship opportunities that will make teacher preparation
financially attainable and attractive for college students of all
backgrounds. This is particularly important because students from
underrepresented groups, those most often in need of financial
assistance, must increasingly be a substantial part of the math and
science teacher work force. Expanding their participation within these
professions is a central component of CSU's strategy.
A major effort has been undertaken by CSU in collaboration with the
California Student Aid Commission to foster maximum utilization of
California's Assumption Program of Loans for Education (APLE). Outreach
efforts ensure that all CSU students know of this important State
program for future teachers, which provides up to $19,000 of loan
forgiveness for new math and science teachers. CSU campuses have
awarded loan cancellation funding to more than 4,000 teacher education
students in the past year, enabling them to enter the teaching
profession in math, science, and other teaching shortage fields with
little or no debt.
Tutoring is another important vehicle providing financial support
and additional recruitment benefits. Research shows that the desire to
assist others is a primary factor in recruitment into math and science
teaching and that the opportunity to do so enhances the quality of new
teacher preparation in these fields. On a number of CSU campuses, both
service learning and paid tutoring are being integrated with math and
science teacher recruitment. Using community service learning to foster
interest in math and science teaching is a priority of the CSU system.
An additional approach for providing financial support to
candidates is through paid internships in lieu of student teaching.
These internships are typically followed by full-time teaching
positions in the same school or school district. Numerous CSU campuses
have arrangements with surrounding school districts that provide paid
internships for math and science candidates. CSU campuses provide
significant support for their teacher candidates in intern positions in
order to ensure that they have the kind of guidance and assistance they
need to be successful.
Component #6. Supporting and Evaluating Promising Approaches Having
Scale-Up Potential
Objective: To identify cost-effective math and science teacher
recruitment and preparation approaches.
Programs: Implementation and examination of a range of different
expansion approaches.
The CSU strategy is a carefully planned effort aimed at supporting,
refining, and scaling up especially promising and cost-effective
approaches for preparing highly qualified math and science teachers.
Priority is placed on identifying, supporting, and examining strategies
for increasing credential production that have clear potential for
replication at multiple campuses.
An example is seen in campus programs that prepare candidates for
the new Foundational Level math credential. The credential is designed
particularly for middle school math instruction, a field in which a
very large shortage of qualified teachers exists in California and
nationally. There is a need for teachers with the new math credential
in all regions of the State, and CSU campuses are piloting a range of
promising approaches preparing individuals to earn it.
The Chancellor's Office has begun identifying especially effective
approaches implemented by campuses for achieving growth in math and
science teacher production. These approaches are being examined
thoroughly and will be described in detail for adoption by other
campuses.
Component #7. Partnerships with Business, Industry, and
Federal Laboratories
Objective: To institutionalize partnerships that enhance the
attractiveness of teaching careers in math and science.
Programs: Partnerships with business, industry, and Federal
laboratories enriching math and science teachers' career opportunities.
Long-term success in increasing production and retention of math
and science teachers requires the active participation of corporate
leaders and partnerships with Federal laboratories. They can assist to
bring about fundamental changes in the societal value-accorded math and
science teaching and in the attractiveness of careers in these fields.
Business and industry involvement often includes scholarships for
future math and science teachers. The CSU system has a longstanding
partnership with the Boeing Company, for example, through which
scholarships have been provided to future math and science teachers.
Federal Department of Energy Labs in California have provided
opportunities for paid summer laboratory experiences for CSU teacher
candidates in ongoing research, and plans are in motion to expand this
effort. In collaboration with education programs at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL), CSU established the CSU-NASA partnership several
years ago. It enables CSU campuses to connect with the Nation's most
advanced applications of technology as they prepare future math and
science teachers.
REPORT OF INITIAL RESULTS OF CSU INITIATIVE: MARCH 2007
Progress to date indicates that CSU's initiative is on course for
achieving intended outcomes. Since launching of the initiative 2\1/2\
years ago, credential production has increased 37.6 percent, from 768
to 1,057. Production increased 64 percent in mathematics and 16 percent
in the sciences. In math, more than two-thirds of the increase is
attributable to growth in the new Foundational Level credential. In the
sciences, more than one-quarter of the increase has been in the newly
authorized specialized credentials. Both of these patterns of gain
demonstrate the importance of creating new credential pathways.
Increases have occurred in the severest shortage fields: more than 15
percent of the increase in the sciences has been in the physical
sciences (physics and chemistry), fields particularly in need of
increased production.
To sustain long-term growth, recruitment efforts are needed that
significantly increase pools of credential candidates from all
backgrounds. CSU campuses have made significant efforts to raise
scholarship funds to assist in recruitment. Last year, four additional
CSU campuses were awarded prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF)
Robert Noyce Scholarship grants for mathematics and science teachers.
This program has been a priority for CSU campuses, and a total of 11
now have been awarded these NSF grants.
A significant issue requiring long-term, sustained attention is
math and science teacher retention. The majority of CSU campuses host
professional development programs for teachers, targeted especially for
high need schools. CSU campuses will be expanding their efforts in this
area with support through No Child Left Behind Title II funds to
institutions of higher education in the State. These programs typically
include intensive summer institutes accompanied by creation of learning
communities during the school year. Programs of this nature have been
shown to be effective in providing support for teacher effectiveness
and growth. The CSU programs have been based on thorough needs
assessments that identify local teachers' needs.
Expanding professional development roles of campuses is important
to CSU in relation to its commitment to place math and science teachers
in high-need schools. CSU has entered into a partnership with the
California County Supervisors Educational Services Association in a
$2.87 million project aimed at addressing this issue by recruiting math
and science teacher graduates to consider teaching in the highest need
schools in the three largest regions of the State.
CSU TEACHER EDUCATION EVIDENCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEMS
The CSU annually conducts the largest and most comprehensive
evaluation of the outcomes of its teacher education programs in the
Nation. The annual CSU Systemwide Evaluation of Teacher Education
Programs has been in place since 2001. It consists of a comprehensive
outcome evaluation of interrelated components of teacher preparation
that, taken together, provide a rich and detailed picture of program
quality and effectiveness. It has to date included analyses of:
the level of each graduate's preparation during his or her
initial years of
K-12 teaching, as reported by CSU's teaching graduates;
the effectiveness of programs as reported by the school
site supervisors of CSU graduates during their first years of teaching;
and
the placement and retention of CSU teacher education
graduates in teaching careers.
Beginning in 2007-8, the annual evaluation will include data on the
effects of CSU teacher preparation programs, including its math and
science programs, on the learning gains of K-12 pupils, enabling the
CSU to further assess the success of its math and science teacher
initiative.
CONCLUSION
The CSU and its campuses have initiated a wide range of strategies
that have substantial promise for increasing the size and the quality
of the mathematics and science teacher workforce. We thank you for your
interest in the CSU and our efforts to prepare the substantial numbers
of high quality teachers in these fields who are essential if we are to
continue to compete in the global economy. I will be pleased to answer
any questions you might have, and look forward to working with you in
this critical area in the future.
______
California State University Mathematics and Science Teacher Summit
Meeting California's Challenge--March 2, 2006 \2\
PURPOSE OF SUMMIT
The Recruiting and Preparing Mathematics and Science Teachers
Summit held on March 2, 2006 helped to launch the California State
University (CSU) Math and Science Teachers initiative (MSTI). It
engaged leaders throughout the CSU system in a wide-ranging discussion
of strategies for significantly increasing the production of
mathematics and science teachers--thereby laying a foundation for each
campus' role in expanding math and science teacher preparation. The
Summit, in this fashion, addressed the most significant human resource
issues that California and its science- and technology-based industries
face today.
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\2\ The complete agenda and presentations from the Summit are
available at: www.calstate
.edu/teachered/msts.
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BACKGROUND
Leaders across American society have recognized the critical
importance of recruiting and training more and better-prepared
mathematics and science teachers for the Nation's schools. This was a
central conclusion of Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and
Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, the recently issued
report of National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Prospering in the
Global Economy of the 21st Century.
The committee, which included among its members several current and
former industry chief executive officers, university presidents,
researchers--including three Nobel prize winners and former
presidential appointees--reported as the highest priority action to be
taken: Annually recruit 10,000 science and mathematics teachers. Its
second priority action was: Strengthen the skills of math and science
teachers through training and education programs. And its third
priority action was: Enlarge the math and science pipeline by
increasing the number of students who take advanced science and
mathematics courses during high school.
The recommendations of this National Academy of Sciences Committee
conform closely with the design the California State University is
initiating within its landmark Mathematics and Science Teacher
Initiative. The May 2004 compact between Governor Schwarzenegger and
California's higher education community identified the critical
shortage of K-12 mathematics and science teachers as a major priority.
A commitment was made by the California State University system to
double the production of mathematics and science teachers by the year
2010.
SUMMIT PARTNERS AND PARTICIPANTS
The California State University Chancellor's Office co-sponsored
the Summit with a number of partners, including Apple Computer, The
Boeing Company, the California Space Authority, the California Council
on Science and Technology, the Center for the Future of Teaching and
Learning, Edison International, the Majestic Realty Company, Morgan
Stanley, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and State Farm Insurance. The
attendees included representatives from throughout the CSU system,
California's other K-12 and higher education institutions, and
business, foundation, and governmental agency leaders.
Memorandum of Understanding--Pathways to Mathematics
and Science Teaching \3\
California faces a shortage of fully credentialed and qualified
mathematics and science teachers and has within its current teaching
workforce in these fields a much smaller proportion of teachers from
diverse backgrounds than are represented in the K-12 student
population.
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\3\ This summary includes the primary substantive provisions of the
complete Memorandum of Understanding.
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California's community colleges enroll half of all freshman college
students in California and the majority of underrepresented college
freshmen. Coordinated efforts between the California Community Colleges
(CCC) and the California State University (CSU) can help to increase
the number of credentialed teachers in mathematics and science,
including teachers from underrepresented backgrounds, and to ensure
alignment between community college programs of study and subsequent
university preparation for teaching in these fields.
Therefore, the CSU and the CCC agree to implement the following
provisions of this Memorandum of Understanding:
1. CSU and CCC will collaborate in publicizing the significant need
for mathematics and science teachers in California and the opportunity
to complete an articulated program of preparation that begins with
lower-division preparation at the community college and is completed at
the CSU.
2. CSU and CCC will make available Web-based resources that provide
recruitment, academic advising and financial aid information to CCC
Transfer Center Directors, CCC Counselors, and CSU Teacher Recruitment
Project Directors for supporting community college students interested
in teaching careers. Financial aid resources will provide details on
relevant grants, scholarships, and loan assumption programs and include
assistance to community college students in acquiring APLE loan
repayment awards upon transfer to a CSU campus with 60 semester units.
3. CSU and community college campuses will involve their respective
mathematics and science faculty in aligning programs and coursework for
community college students interested in teaching. They will (a)
identify at least six units of lower-division coursework in the
mathematics and science Lower Division Transfer Patterns (LDTP)
relevant to preparing for teaching, and (b) include in this coursework,
as appropriate, experiences that foster understanding of K-12 teaching,
but do not reduce or eliminate course requirements either of the
community colleges or necessary to maintain articulation with 4-year
institutions.
4. CSU campuses will establish regional Mathematics and Science
Teaching Pathways Advisory Committees. These Advisory Committees will
generally be established in connection with Teacher Recruitment
Projects. The Advisory Committees will assist in the planning of
recruitment activities and in the design of programs and courses in
mathematics and science for transfer students. The Advisory Committees
shall include representatives of community colleges, CSU mathematics,
science, and education faculty, and other educators as appropriate.
5. CCC and CSU will actively promote cross enrollment and dual
admissions programs for community college students interested in
mathematics and science teaching. Examples of effective practices will
be jointly disseminated by the respective Chancellor's Offices.
Building Evidence Systems for Accountability and Improvement in Teacher
Education: The California State University's Center for Teacher Quality
BACKGROUND
With 23 campuses and an annual enrollment of more than 400,000
students, California State University (CSU) is the largest public
university system in the world. Central to its core mission is the
preparation of the education workforce in California. Close to 60
percent of the teachers credentialed in California each year are
prepared by the CSU. Chancellor Charles Reed and the CSU Board of
Trustees have made high-quality teacher preparation one of the highest
priorities of the system. Following a decade of unprecedented growth
and reform in public K-18 education, the CSU Board of Trustees in 1998
embraced systemwide efforts to improve teacher preparation in a policy
entitled CSU's Commitment to Prepare High Quality Teachers.
Beginning in 2001, each CSU campus participates annually in the
Systemwide Evaluation of Teacher Education Programs. A central purpose
of this evaluation is to provide information that the Deans and other
campus leaders can use in making improvements in teacher education
programs. Rather than viewing the evaluation as a one-time event, the
Deans committed to an ongoing evaluation that would provide them with
fresh data about the quality of their programs each year.
As a partner with public schools in the education enterprise, the
CSU uses feedback information at two levels: Individual CSU campuses
make improvements in teacher preparation programs based on the many
specific evaluation findings, and the CSU system undertakes systemwide
initiatives when evaluations reveal systemwide needs. The CSU credits
teachers and administrators for these opportunities to strengthen the
teaching profession.
The CSU knows of no other system of 4-year universities that has
relied on teacher and administrator feedback for so many years. CSU
teacher education programs have benefited richly from the advice and
guidance of K-12 professionals.
The CSU Systemwide Evaluation consists, structurally, of the six
interrelated sets of activities and outcomes of teacher preparation
shown in Figure 1 below. Taken together, the evaluation of these six
areas provides a rich and detailed picture of program quality and
effectiveness.
The Chairman. Thank you. Very helpful. Wanda Watkins,
Principal, Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, Richardson,
Texas. Wanda has worked in Richardson Public Schools more than
20 years as a Spanish teacher, guidance counselor, assistant
principal and principal. She is currently the principal at
Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, which opened in 2005 and
is a teacher at the Advanced Program School. So we thank you
very much and look forward to your testimony.
STATEMENT OF WANDA J. WATKINS, PRINCIPAL, THURGOOD MARSHALL
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, RICHARDSON, TEXAS
Ms. Watkins. Thank you, Chairman Kennedy and I thank the
other members of the committee for having me here today. It is
indeed a great honor; in fact, it's an awesome wonder that I'm
here and I'm excited to share with you the experiences that we
have enjoyed at Thurgood Marshall Elementary.
I am so happy to say that we do have a program, the Texas
Advancement Program, that is in place and it is really focusing
on every child. We embrace No Child Left Behind. We don't do
standard deviation and study that but our focus is on every
single student and value-added gain and as we look at the
challenges, I want you to just for a moment, walk through my
challenges with me, because in that way, even though I outlined
them for you in the written testimony, when you hear them, I
think you will get a better feel for what has been accomplished
at Thurgood Marshall Elementary.
It is in the heart of an area surrounded by apartment
complexes and it is like an inner-city school and it has the
challenges of an inner-city school. You know, I was around
years ago when we talked about how little Johnnie could not
read and everybody was concerned that little Johnnie could not
read. Well, I have a lot of children in my school and they are
little Johnnie's children and little Johnnie's grandchildren
and little Johnnie, unfortunately, has joined the ranks of
those in prison or he's been lost to the streets and now we
have his children, who last year could not read and thanks to a
program that attracted effective, quality teachers and thanks
to a program that worked very diligently with the job embedded
plan to teach teachers weekly, the strategies that they needed
to address the needs of those children who could not read. We
saw some great gains over the past year.
And what is so wonderful about it is that not only has it
built collegiality among my staff members, something that I
tried for years to accomplish and could not do, as I outlined
for you in the written testimony, it has done that. It has
addressed the needs of those children and we have enjoyed just
tremendous, outstanding growth for children who came to us from
Louisiana, when the hurricane hit there and from other parts of
the city, from inner-city Dallas schools where moms where
trying to escape to an area--they had heard that the school
district was great in Richardson. They wanted to be a part of
that. They were looking for better housing, which Richardson
does provide. And so they came to us but they came to us with a
lot of needs. They came to us with a lot of children who had
been sat in front of the television set as a babysitter and
those children come to us without a whole lot of experiences,
without background knowledge and our teachers have to learn how
to address those needs so that those children can succeed, so
that they can be successful.
And I'm very passionate about education so it's going to be
very difficult to speak about something I'm so passionate about
in such a short time. I'm also very convinced that the Teacher
Advancement Program has made a big difference in the school and
it's going to be difficult to briefly talk about such an
outstanding program that has done so much for my children.
When they came to us last year, they had so many needs and
teachers were so frustrated and I was opening a brand new
school and it was so difficult to try to build relationships
and instill trust, administrator to teacher and teacher to
teacher and then teacher to children and even peer to peer.
Nobody knew anybody and the school was open to alleviate the
crowded conditions that existed in high-needs area in the
Richardson Independent School District. So just briefly
speaking, I want to just quickly say that the Teacher
Advancement Program, as we interviewed teachers and tried to
recruit teachers to staff this huge new school, one of the
things that we saw is their countenance just totally change and
light up. When we talked to them about how they were going to
have a mentor who was going to address strategies that had been
proven effective. They were research-based. They were going to
help those children to make gains over 1 year of time and they
knew they were not in it by themselves.
I could so much relate to that because as a teacher in the
trenches, I had gone to so many staff development sessions
where I had to sit and listen and try to go back to my school
and implement everything that I heard. Often they were
wonderful, wonderful strategies that I knew would work. But
without a mentor to guide me through that, without somebody to
coach me and to walk me through it and to show me how to
implement it in my classroom was just an outside consultant who
was not gathering data on my own personal children. I was quite
overwhelmed often and did not know how I was going to go back
in the classroom and implement those strategies that I really
believed would work. So I often did what many educators do--all
of the materials went on my shelf and I thought, I'll get to it
sometime. And the tragic result of that was no change in
classroom practices.
With what the Teacher Advancement Program does for
children, with the ongoing coaching and the weekly classroom
meetings to address needs and to talk to teachers about data
that they gathered--the master teachers--as they work with
their students. That makes a huge difference because those
master teachers go in and team teach with the teachers. They go
in and model for the teachers. The teachers get to see that and
then they coach them through it when they go back and observe
them. They provide data on children that those teachers teach
and they get great effective buy-in.
So for those reasons, to have a job-embedded program that
does not ask exhausted teachers to attend another staff
development session at the close of a day or at the end of a
week on a Saturday, has been most effective. I totally embrace
it. It does not leave children behind.
I would like to share the great gains but I know I don't
have time but I must not close without saying that just
yesterday, I learned that a high stakes test in Texas that
accesses children's knowledge and skills, which we took in
February, I am so, so proud to report that 80 percent of the
students in third grade this year, having taken a high stakes
test like that for the first time, have passed that test after
only the first administration. That is far greater than what we
did last year at this time, when only 55 percent of them had
passed.
So the Teacher Advancement Program has maintained its high
standards for excellence and I'm just thrilled to talk about a
program that focuses on the child and that really ensures that
that child does not get left behind and that he experiences
those opportunities in school that he does not get in his home.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Watkins follows:]
Prepared Statement of Wanda J. Watkins
I would like to thank Chairman Kennedy, Ranking Member Enzi, and
the other members of the committee for inviting me to testify here
today. It is a great honor, and I am delighted to have the opportunity
to share with you some of our experiences at Thurgood Marshall
Elementary School. We are located in the Dallas metropolitan area in
Richardson Independent School District.
1. What specific strategies, programs or policies have been
effective in addressing the need for qualified educators in your
community? What outcomes or progress--with respect to the recruitment
and retention of these educators--have been made as a result of these
strategies?
THE CHALLENGE
I would like to start by noting that as a high-need urban school
with very high student mobility rates, we face the challenge of making
more than a year's academic growth with many of our students on a
consistent basis. Teachers in our school must be able to make these
kinds of academic gains with students to meet our goals as educators,
and those articulated by Congress in ``No Child Left Behind.'' This
means our teaching staff must be consistently exemplary, and we must
create an environment that encourages them to remain at Thurgood
Marshall.
Thurgood Marshall Elementary School has a very high-need student
population. Our free and reduced lunch percentage is approximately 90
percent. Of the 540 students we serve, African-American students
comprise 80 percent of our student population with Hispanic students
comprising 19 percent of the population. The school is located in an
area that is surrounded by apartment complexes. One would naturally
surmise that the children from those neighboring apartment buildings
would make up my student population. Quite the contrary is true! The
boundary lines have been configured so as to allow a minimal number of
the Thurgood Marshall students from nearby apartment buildings to
attend. Most of our students come from apartments that are located on
the opposite side of a very busy freeway; thus these students ride
buses to the school. As a result, many of our students and parents are
not able to attend after school extra curricular activities or receive
additional assistance because they lack transportation. Teachers who
would provide additional aid to children before and/or after school are
unable to do so because students are not available.
Moreover, many of our students come from one parent homes, and an
extraordinary number of those parents are very young single mothers.
These families tend to have very limited income, which results in
frustrated young mothers who are sometimes abusive to their children as
they strive to cope with their own personal struggles. Teachers
encountered a great number of young mothers who were not capable of
appropriately conferencing with teachers regarding their children's
academic and/or disciplinary issues, etc. Frequently, they resorted to
the use of intimidating behaviors, which included shouting, cursing,
and threatening. Most of the teachers were quite intimidated, and chose
to avoid calling parents rather than confronting such challenges.
Many of our students have fathers who are either imprisoned, or
simply uninvolved in the lives of their children. Also, families most
often consist of children whose siblings have different fathers. As a
result, the students struggle with some emotional issues that often
interfere with their ability to totally focus on learning. Due to their
circumstances at home, they tend to be quite transient. Our mobility
rate for 2005-6 was approximately 124 percent, which is quite
frustrating to teachers because they find themselves making progress,
only to lose students with whom they have worked so diligently. Not
only that, but some of our students leave, stay away 2 months or more,
and then return. Teachers then have to practically start all over again
with those students.
Our first year of operation was very much that type of environment,
and after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, we received an influx of
those evacuees because the spacious new school could more readily
accommodate them. At one point, our student population was 10 percent
Katrina/Rita evacuees. Those students' arrival to Thurgood Marshall
Elementary greatly augmented our challenges and presented us with some
emotionally disturbed children who had been trapped in a dome for days,
after having faced the very traumatic ordeal that would naturally
evolve from such an experience. In addition to continually working with
an already existing high-need population, the teachers then had to
adjust their instruction to tailor fit the needs of students who had
even bigger learning gaps to close. (Accountability differs greatly
from State to State.)
Not only did the evacuees arrive in need of some intensive
instructional adjustments, they also came with these issues:
1. Children who had been diagnosed as AD-HD, MR, etc. had lost
their medication during the violence of the storm.
2. Parents often could not give us information that would aid in
appropriate placement of their students, and some of those students had
been receiving special services.
3. We had no way of getting students' records, medical records,
immunization history, etc.
4. Students were exceedingly more volatile and exhibited a greater
need for social reform.
5. Thurgood Marshall's currently enrolled students and the evacuees
had to learn how to coexist, and they sometimes ``missed the mark'' on
that one.
6. Such sudden changes greatly impacted the teachers and their
existing learning environment.
7. Teachers suddenly had to cope with these issues until the
district could procure the funding that would allow for more personnel
to aid in instructing these students to get these students closer to
their grade level performance.
8. To keep things even more interesting, another hurricane--Rita--
hit Louisiana and Southeast Texas to add a few more students and
challenges to our numbers.
9. The evacuees were in the habit of returning intermittently to
Louisiana and coming back to Thurgood Marshall, which increased both
our mobility rate and teachers' challenges.
The above challenges were added to (a) opening a new school that
was implementing a new program--the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP),
(b) striving to build morale and interpersonal employee relationships
with a group of teachers who were unknown to each other, (c) striving
to build employee and student relationships in a new school where
students knew none of the adults and few of their peers, (d) striving
to instill trust (administrator--employee; teacher--teacher; student--
student; and adult--student) in such a new environment, and (e)
acclimating so many novice employees to the particular policies,
curriculum, methodology, etc.
We faced all of these challenges continually, and the first
semester was filled with very long days as we put in hours of work to
plan, collaborate, and continue the pattern of preparing for every next
day of learning. These days came after very long hours of summer days
filled with interviewing and screening applicants, receiving shipments
to fill an empty school that was to open soon, working out logistics
and details regarding first day enrollment, how to receive and dismiss
students (of whom approximately one-third ride the quit bus), fire
drill/evacuation/disaster drill guidelines, and a myriad of other
tasks. The interviews themselves were long and draining because we had
to present the Teacher Advancement Program in addition to screening/
attaining the necessary information to make an informed decision.
Although it was a very good problem to have, the Teacher Advancement
Program inevitably led to more questions, discussion, and interest;
thus, the interviews grew even longer! We persevered because we know,
and research has confirmed, that teacher quality and effective
instruction is what can ultimately lead to student achievement gains.
THE TEACHER ADVANCEMENT PROGRAM
The key for us is recruitment, retention, and development of
effective teachers. We must have a system in place to help teachers to
become outstanding, and our teachers are looking for that support. The
professional support system provided by TAP, as I have alluded, was one
of the key elements in my ability to attract teachers to Thurgood
Marshall when it opened as a new school.
In a high-need school there is a tremendous need to implement a
support structure that enables teachers to continually improve the
effectiveness of their instruction if students are going to continue
improving academically. TAP had achieved this success with similar
students in other high-need schools. Research showed us that 64 percent
of TAP schools with 30 percent or more of students receiving free or
reduced price lunch, and 54 percent of these high-need schools increase
their percent of students at proficient or above from 2003-4 to 2004-5.
This evidence is why we chose to implement TAP.
The method for achieving these results is an intensive focus on
increasing teacher quality through a comprehensive program that
includes (1) school-based professional development led by Master and
Mentor teachers, (2) career opportunities for teachers to take on
additional roles and responsibilities with additional pay, (3) a fair,
rigorous, and objective evaluation system for teachers and principals,
and (4) performance-based pay incentives. Thurgood Marshall began
implementing TAP in the fall of 2005. I have included a summary of our
program below.
TAP at Thurgood Marshall
1. Building the Capacity of Teachers and Principals Through
Professional Development that is directly aligned to content standards
and elements of effective instruction takes place during the regular
school day, so educators can constantly improve the quality of their
instruction and increase their students' academic achievement. This
allows teachers to learn new instructional strategies and have greater
opportunity to collaborate, both of which will lead them to become more
effective teachers.
2. Additional Roles and Responsibilities allow teachers to progress
from a Career, Mentor and Master teacher--depending upon their
interests, abilities and accomplishments. This allows good teachers to
advance without having to leave the classroom and provides the expert
staff to deliver intensive, school-based professional development that
supports more rigorous course work and Texas standards.
3. A Fair, Rigorous and Objective Evaluation Process for evaluating
teachers and principals. Teachers are held accountable for meeting
standards that are based on effective instruction, as well as for the
academic growth of their students, and principals are evaluated based
on student achievement growth as well as other leadership factors.
Evaluations are conducted multiple times each year by trained and
certified evaluators (administrators, Master and Mentor teachers) using
clearly defined rubrics which reduces the possibility of bias or
favoritism.
4. Performance-based Compensation Based on Student Achievement
Gains and Classroom Evaluations of Teachers Throughout the Year.
Student achievement is measured using ``value-added'' measures of
student learning gains from year to year. Performance pay is based on
TX standards and TX assessment--both valid and reliable measures of
student achievement that are used to calculate progress under NCLB.
THE RESULTS
Outcomes That Have Been Achieved
The TAP allowed us to attract such qualified teachers that students
progressed very quickly. The support that these qualified teachers
received from the TAP Master Teachers, coupled with their existing
proficient skills, benefited students greatly. With all staff members
unified across the building to teach the TAP Cluster strategies, the
team of educators was able to close students' learning gaps at an
extraordinary rate. Therefore, students at the school continually
demonstrated progress on teacher made assessments, Master Teachers'
post testing instruments, campus and district benchmarks, and the
State's high stakes standardized tests.
Student Achievement Results with TAP in the First Year
During its first year of existence, Thurgood Marshall met AYP and
received Recognized status from the State of Texas for our student
achievement scores. Thurgood Marshall's Texas Growth Index (TGI) score
was 18 percent. The average TGI values for comparison groups of similar
schools are rank ordered. Thurgood received Gold Performance
Acknowledgement because we fell within the first Quartile of the
comparison group (meaning our students did better than 75 percent of
similar schools in producing student achievement gains). Thurgood
Marshall also had a schoolwide value-added gain in 2005-6 its first
year of existence of a 5--showing the school met more than a year's
worth of growth.*
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* In evaluating TAP teachers and similarly TAP schools, SAS EVAAS
calculates the effect of each teacher on student progress as assessed
by the difference between the growth scores of the teacher's students
and the average growth scores of the control group, which defines a
year's growth. We then place each teacher (TAP and control) in one of
five categories.
Teachers in categories ``1'' and ``2'' produced less than an
average year's growth with their students, and teachers in categories
``3'', `'4'', and ``5'' produced a year's growth or more with their
students.
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By fostering a culture of continuous professional growth and
reflection, creating multiple career paths for teachers, and rewarding
effective teaching and student achievement, TAP has been instrumental
in building a professional learning community at Thurgood Marshall
where teachers feel both supported and challenged to refine and deepen
their craft. The introduction of weekly TAP cluster groups along with
bi-monthly interim assessments has ensured continuous monitoring of
student progress and given faculty the data and skills to tailor
instruction to areas of academic need.
It is the Richardson Independent School District's custom to
administer benchmarks intermittently throughout the school year. Last
year we noticed tremendous gains much earlier in the year than students
at my former school had achieved. Students' learning gaps were closing
at an astounding rate! At some grade levels, the newly opened school
was quite competitive with other schools across the district that did
not have the same challenges that our school faced. For example, our
fourth grade students of 2005-6 had a higher rate of students passing
the Math Benchmark than some schools whose demographics were totally
different than ours. Not only was I thrilled, but the RISD central
office personnel were also impressed. Teachers noted that their
students were progressing quite rapidly in the classroom, and Master
teachers noticed their progress as they modeled/taught in the
classrooms. The ultimate results came when we received students' scores
from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, our high stakes
test. The results are the following:
2006 School Accountability Rating: Recognized**
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** STATE OF TEXAS RATINGS: To be rated as ``Exemplary,'' a school
must have 90 percent of its students passing.
In 2005-6, at least 70 percent of students had to pass for a school
to have a ``Recognized'' rating; this year (2006-7) it is raised to a
75 percent passing rate.
Academically Acceptable = 60 percent passing Reading, Writing, and
Social Studies; 45 percent passing Mathematics; 40 percent passing
Science.
Low Performing = 35 percent passing.
Gold Performance Acknowledgments: Commended on Mathematics
Comparable Improvement: Reading/ELA & Mathematics
READING--82 percent of students passed
MATHEMATICS--78 percent of students passed
WRITING--99 percent of students passed
SCIENCE--71 percent of students passed
SDAA II (State Developed Alternative Assessment--for student who
don't take TAKS)--97 percent of students passed
Not only are overall passing rates commendable, but since
implementing TAP, Thurgood Marshall has made significant progress with
groups that are most in need. The percentage of At-Risk students who
passed the TAKS increased 25 percent on writing (75 percent to 100
percent) and 10 percent in math (from 60 percent to 70 percent).
Similar increases were seen among those categorized as economically
disadvantaged (14 percent writing and 9 percent in math).
National TAP Results
At the national level, TAP schools that have been implementing the
program for a number of years demonstrated student achievement results.
A report released recently by the National Institute for Excellence in
Teaching, the non-profit organization that developed and oversees TAP,
concluded that teachers and schools participating in the program
produce higher student achievement growth than their control
counterparts. Comparisons also show TAP's meaningful results in terms
of adequate yearly progress (AYP), and its support among teachers as an
effective professional development program. The full report can be
found at www.talentedteachers
.org.
The report shows that TAP teachers demonstrate higher achievement
growth than control schools. In every TAP State, TAP teachers
outperformed similar non-TAP teachers in producing an average year's
growth or more in their students' achievement.
In addition, more TAP schools outperformed similar non-TAP schools
in producing an average year's growth or more in both reading and math
achievement.
RECRUITING
I have seen several changes in the recruiting effort. Applicants
become very interested in working at Thurgood Marshall Elementary when
they hear about the amount of support they will get from the TAP Master
and Mentor teachers. My team and I have conducted interviews where we
observed the applicant's countenance immediately change when we started
to discuss that there would be weekly staff development trainings in
TAP Cluster Meetings to teach them strategies to use in the classroom.
As we explained that these would be research-based strategies that have
been proven effective, the applicant usually became even more
inquisitive and excited. This was true with both highly experienced
teachers as well as those with little or no experience.
All except one (out of approximately 80 applicants) expressed a
desire to attend those kinds of meetings if it would mean that a Master
Teacher would followup with modeling in their classroom, team teaching
with them, and/or coming into their rooms to observe them teach the
strategy. The applicant we lost to disinterest expressed her need to
have her classroom time alone with her students without the presence of
guests. All others are very enthusiastic even about the followup
coaching that Master Teachers provide after observing TAP Career
Teachers teaching the TAP strategy.
The Teacher Advancement Program was instrumental in my ability to
recruit 8 teachers from my former school, 3 from schools within the
district, and 33 teachers from other locations.
REDUCING TEACHER TURNOVER
One of the most costly challenges facing schools is high teacher
turnover. Nationally, more than 50 percent of new teachers leave before
they have been teaching 5 years. In the Dallas area, we have an even
higher teacher and principal turnover rate in our high-need schools.
This makes it very challenging to provide continuity for students of
poverty--who need stability in the teaching force to achieve.
After recruiting very interested, qualified teachers, we were able
to retain many of them. Some found, however, that they were not capable
of effectively (a) interacting with the students' apathetic and
frequently volatile parents, (b) coping with the issues that arise when
working with a very transient population of children, (c) interacting
with children who had serious problems associated with hygiene, (d)
interacting with students who lacked appropriate social skills, and (e)
giving the necessary tireless efforts everyday that are essential when
closing academic learning gaps of low socio-economic students.
Of the teachers who left, two of them moved to another TAP school
in the district (promotions); a TAP Master Teacher moved back to
teaching and remained in the district, and five of them sought work
with a different student population. Of that five, one of them
transferred within the district because she was dissatisfied with the
students' inability to manage their own discipline. Additionally, seven
teachers moved to other positions within our school. It is also worth
noting that two teachers chose to stay home with their expected babies,
one Master Teacher relocated when her husband had to transfer, one left
to work in her husband's church, one left because her daughter was
seriously ill, and yet another teacher relocated to get married. Since
only two teachers were non-renewed due to their ineffective classroom
teaching practices, I maintain that implementation of the Teacher
Advancement Program allowed for us to attract a majority of qualified
teachers to our opening school and to build our faculties' skills over
the course of the year. It is extremely rare to hire such a large
number of qualified teachers when there is a need to staff a building
for its first year of operation.
COLLEGIALITY AND PERFORMANCE PAY
As a building principal, I have made so many ineffectual attempts
to build collegiality, all of which have failed until TAP. No matter
how many games we played prior to a large staff development faculty
meeting, and no matter how many ice breakers I tried throughout the
year, teachers continued to return to their own special groups when the
meetings ended. Through its weekly cluster group meetings, TAP provides
a way for grade level teachers to come together with Master and Mentor
teachers, support teachers such as librarians, and educators who teach
Special Education courses or Special Areas teachers. They establish
positive relationships as they work together toward a common goal:
student achievement! This is evident when, for example, a P. E. teacher
talks with a second grade teacher about using a TAP ``Cluster Group''
strategy that focuses on word meaning when teaching students how to
dribble a basketball.
For the first time in my 7 years as an administrator, I had the joy
of learning that a large group of my teachers were going to Las Vegas
together to enjoy their spring break. The most surprising part of that
news was that the teachers were a mixed group of both primary and
intermediate teachers, and usually that twain never meets.
While teachers last year rarely mentioned the TAP payout for
performance, they were very excited when they received their bonus pay
in the fall of 2006. The district's TAP Director and central office
personnel held a special ceremony to celebrate those teachers who
received the bonus checks, and the teachers seemed to really appreciate
the honor. It was their time to be recognized for their diligence, and
they enjoyed the time of celebration. For several weeks, I heard talk
of how the money would be spent, and it ranged from weddings to
vacations! After that time, it was back to work, and oddly enough, I
hear hardly anything at all about the payout bonus. There is, by far,
more discussion about students' needs, how to meet them, specific TAP
Cluster Group strategies, and ultimate student achievement.
FUNDING TAP
The Teacher Advancement Program at Thurgood Marshall is funded in
the following ways:
Title V (NCLB)--grant for innovative programs
Title I (NCLB)--a State grant
Priority Funds--local tax dollars
Title II (NCLB)--a State grant for teacher quality and
recruitment
BUSINESS AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT
Here's a quote from a community person who serves on our Local
School Council, ``I am so very impressed with what I see going on in
this school. The hard work of the teachers is incredible! It is amazing
to watch these teachers working with the students.''
This is a quote from a parent, ``I really hate living in this area,
but the school is so good that I don't want to leave it. You all have
helped my children so much, and they love it.''
2. What strategies do you believe are most effective in terms of
providing professional development and support to educators in high-
need schools? Is professional development being targeted to educators
to respond to their needs and, if so, on what criteria or data was the
targeting based?
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Weekly cluster meetings provide the primary vehicle through which
professional development is implemented within a TAP school. Clusters
are weekly job-embedded meetings attended by a group of teachers with
similar students and are led by a master or mentor teacher that is part
of the school faculty. This is an important element of TAP clusters in
that they are led by a teacher with personal knowledge and
understanding of the needs of the students and teachers at the school
as opposed to an outside trainer who does not have this personal
knowledge.
During these weekly professional development meetings, a master or
mentor teacher models effective implementation of a strategy targeted
at an identified student need represented by the cluster members'
students. Throughout a cluster cycle, teachers continually analyze and
utilize student work as they develop the strategies learned for their
specific students and content area. Everything in the Cluster Group is
driven by student work and student needs. This includes needs
identified through standardized tests as well as through benchmark
assessments and informal assessments by teachers, and through analysis
of individual student work.
When we opened Thurgood Marshall Elementary in the fall of 2005, we
had to pre-test all of our students because they came from so many
different areas of the city, cities, and even States. Some are from
Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. We used our data to not only
drive our decisionmaking concerning school goals and cluster goals, but
to also drive instruction. This continues to allow teachers to learn
new instructional strategies and have greater opportunity to
collaborate, both of which will lead them to become more effective
teachers.
When the evacuees arrived, we had to pre-test them as well to
determine where they were academically so that we could better tailor
small group instruction to fit their needs. Then we had to screen
applicants and hire additional part-time employees to pull students out
of the regular classrooms and provide that instruction.
TAP does not adhere to the traditional mode of professional
development of teachers. Traditionally, teachers attend professional
development sessions throughout the course of the school year. They
attend, sit, listen, and get a ton of new ideas and materials to use in
their classrooms. Unfortunately, they are often either fearful to try
it or overwhelmed by it all because they have no idea of how to
implement into their lesson design/planning. Thus, they usually end up
placing all the new materials on a bookshelf or in some cabinet, and
they push all the innovative ideas to the back of their minds. The
result is too often that teachers learn about some effective classroom
practices, but nobody ever utilizes any of them. The tragic result:
classroom practices do not change.
The TAP, on the other hand, introduces the critical attributes of
research-based, proven effective classroom strategies, the master
teacher models the teaching of the strategies (even creating a
simulated classroom setting where the teachers who are learning the
strategy become the students), and then the master teacher follows up
by either modeling the strategy again in the actual classroom setting
or team teaching with the career teacher. This method of training
removes the guesswork for the teacher and supports the teacher
throughout the entire process. Finally, there is opportunity for post-
conferencing and coaching to further address any needs or concerns. The
ultimate result to the TAP model: effective classroom practices that
yield student success!
EVALUATIONS
Another important input to professional development is provided
through TAP's comprehensive system for evaluating teachers and
rewarding them for how well they teach their students. Every teacher in
our school is evaluated at least four times each year by trained and
certified evaluators who are the master teachers, mentor teachers, and
the administrators. Evaluations are based on research-based standards
in four areas: planning instruction, learning environment,
responsibilities, and implementing instruction. Teachers are given this
detailed rubric and are well prepared for their evaluation. In
addition, pre- and post-conferences are held with each teacher to
design strategies for growth, and coaching is provided throughout the
year.
CAREER OPPORTUNITY
TAP allows teachers to pursue a variety of positions throughout
their careers--career, mentor, and master teacher--depending upon their
interests, abilities, and accomplishments. As they move up the ranks,
their qualifications, roles, and responsibilities increase--and so does
their compensation. This allows good teachers to advance without having
to leave the classroom.
Master and mentor teachers must have expert curricular knowledge,
outstanding instructional skills, and the ability to work effectively
with other adults. They take on additional responsibility and
authority, and are required to have a longer work year. Master teacher
stipends are approximately $8,000, and Mentor teacher stipends are
approximately $4,000.
In order to provide quality, school-based, job-embedded
professional development, there must be a qualified team of individuals
to provide this training. TAP allows for instructional leadership
within a school to be shared among members of the TAP Leadership Team
(Principal, Assistant Principal, and Master and Mentor Teachers) in a
participatory leadership model. I believe there is a positive
relationship between employees' motivation and their ability to advance
within their career. The consensus in this research is that employees
who have opportunities for career advancement are motivated to improve
the quality of their work. In my experience, TAP's combination of
fiscal and work opportunity incentives creates a total package that
appeals to teachers.
CONCLUSION
To summarize, the Teacher Advancement Program is an effective model
for these reasons:
It offers support to career teachers, especially to those
teachers who are new to the educational arena. Since universities often
provide knowledge, more so than effective classroom practices,
graduates in the teaching field are frequently unequipped to provide
educational opportunities that allow all children to grow.
TAP develops good teachers into outstanding teachers and
retains them in the field of education. It attracts those teachers who
come with a good knowledge base, some skills, and hones those skills.
Since teaching is such a vital profession that pays so little, TAP
augments teachers' salaries.
TAP builds collegiality within a school's learning
environment.
TAP effectively trains teachers while offering them the
necessary support to ensure successful careers.
TAP supports teachers in delivering a more rigorous
curriculum.
And, most important, TAP offers the low socio-economic
student an opportunity to learn that might otherwise have been
forfeited.
Successful teachers automatically produce successful students.
Successful students ensure a brighter future for America. Thank you for
the opportunity to speak with you about our work at Thurgood Marshall.
The Chairman. Very impressive. Thank you, Wanda. Jon
Schnur, who is the Chief Executive Officer, New Leaders for New
Schools. Jon co-founded New Leaders for New Schools in 2000. He
plans to expand the nonprofit work. The organization has
trained more than 200 school leaders who now work in several
cities across the country. We're delighted to have you here,
Jon. He was the Special Assistant to the Secretary of
Education, Richard Riley, as well. Glad to have you. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF JON SCHNUR, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, NEW LEADERS
FOR NEW SCHOOLS, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Mr. Schnur. Thank you very much, Chairman Kennedy, members
of the committee. I'm thrilled to be here. I have a lot to say
in 3 or 4 minutes so I'm going to try to do three things in
these 3 or 4 minutes.
No. 1, try to argue that the principal quality strategy, a
school leadership quality strategy is absolutely indispensable
in this country to ensure quality of teaching. Without that, we
can't have quality teachers.
No. 2--I'll share with you a little bit of background about
New Leaders for New Schools and some of the progress that we've
made and some of the learnings that we've made and some things
we don't know about the principalship. We have a lot of
humility about what we know and don't know and want to share
that because No. 3, I want to then offer some recommendations
for Federal policy that rooted both in the sense of urgency
about having great principals but also a sense of humility
about what we do and don't know about how to ensure great
principals at scale.
So No. 1, principals matter a lot. The research is really
clear and Senator Clinton has been a pioneer in the efforts on
school leadership and the Senate authored the first school
leadership programs. Senator Kennedy, you've been an advocate,
Senator Alexander has been an enormous advocate, nationally and
in Tennessee. But don't think it pervades the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act yet. The research is clear. The most
important in-school factor affecting student achievement in
high-need schools is the quality of the teacher as has been
said earlier and Amy said that and of Amy's work and others.
The second most important factor is the quality of the
principal. It's No. 2, so we try harder. But you actually can't
have a quality teacher strategy without a quality principal
because principals control many of the levers about teachers.
They hire teachers, they select teachers, they provide
professional development to teachers, they support and hold
teachers accountable so not only is it No. 2 but it is actually
indispensable to No. 1. The best schools have great principals.
You've seen that and the research backs that up.
The challenge is how do you take that simple idea that you
can't have great schools without great principals to scale in
this country, in a large complex nation where you have limited
knowledge about how to do this at scale.
The second point, New Leaders for New Schools is one
example of an effort to make progress against this issue. Our
focus is high achievement for all children, especially in urban
schools, urban or public schools. We recruit and train and
support very talented people to become principals of urban
public schools at scale. We currently work in nine cities. New
Orleans was just launched 2 weeks ago as our ninth. We're in
New York City, Memphis and other cities across the country. We
do three things. We recruit and select individuals who have the
characteristics associated with the highest performing
principals. The research is clear what characteristics
principals have and we try to recruit and select individuals
for that.
Jesse Solomon made the point earlier that you have to focus
on selection if training is going to be effective. We got 5,000
applications for our first 330 fellows. So we've selected 7
percent of candidates and we don't think any more than that 7
percent could actually become a high quality principal. In
fact, only 80 percent of our people, I think, are on track to
become great principals. There needs to be an important focus
on recruitment and selection.
Second, we train and develop principals. We have a lot of
intensive work to train and develop principals, barring the
best of work both in the educational world, the business world
and elsewhere and third, you can't leave a principal alone on
the job without on the job support. So we have really intensive
supports to help principals on the job.
Very briefly, what we know about great principals, they do
three things. No. 1, they lead data-driven effective teaching
and learning. A principal must be an instruction leader who
uses data to drive improvements in teaching and learning.
No. 2, a principal drives really strong consistent school
culture in a school, aligned to the value--at least one value
that every child, regardless of background, can and must
achieve at high levels--where you do not have a principal who
is pushing that into the culture, you don't have high
expectations in a school, you don't attract and retain good
teachers who focus on that.
The culture is key. No. 3, is a good principal ensures good
management and organization effectiveness to ensure that the
best instructional vision actually gets implemented. So we've
seen the best principals do those three things well. There are
only a few, a small number that we've seen who do this
exceptionally well and I could give you some examples in New
York City and Chicago and Newark and elsewhere--I don't have
time but what I would say the implications for policy are we do
not know how to do this at scale. While I feel urgency to have
a national principal policy, it could drive quality principals
to scale. I don't think we know how to do that so my
recommendation overall on the policy front is that the next 5
years, I would recommend a real kind of golden era of learning
about the principalship and then I would recommend that there
be a serious research and development effort with putting 1
percent of what is spent on No Child Left Behind into an R&D
fund to support really well-documented pilots with evaluation
and research to document what it takes to ensure great
principals. Senator Clinton, I know is sponsoring legislation
this week which would do this in certain agencies with
implications for how to over all State licensure and
certification. Senator Alexander has supported efforts around
the performance incentive piece for teachers and principals and
I think there are others. But I really believe this is a time
not for a uniform, national policy around principal
effectiveness yet. I think in 5 years we can come back with
real data about what that might be.
One last comment to close, I do think there is one other
very exciting and important policy option under this kind of
R&D agenda and I really commend Senator Kennedy for your
leadership on this, Senator Landrieu from Louisiana,
Congressman Miller, and Congressman Mulanston from Louisiana.
Today, as I understand it, legislation is being introduced
which would be designed to help New Orleans and Gulf Coast
communities impacted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita really
attract and retain highly effective teachers and principals at
scale, which would both boost salary for teachers and
principals as well as give extra incentives to track math and
science teachers, and give us some performance-based
incentives. The local and State officials in Louisiana say this
is critical. They have a shortage of teachers. They must hire
1,000 teachers in the next few months for the new school year.
Housing has gone up $450 a month in Louisiana and their
starting salary is $35,000 when the national starting salary is
like $45,000. The New Orleans schools must be the cutting edge
of the future of New Orleans. They won't do it without great
teachers and principals. This bill will be very, very important
support if enacted quickly, to help New Orleans really recover.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Schnur follows:]
Prepared Statement of Jon Schnur
Great schools are typically led by great principals. And faster-
improving schools are led by better principals than others. Indeed,
nearly 25 percent of the in-school factors affecting student
achievement can be attributed directly to the quality and effectiveness
of the principal. This is second only to the effects of teacher
instruction--which is shaped by the way our most effective principals
select, manage, and develop their teachers. And because principals
select, train, manage, support, evaluate, and set the culture for
teachers, a teaching quality strategy can't be successful without
effective principals.
The bottom line: the quality and effectiveness of school principals
matters a lot to the future of our students and to the future of our
Nation.
In a world where there are no shortcuts to school success, a
serious focus on the principalship provides no silver bullet. But
systematic efforts to drive the quality and effectiveness of our
Nation's principals may be one of our most pragmatic and significant
opportunities to offer our neediest students better support to help
them reach high standards of excellence.
Translating this simple insight into effective policy and scalable
practice is no easy task. It is not easy to balance the urgency of the
need for effective principals at scale (especially in our highest-need
schools) with the need to ensure that these reforms are implemented in
a deliberate, high quality way. Too often, powerful ideas are lost to
inadequate knowledge about how to bring ideas to scale, limited
capacity, and well-intentioned but poorly planned implementation. As we
consider solutions and strive to meet the urgent educational needs of
children as quickly as possible, we must both identify how the Federal
Government can be most effective in this work and recognize the current
need for more research and development as well as learning on how to
gain clearer knowledge, build capacity, and quickly scale effective
efforts. While this testimony is focused on the principalship, I do
believe there is a similarly difficult balance to strike when designing
policies around teacher quality and effectiveness.
In this testimony, I offer a few ideas to inform your policymaking.
First, I offer some observations to help define the problem we are
trying to solve and provide a clear target for the goal of a principal
quality policy. Second, I offer some lessons learned from our 6 years
of work recruiting, selecting, training, and supporting new urban
principals across the United States at New Leaders for New Schools.
Third, I highlight some of what we in the field know and don't know
about scaling highly effective principals. Fourth, I will offer
thoughts on implications for immediate Federal policy options.
While this testimony is simply a starting point, New Leaders for
New Schools and I would be happy to work with you and your teams to
explore and develop public policy options aimed at driving principal
quality and effectiveness to ensure that all children can reach high
levels of academic excellence.
First, we must define the target at which we are aiming; i.e. what
problem are we trying to solve with a principal quality policy. While
academic standards and principal policy are sometimes considered to be
unrelated, defining student and school success is crucial to understand
how to define principal success.
Defining Student Success. Our goal is to ensure that all students
succeed at high academic levels--starting with academic achievement at
least at a proficient level for every student. Senator Kennedy and
others are on the right side of this debate to insist on maintaining
the No Child Left Behind goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 for
every student regardless of race, family income, or native language and
culture. I agree that there should be a national standard for what
constitutes student proficiency at least in reading, writing, and math.
For example, while there are thousands of different teacher techniques,
lesson plans, and instructional materials for how to teach children to
read effectively and independently by the 3rd grade, our society and
children can no longer afford to hold a Tennessee school or school
system to a different standard than a Massachusetts school or school
system for whether every child regardless of background learns to read
effectively and independently by the 3rd grade.
That's partly because we know from the research that a 3rd grade
student unable to read well enough to learn ``content'' will likely
struggle and learn less from most of his or her courses in the 4th
grade and beyond. That student will need far more intensive and
expensive help to ``catch up'' to a diploma-ready (much less a college-
ready or a global-economy-ready) standard of excellence. In an era
where a college diploma can make a $1 million difference in lifetime
income when compared with a high school dropout (and where there are
States that determine the number of prison cells to build based on
elementary reading scores), I don't believe that the birthright to
learn how to read should be a New York or Louisiana birthright--it
should be an American birthright available to every child that walks in
the door of any school in any of our communities.
If those standards and assessments are done well, a student that
achieves these standards grade-by-grade should be ready to enter
college successfully by the 12th grade. While not every student will
choose college, I believe it is our responsibility to ensure that every
student and their family are empowered to choose to attend and succeed
in college. Our failure to get a student to college-readiness by the
12th grade deprives them of that choice.
Our conception of student success should include two other areas
beyond academic achievement. First, in a democracy that depends on
citizenship and service and in an economy where many workplaces depend
on teams, successful schools will ensure that students learn how to
define ``success'' as success not only as an individual but also as a
contributing member of a team, class, school, and society. Students
must understand how to succeed as an individual partly through
contributing to--not at the expense of--success of those around them
including those they see as different from themselves. Second, I
believe that successful schools will contribute to students whose
academic strength lies not only in their mastery of certain courses or
skills but also in their capacity to persistently and confidently act
as on-going learners in a world where they will face situations and
need skills we haven't even dreamed of yet.
Defining School Success. Having identified the goal of having
schools that educate students at high academic levels and equips them
to succeed in the ways described above, our next step is to identify
the most important elements in schools making significant progress
towards that goal. It is important to note the distinction between this
question and one that asks ``What are the characteristics of effective
schools?'' Framed that way, ``characteristics of effective schools''
tend to define a happy end-state that doesn't provide a useful and
needed roadmap on how to get there. Our focus in setting policy around
the principalship must be on the most vital characteristics of schools
making dramatic progress toward success for every student. Here is a
one formulation that draws on both research and the experience we have
had at New Leaders for New Schools in hundreds of schools across the
United States.
Schools tend to make dramatic, sustained progress when they are
successful in the following three areas:
Data-driven learning and teaching. Fast-improving schools
drive continual improvements in effective learning and teaching across
every classroom. This depends on clear learning goals deeply understood
by many, using data and assessment multiple times during the year to
help improve teacher and student performance, shared vocabulary and
mindsets about instructional practice, and effective intervention for
struggling students.
Effective organization and management of teams,
instruction, and operations. These schools create conditions for
success through effective organization and management that recruits and
selects talent well, builds teams, manages learning and instructional
performance effectively, creates clarity and trust, organizes staff
time effectively, and is strong on implementation, operations and
project management.
Rigorous school culture focused on achievement and success
for every child and other specific beliefs. These schools build a
consistent school culture among adults and students that models and
reinforces personal responsibility and aspiration to achieve excellence
as individuals and as a school community; a focus on continual
improvement, positive and explicit social norms; challenging, rigorous,
and direct feedback within a safe environment; personal engagement and
positive relationships that enable learning from others; and, a belief
that every student can learn at high levels.
While no school or organization of any kind will ever be even close
to perfect in each, I haven't seen any school make dramatic and
sustained progress in student achievement and success where that school
is failing to make meaningful, continual progress in even one of these
three areas. The implications of that insight for the principalship
(and for principal policy) are enormous. For example, a school system
focused on excellence in these three areas (and that understands that
school-based management drives culture and practice) wouldn't simply
ask principals to ``make the trains run on time'' and keep parents
happy. And they wouldn't just ask principals to be instructional
facilitators/leaders.
The implication is that school systems must get vastly better at
recruiting, selecting, training, retaining, managing, evaluating, and
supporting principals (systemwide and long-term) who can work with
their school leadership teams to successfully lead data-driven learning
and teaching, effective organization and management, and a consistent
school culture that reflects a specific set of core beliefs. Part of
that work is getting and training the right pipeline of principals.
Another part is re-designing a school system to provide an array of
supports and tools to help principals lead these three areas of work
effectively.
Second, I am pleased to share background information and some of
the lessons learned from 6 years of work recruiting, selecting,
training, and supporting new urban principals across the United States
through New Leaders for New Schools.
Background. New Leaders for New Schools is a national non-profit
organization working in nine urban school systems on one clear mission:
promoting high levels of academic achievement by attracting,
developing, and supporting the next generation of outstanding
principals for our Nation's urban public schools. Our goals by 2012 are
to have at least 80 percent of our over 200 high-need schools led by
New Leaders principals for at least 5 years achieve 90-100 percent
proficiency in core academic subjects and 80 percent of high schools
led by New Leaders principals for at least 5 years achieve at least 90
percent real graduation rates. Our goal is also to provide 25 percent
of the new urban principals needed in the United States by 2014. (As
noted earlier regarding the definition of student success, we are
actively searching for the best one or two additional student
performance indicators that will allow us to inform and set additional
goals for student success.)
Another major goal is to create groundbreaking, research-based
knowledge and learning for the field about what it takes to recruit,
select, train, and support highly effective urban principals (and the
schools they lead) at scale. The Rand Corporation is doing an
independent, long-term longitudinal evaluation of our schools and our
work.
Our major funders and partners for New Leaders generally include
some of the Nation's leading philanthropists, leading local companies
and foundations in cities we serve, and superintendents and leadership
teams in nine major urban school systems. The nine cities and
superintendents we currently serve are Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis,
Milwaukee, New York City, Oakland and California's Bay Area, Prince
George's County, Washington, DC.--and as of 2 weeks ago, New Orleans.
Our largest national philanthropic funders are the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Broad
Foundation, the Noyce Foundation, and the Walton Foundation. Local
partners include companies like Boeing, FedEx, AOL, Ford, and more. We
also have received grants for our principal selection and training work
in four of our nine partner cities from the Federal school leadership
program. While we are focused on transforming urban education within
the United States, we are collaborating with a similar London-based
private-public partnership that was created based heavily on our model.
Our principal program is divided into several components: intensive
recruitment and selection of outstanding educators and leaders (330 New
Leaders selected from our first 5,000 applicants), intensive training
and development including a year-long full-time school leadership
residency to prepare those individuals to become effective new
principals, and on-the-job support to promote the success of those
principals and the schools they lead. We also conduct a city
competition to select one new city partner each year that meets our
criteria for serving high-need schools, coupled with the readiness and
commitment to a deep student-focused partnership.
We have seen some dramatic examples of success at schools led by
New Leaders principals. For example, 80 percent of the incoming 9th
graders at North Star Academy (led by a New Leaders principal) in
Newark, NJ have graduated from high school and gone onto 4-year
colleges. Nearly 100 percent of students from North Star are from low-
income families. Last year in Chicago, two schools led by New Leaders
principals (the Dodge Renaissance Academy and the Clara Barton
Elementary School) have made some of the most dramatic gains in the
entire city. The Chicago Tribune recently cited the Clara Barton school
and the New Leaders principal there as an example of what's working in
terms of educator recruitment and training in Chicago.
Selected insights and lessons learned. We have both learned lessons
and gained significant insights from each of our programmatic areas
with implications for local, State, and Federal policy and practice.
Then I will close this section with a few overall insights and
takeaways from our work over the past 6 years.
Recruitment and Selection. As we seek outstanding aspiring
principals, we have been screening for three characteristics/types of
knowledge in highly structured, rigorous ways: the right belief system
(that every student can learn at high levels and that adults are
responsible for children achieving their potential), instructional
expertise, and a strong record and potential to lead and manage adults
effectively. While many schools systems and schools of education have
not prioritized this, an important insight we've gained is that an
intensive, quality recruitment and selection process is very important
in driving school and student success. A second insight is that even
the best principal recruitment and selection processes are based on
hypotheses about what characteristics are important, and not yet based
on rigorous research. That's why we are investing heavily in research
and evaluation of our model and correlation over time with school and
student achievement.
Overall, New Leaders for New Schools and our local partners have
made substantial progress in improving the recruitment and to some
extent the retention of school leaders. We have successfully recruited
330 New Leaders across our cities to make long-term commitments to
become school leaders. And we have had 15 times as many applications as
spots. While not a single New Leader has voluntarily left the program
in the first training year, we are currently retaining just over 90
percent of our New Leaders each year in their school system's
principalship. While that is higher than retention levels overall in
many school systems, we do think additional steps will be needed to
further maximize retention rates.
Through our work, we have found that:
There is serious interest in the urban principalship if
defined right with the right support. While some see dwindling interest
in the urban principalship, we see the opposite. With the right clarity
of mission and commitment of support, a surprisingly large number of
committed and talented educators want to take on this role. Five
thousand people applied for our first 330 fellowships.
Beliefs matter tremendously in the selection of principals
that have the commitment and capacity to be effective. However, most
school systems do not rigorously screen for the candidate's beliefs.
All of our highest performing principals demonstrate intense personal
commitment to the proposition that every student regardless of
background can learn at high levels--and that it is their
responsibility as principal to drive dramatic improvements in
instruction and academic achievement. While many of 5,000 candidates
seemed to express that belief, the majority actually fail our screening
process for this belief system. Training won't quickly shift that
belief.
All three of our overall criteria (beliefs, instructional
knowledge, and adult leadership skill) are critical. Individuals who
are weak in any of these areas fail to deliver impressive results as a
principal. One rare exception may involve leaders who can succeed
without the instructional knowledge when they are paired with the right
instructional leader. Where additional instructional expertise is not
available, a high level of principal instructional expertise is
crucial.
Even the best selection processes for the principalship or
in any sector yield only 80 percent successful candidates, yet many
school systems and schools of education act as if that's not the case.
Top human resources experts in the business world confirm that an 80
percent success rate is about as high as successful selection processes
for a particular job work at scale. Many school systems and schools of
education act as if they can assume that they are achieving 100 percent
success rates. That doesn't mean the other 20 percent should be
removed--but it does mean that employers should at least be ready to
consider moving someone into a different role where they have a better
prospect at success (e.g., assistant principalship or a district staff
role instead of a principalship).
Effective recruitment and selection requires discipline,
investment and time. Many school districts and most schools of
education invest little or no effort toward this. Nearly 20 percent of
our overall costs at New Leaders go to recruitment and selection. But
the general bias is against spending time and money in school systems
and schools of education on this critical activity.
Principal training and development. New Leaders residents
participate in a year of intensive training and development before
becoming a principal. This includes an intensive 5 weeks at a summer
institute acquiring the foundations and framework for the
principalship, weekly local sessions, and a year-long full-time
leadership residency and intensive year-long coaching and feedback.
This model is aligned to a set of principal leadership competencies
that we gleaned from research and experience. One insight is that the
field of principal training is very weak--only a few institutions are
doing intensive work training principals. A second insight is that the
training for principals going into high-need urban schools should
differ substantially from training for principals more generally. Any
institution trying to generically train principals for all contexts or
districts will likely be severely hampered by the lack of focus and
context-specific work. Also:
There is substantial emerging knowledge about school
improvement that is not codified and not readily available to most
principals and teachers in the United States. Our most effective
training (e.g., data-driven instruction) comes from a few high-capacity
principals and/or other experts in early stages of developing their
expertise and training and who are providing it at a small scale. It
will take huge work to codify, institutionalize, and scale the
availability of this knowledge. Most institutions working on principal
training don't have the capacity to deliver this.
Most principal training is delivered in the university
classroom or the district central office. But the most effective
learning seems to be a mix of high-quality training and applying it in
real contexts in real leadership roles. Our year-long residency is one
way to address that. But the training and development of aspiring and
current principals needs to be embedded far more in context of a school
leader's work throughout their careers.
If the key areas for school success are indeed data-driven
teaching and learning, management and organizational effectiveness, and
building rigorous cultures, then most principal training is not aligned
to build knowledge and skills in the right areas. Current capacity to
teach these effectively at institutions that train principals is quite
limited.
Focused, practical, research-driven training can
substantially impact principal practice. For example, our training on
data-driven instruction and observation and supervision of teaching
lead to demonstrable changes in principal practice that may correlate
to faster improvements in schools. Absent intensity and quality, other
training may not affect the impact that principal practice can have on
student achievement.
On-the-job coaching and support. New Leaders provides on-the-job
principals with on-going coaching, an online community, and high-
quality formative assessment tools aligned to each State's standards,
and coaching on how educators can make effective use of these
assessments to drive instructional improvement. With support from the
Teacher Incentive Fund, we will soon offer access to effective
practices from the highest performing and fastest improving urban
schools and classrooms and financial incentives for high-performing
educators in exchange for their sharing of effective practice with
others. But even with initiatives like title I increases and the
Teacher Incentive Fund, the significant insight is that in order to be
successful at this work at-scale across the country, substantial new
systems of data-driven differentiated capacity building will be needed
to take these and other promising practices and customize them to
individual schools through serious on-the-job support. And that may be
constrained by lack of financial resources, human capacity, and an
absence of the right, shared data-driven mindset in many institutions.
Third, now that we have identified our overall goal and considered
one organization's experience in attracting, preparing, and supporting
principals in high need schools, we can ask ourselves: do we know
enough about the successful principal of a high-need school (and how to
scale that) to drive specific kinds of consistent principal quality
policy across the United States?
Defining Principal Success. Given the definition of student and
school success described above, we must ask the following questions:
(1) What actions must the principal actually take in order to ensure
that all students can succeed? Can we identify the knowledge, skills,
and personal characteristics that principals need to take those actions
effectively? Only then can we fully address the vital questions of what
are the policies, systems and practices that can (a) help create a
pipeline of principals who can succeed in this role and (b) provide on-
the-job supports, tools and management to help them succeed.
Here's my troubling answer. While I will share with you hypotheses
that we are testing out at New Leaders, we don't really know the
definitive answers to these questions. While we know there are a small
number of exceptional principals driving dramatic gains in high-need
schools, we don't know nearly enough about how or why in different
contexts to scale that nationally.
It is crucial that we figure this out in the next 5 to 7 years.
In some ways, the most important role the Federal Government can
play related to the principalship is to mandate, drive, and fund an
intense period of rigorous experimentation and learning in every State
grounded in certain core beliefs that I will describe below about
creating a new principalship in this country defined by its
responsibility for school success and student achievement.
We do know enough for the Federal Government to set some very broad
direction--including encouraging States and school systems to invest in
the principalship and focus their efforts on leveraging the
principalship to drive dramatic improvement in student success and
academic achievement. We know high-quality principals are crucial to
school success and there are some common-sense steps we can encourage--
such as providing ways to recognize, reward, and retain our highest
performing principals or encouraging more rigorous processes to select,
evaluate, and when necessary, remove principals. But we don't know
enough about how this works to legislate the specifics.
We do know that an effective principal is critical to the success
of schools and that the Federal Government should support a crucial R&D
phase of trying, rigorously evaluating, and learning from an array of
approaches to driving principal effectiveness. This is especially
urgent in low-performing schools. Among other benefits, we will then
learn much more that can inform national policy in a much more robust
way by the time of the next NCLB reauthorization.
But we do not know enough to set consistent national policy on such
areas as principal certification. We do not know enough to require
States to address certification in particular ways. We do not know
enough to mandate prescriptive approaches to principal recruitment,
selection, base compensation, evaluation, and accountability.
We are in a phase of our work together in education where we are
creating early hypotheses and need to rigorously evaluate and learn
from them. If handled right, we could make this a golden age of
learning about how to ensure highly effective principals at scale.
For now, while there is some research about what effective
principals do, there is very little meaningful research about the
actions that principals must take to drive change in the high-need,
low-achieving schools that are rightly such a strong focus of Federal
policy under NCLB. And there is similarly very little meaningful
research about the corresponding knowledge, skills, and personal
characteristics that principals need in order to take those actions
effectively in particular contexts.
Moreover, there is real evidence that suggests that the actions,
knowledge, skills and personal characteristics of an effective
principal who is the steward of a school that is doing well or ``just
fine'' are actually quite different from what's needed from a principal
who is to lead dramatic change in high-need schools where most of the
students are achieving at low academic levels.
While New Leaders for New Schools is the largest national provider
of urban principals in the United States, even we are still only in the
phase of testing out hypotheses that will be tested out by our
experience and an independent Rand Corporation evaluation over the next
several years.
I will share some of the specific highlights of this limited
research in my comments before the committee.
Fourth, what are the implications for policies that the Federal
Government could undertake to move this work forward?
There are several high-level policy options that I would like to
propose for your consideration. Most of these are research &
development efforts designed to spur a ``golden era'' of learning about
the principalship and ensure that we have far more knowledge to inform
the next reauthorization of NCLB and the next wave of school and
leadership reforms. Specifically, these R&D options are in the areas of
principal recruitment, selection and training, principal-led
turnarounds of low-performing schools, districtwide strategies to
ensure successful principals at scale, and State efforts to overhaul
State licensure and certification.
To increase the impact of the efforts, Congress should fund a
world-class research and evaluation firm and team to oversee and
coordinate the evaluation of all of these options in order to
systematically create knowledge for the field. They would identify,
drive and coordinate learning around questions such as ``What are the
most important characteristics that selection processes should screen
for to pick principals who are likely to lead dramatic turnarounds of
schools?'' and ``How can a district effectively create a systemwide
results-based strategy to ensure effective leadership in every
school?'' In addition, every grantee under any of these options would
need to create, pilot, and evaluate systems for providing useful data
to educators through value-add academic achievement gains at least at
the school level. Funding would be included under any of these options
to help create, refine, and evaluate these systems. A portion of the
research and evaluation would examine the usefulness of the data
provided by these systems.
Create a principal/assistant principal recruitment and
training R&D fund. To do this, we must triple the size of the Federal
school leadership program to $50 million in exchange for requiring
every grant be used as R&D with a rigorous external research and
evaluation effort designed to create significant research for the field
on principal selection and training. No project would be funded without
a serious theory of change, a high-quality research plan, and specific
plans for producing useful research related to the recruitment,
selection, training and support of principals. Give a preference for
those initiatives that can show diversity of types of institutions
offering training and types of high-quality candidates from different
backgrounds.
Create a national R&D pilot of 200 school turnarounds
(school restarts or ``fresh starts'') of the lowest performing schools
in the Nation led by outstanding principals with track records of
success. Only fund efforts that show how they will select outstanding
principals, will ensure rigorous external research and evaluation,
require dramatic change/restarting in a historically low-performing
school and provide intensive additional support for the principal,
teachers, and staff.
Create a $500 million 5-year effort to back 5 high-need
districts to pilot systemic approaches to ensuring educator quality--
especially teachers, school leaders, and associate superintendents who
manage principals, and make New Orleans one of these five cities. This
could include dramatic increases in educator pay coupled with
differential compensation systems that are effectively and fairly
designed and implemented, and tied partly to student achievement. This
could include systemwide efforts to adopt smart human capital
strategies to cultivate and develop top talent throughout a school
system. And it could include robust, data-driven systems of
differentiated capacity building for principals and teachers across
that school system. This would require serious external research and
evaluation and proposals--and would be judged partly by the quality of
that research and evaluation plan and the likelihood that it will
produce useful knowledge for the field.
I also would strongly encourage you to consider making a down
payment on this kind of initiative this year by enacting a version of
the Landrieu-Kennedy-Melancon-Miller RENEWAAL Act of 2007 (Revitalizing
New Orleans by Attracting America's Leaders) introduced yesterday. This
important legislation was introduced this week by Senator Landrieu,
Senator Kennedy, Congressman Melancon, and House Education Committee
Chairman George Miller. This bill would make it possible to drive
teacher and principal quality in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast
communities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. If enacted and
funded swiftly, the legislation could help revitalize New Orleans and
other devastated communities by addressing teacher and principal
shortages there by helping to attract and retain effective teachers and
principals for the coming school year. The bill would help boost
teacher and principal pay in New Orleans and these communities while
providing additional incentives to attract teachers and principals back
to New Orleans as well as special incentives for math and science
teachers and for the most effective principals and teachers in exchange
for sharing their practices with others.
The need for swift enactment and funding of this bill is dire. New
Orleans may need to hire as many as 1,000 educators in the New Orleans
area this year to accommodate rapidly growing student population.
Moreover, New Orleans has massive hiring needs at a time when housing
costs have increased $450 monthly compared to pre-Katrina because of
scarce housing in the hard-hit city and region. And the current
starting salary for many teachers in New Orleans is $35,400 compared to
an average teacher salary nationally of $46,000.
Senator Kennedy, we are grateful for your leadership on this
initiative.
Provide funding to a small number of States who have
already done serious work on the principalship an opportunity to
overhaul (or pilot an overhaul of) their certification and licensure
system for school leaders and/or teachers. The State policy changes
must be rooted in data and research. The U.S. Department of Education
should fund a variety of models and approaches to evaluate different
kinds of approaches to principal certification and licensure, and
evaluate results based on impact on student and school success.
Create a national blue-ribbon program to give substantial
fellowships and honors to the principals and school leadership teams
that have demonstrated the most dramatic and sustained gains in their
high-need schools over time. This could be used to convey honor and
respect to the very best turnaround principals in the Nation--and then
be used to leverage their expertise to guide other efforts to
dramatically improve schools and school leadership.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to share our insights and
recommendations. New Leaders for New Schools looks forward to
cooperating with you in whatever way might be helpful to build urgently
needed policy options for ensuring effective principals who can drive
high levels of academic achievement for all children.
The Chairman. Thank you very much. Dr. Sanders is Senior
Management at the Value-Added Research and Assessment, SAS
Institute. Dr. Sanders has spent more than 30 years as a
Professor and Director of Value-Added Research and Assessment
Center at the University of Tennessee. His work helped the
State of Tennessee develop their value-added assessment
systems. He is a statistician by training and has been involved
in education for 25 years. I look forward to hearing you,
Doctor.
STATEMENT OF WILLIAM SANDERS, PH.D., SENIOR MANAGER, VALUE-
ADDED RESEARCH AND ASSESSMENT, SAS INSTITUTE, CARY, NORTH
CAROLINA
Mr. Sanders. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Indeed I am a
statistician that fortuitously got involved in educational
research 25 years ago. At that time, we began to explore a
different analytical approach using student test data. This
approach, which I call value-added assessment, is based on a
very simple notion and the simple notion is that you follow
each student's academic progress as an individual. You don't
look at groups of kids; you follow the same kid over time and
by linking this test data, this enables you then to do very
rigorous longitudinal analysis from that data, allowing each
student to serve as his or her own control. And by so doing,
you have got a device by which you can partition educational
influences from exogenous influences over which educators do
not have control.
From this process and the millions of longitudinal records
that we have created over the years, we have been able to
address many research questions that heretofore people did not
have the opportunity to address and in my written remarks, I
have outlined those but for this morning, I just want to
emphasize two major areas, the first of which has been
mentioned already several times.
Let me give you the good news. The good news is that highly
effective teachers are facilitating excellent student academic
progress in high-poverty, high minority schools. No question
about it. They are there. You can measure it and they are
getting excellent, excellent progress for their students.
But the other side of the coin is that the percentage of
these highly effective teachers in these schools is measurably
lower than at low-poverty, low minority schools. There will be
a report released in the next few days from the Tennessee
Department of Education based upon this work that will have
this completely documented.
Now, Mr. Chairman, the other area that I want to mention
deals with the question that came with our invitation and that
is, has professional development been targeted to educators to
respond to their needs and if so, on what criteria or data was
the targeting based? That's what I want to talk about next.
Once you have a longitudinal data structure for each
student, you have got the basis on which to make a projection
of whether or not every single student as an individual is on a
trajectory to meet various future academic end points. Once
that information is available to teachers and principals, it
can be far more allowable than one test score because you're
using the totality of information for each kid. This enables
principals and teachers to begin to plan and think about
providing instruction in an entirely different way.
Now, a nerdy old statistician like myself, it doesn't
matter how rigorous the analysis is if people do not know how
to use this information in positive ways. So I'm very happy to
say that we are working with various entities around the
country as they are bringing staff development efforts to tie
with this additional information at the individual student
levels. Battelle for Kids, a nonprofit in Ohio is providing
staff development to initially--there are a hundred pilot
districts in Ohio. Now they are working to roll this out
statewide. We're working with the Pennsylvania Department of
Education as they are rolling out this kind of information,
kid-by-kid, statewide. The North Carolina Department of Public
Instruction is now beginning to bring this in to meld in with
their school improvement planning as was mentioned. The Milken
TAP program we work with, with over 100 schools, the Tennessee
Department of Education as Tennessee is now beginning to really
put pedal to the metal with regard to regional professional
development activities but based upon the information
associated with every kid who is an individual.
So, Mr. Chairman, the last recommendations I would have is
that this needs to be continued and No Child Left Behind, with
these longitudinal data structures--now all States will have
them. Now make this a reality and a possibility and lastly, I
would strongly recommend that in the re-authorization that you
do allow the appropriate growth models to be included. But let
me warn you--all of these growth models are not equivalent.
Congress needs to very seriously consider setting minimal
standards for those growth models. If you have that then you
need to seriously consider allowing districts to use this or
States to use this in lieu of existing Safe Harbor. Because
what this will do is de-incentivize some of the negative
things--there are some negative things associated with AYP and
that's the incentive to teach to the bubble kids too much and
we have data that certainly would support that. That would tend
to do it and lastly, with appropriate growth model, a lot of
these inner-city and rural schools that are getting excellent
gains for kids that are presently branded as failing are
anything but failing schools. So consequently, that should
indeed help as people try to recruit teachers and retain
teachers because you could document how effective those schools
are being.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Sanders follows:]
Prepared Statement of William L. Sanders, Ph.D.
Thank you, Chairman Kennedy and Ranking Member Enzi. Thank you for
the invitation. My name is William L. Sanders; I am presently Senior
Manager, Value-added Research and Assessment, SAS Institute, Inc.
Additionally, I hold the honorary title of Senior Research Fellow with
the University of North Carolina. Previously, I was Professor and
Director of the Value-Added Research and Assessment Center with the
University of Tennessee.
Our experiences. I am a statistician that fortuitously got involved
with educational research 25 years ago. At that time we began to
explore a different analytical approach using student test data. This
approach, which I call value-added assessment, is based on the simple
notion of following each student's academic progress over time. Linking
each student's test records from grade to grade over subjects, provides
the testing framework for a multivariate, longitudinal analysis in
which each student serves as his/her own control. By so doing,
educational influences on the rate of student progress can be
partitioned from exogenous factors (if not completely, then nearly so)
allowing an objective measure of the influence of the district, school
and teacher on the rate of academic progress. The process that we have
developed, based upon statistical mixed model theory and methodology,
enables a multivariate, longitudinal analysis, no matter how sparse or
complete the data record for each student. Analyses that accommodate
fractured student records eliminate the short-comings of more
simplistic value-added approaches.
Some of the more simplistic approaches have been shown to provide
potentially biased and unreliable estimates, especially at the
classroom level. However, the appropriately constructed multivariate,
longitudinal process will minimize the problems of the more simplistic
approaches resulting in robust estimates of the influence of
educational entities on the rate of student academic progress.
Analyses at the classroom level require the utmost care and caution
and present even more burden on the statistical methodology, the
computing software, and the data archiving process itself. We have had
to engineer the flexibility to accommodate other ``real world''
situations encountered when providing effectiveness measures at the
classroom level: the capability to accommodate different modes of
instruction (i.e., self-contained classrooms, team teaching, etc.),
``fractured'' student records, and data from a diversity of non-
vertically scaled tests. However properly applied, the technology now
exists to provide estimates to distinguish the highly effective
educators who are facilitating excellent academic growth for their
students.
From the millions of longitudinal student records that we have
created over the years, we have been able to address research questions
that heretofore were not easily addressed. The following is a summary
of the most important findings.
If the variability in student academic progress is
partitioned into three ``buckets'' among Districts, among Schools
within Districts, and among Teachers within Schools within Districts--,
what is the relative amount of the variability that will go into each
bucket?
(a) Among Districts about 5 percent,
(b) Among Schools within Districts about 30 percent,
(c) Among Classrooms within Schools within Districts about 65
percent.
Differences in teaching effectiveness is the dominant
factor affecting student academic progress. This is true in all
subjects but is pronounced in Math.
Teacher effects are cumulative and additive. The sequence
of Math teachers that students have can have a profound effect on their
ultimate achievement in Math.
Relative to the distribution of all teachers'
effectiveness,
The average beginning teacher is less effective
than the average 10-15 year experienced teacher.
Beginning teachers profile at about the 35
percentile relative to the distribution of all teachers.
Ten to fifteen-year veterans profile at about the
55 percentile of the teacher distribution. Teachers who leave
after 1 year of experience are on average less effective than
those who stay.
Of the leavers, those teaching in schools with more
than 75 percent minority students profile at about the 22nd
percentile. In schools with more than 75 percent minority
students, beginning teachers who do not leave are only slightly
less effective than those beginners assigned to schools with a
low percentage of minority students.
Inner city schools have a disproportionate number of
beginning teachers.
Inner city schools have a much higher turnover rate of
teachers than suburban schools.
A smaller percentage of middle-school math teachers within
inner-city schools have a high-school math endorsement.
Retardation of math gain rates for high achieving inner-
city middle-school students is more pronounced than for lower achieving
students.
Some rural districts have very effective elementary
schools, but have high schools that are not extending academic growth
opportunities for average and above average achieving students. In some
cases this is so severe that even the most advanced students, even if
admitted to a 4-year university, would be nearly certain to have to
take remedial courses.
In too many schools the number of 6th graders prepared to
succeed in Algebra in the 8th grade is greater than the number of seats
available.
Students attending schools with over 75 percent poverty
students, when assigned to highly effective teachers, make comparable
academic progress with students attending schools with less than 25
percent poverty students if they too are assigned to highly effective
teachers.
The percentage of highly effective teachers is less in
high-poverty schools.
On average there is a big difference in effectiveness
between 20+ year veterans in high-poverty schools when compared to
teachers with similar experience teaching in low-poverty schools. Those
in the low-poverty schools tend to be more effective while those in the
high-poverty schools tend to be less effective.
Our research has shown that highly effective teachers are
facilitating excellent academic progress with students at all
achievement levels, regardless of the location of the building where
they teach. The evidence is overwhelming that students within high-
poverty schools respond to highly effective teaching. Then the question
becomes ``how can the less effective teachers within these schools be
assisted in becoming more effective?''
We have had the experience of working with various groups of highly
effective educators across the country. According to these educators,
``teachers who are average or below in effectiveness must learn to meet
the academic needs of all students in their classrooms if they are to
become more effective,'' i.e., more effective at differentiating
instruction. Not only must they be cognizant of the subject knowledge
and skills necessary for student success, but they must possess
excellent intra-classroom assessment skills and understand how to use
the results of their own assessments as well as those from longitudinal
analysis of state-test data in their teaching decisions. Highly
effective teachers maximize the influence of their instructional time
so that students at all achievement levels make appropriate progress.
These are skills that can be learned, and the influence of their
application to teaching can be measured with appropriate reliabilities.
As more reliable student projections to future academic standards
have become available, educators are learning to more efficiently
target students needing academic interventions and intense academic
support. These strategic uses of resources increase the likelihood of
at-risk students reaching meaningful standards in the future and
provide support for the classroom teacher at the same time.
NCLB testing requirements and Federal and State investments in
longitudinal data structures allow the reliable student projections
referenced above to become more widely available. Additionally, when
appropriate methodology is applied to these data, policymakers have a
way to more realistically assess the resource requirements necessary
for all students to achieve at higher standards. Two recent examples:
In a rural school, we found that over 100 6th grade students were on an
academic trajectory to be proficient in Algebra I as 8th graders. Yet
this school was providing only 25 seats for the 8th grade Algebra
offering. In a second school district, even though many students were
enrolled in Algebra I in 8th grade, essentially all of them were
retaking Algebra I in 9th grade, even when they were prepared to move
into more difficult courses in the 9th grade.
We have worked with Battelle for Kids as they prepared professional
development for over 100 school districts in Ohio, the Pennsylvania
Department of Education and Intermediate Unit 13 of that State as they
prepared professional development for the 100 pilots and their
statewide rollout of district and school value-added reporting and
student projections, the North Carolina Department of Public
Instruction to prepare professional development for their school
improvement program, the Milken Talented Teacher Program as they worked
with over 130 schools receiving both school and teacher level analyses,
and the Tennessee Department of Education as the current administration
has developed regional professional development for districts, schools
and teachers and researched teacher inequity in that State. From these
experiences we provide the following recommendations.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Major staff development activities with a focus on using
the longitudinal projections for each student in both classroom and
school planning to ensure that all students have the opportunity to
make appropriate academic progress regardless of entering achievement
level.
A greater emphasis on intra-classroom formative assessment
to insure that all students are making the desired progress, not merely
the students who are at risk of not meeting the proficiency
requirements.
With the reauthorization of NCLB, allow the appropriate
growth modeling results to be used in lieu of the existing safe harbor
provision to eliminate the too prevalent practice of focusing on the
``bubble kids.'' This should reduce the difficulty that districts are
having in recruiting highly effective teachers to schools that are
vulnerable for not meeting the present AYP requirements of NCLB.
Removing the stigma of failing but keeping enhanced resources available
could be a recruiting option in the new reauthorization for schools
that demonstrate appropriate growth for their students.
SUMMARY
We have had several years of experience providing value-added
analyses to thousands of districts within many States. We have found
that when educators are provided with reliable measures of student
progress, then they can evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses. We
have observed the progress that schools and teachers have made once
they have trust in the reliability of the information and dedicate
themselves to improvement.
The Chairman. Thank you. We'll try and have every comment
just about a minute or so, if we could, so we can all get a
chance and I'll take--with our group here, we'll do 5-minute
rounds.
Let me ask you, Dr. Sanders, just briefly, I think of the
State of Oregon as the only one that has listed every
individual student so that they can look individually and make
an assessment. In Massachusetts, a major community that has
done it--it costs $7 per student but they think that that could
be indispensable in terms of doing an evaluation in terms of
growth. Have you made any judgment about whether that type of
activity is useful? At about $7 per student--it would cost
almost half a billion dollars to implement. It is worthwhile?
Should we be encouraging that? Discouraging? Incentivizing
States to go to that direction?
Mr. Sanders. Are you talking about $7 cost?
The Chairman. Cost to put them on the list, to develop the
process for evaluation. Is it a good idea?
Mr. Sanders. It is an excellent idea. In fact, we are
providing that for Ohio and Pennsylvania and Tennessee and
North Carolina right now.
The Chairman. Can you give us an idea--will you give us
suggestions about how to do it and what the alternatives are
and which system you think----
Mr. Sanders. Absolutely, absolutely.
The Chairman. With regards to the cost--is that amount set?
Mr. Sanders. Absolutely. If it's done properly, it can be
done far less than $7.
The Chairman. Okay, good. Let me ask Amy Wilkins. I spent
about 4 or 5 hours over the weekend with a number of
principals, teachers, and parents with inner-city schools in my
State and one of the most profound teachers who has been in the
school system and highly regarded, said, ``Senator, with all
respect, No Child Left Behind is just not going to do it for
these schools because of the growth of poverty.'' The growth of
poverty. Bad housing. Bad health. Bad nutrition. The growth of
homelessness in these communities is so overwhelming that
basically you're going to be tinkering along the edges on it.
I'm putting it rawly but it was a very emotional--and this is a
person that is out there and is a very good, a very, very good
teacher, talking about what was happening in many of the
communities, inner cities, the growth--the mobility of
children--35 or 40 percent in the inner-city schools. The
change in the school population. The good teachers will not go,
even with a salary increase. I heard from principals that say
even for $10,000 or $15,000 more they would not go because they
believe that the school is in restructuring, need of
improvement, getting labeled. It's a very difficult kind of a
situation. Maybe that's not an accurate perception of what is
happening in a lot of our inner-city schools, but whoever wants
to can take a whack at it to the end of my 3\1/2\ minutes here.
I'll start with you. Was this teacher off base?
Ms. Wilkins. Well, Senator Kennedy, you know, no one could
reasonably sit here and say to you that it is okay, that large
majorities of black kids and Hispanic kids that need and a
percentage of white kids are growing up without adequate
housing, without adequate healthcare, are growing up in
conditions that are absolutely unconscionable in a country as
rich as ours. I mean, it is just wrong. And we--and I know we
need to fight those things with every fiber of our being. That
said, the question can't really be, does poverty affect student
learning? We know it does. So the question for schools and the
question for people who make policy about schools is how those
schools respond to the condition those kids bring to school and
the question is, do we surrender those kids' lives to poverty
or do we fight for those children's lives? Because we know from
research like Dr. Sanders, that highly effective teachers can
change the life trajectory of those children. And nobody is
saying it's easy. Teaching in high-poverty schools is hard. We
need to provide those kids with the best teachers and we need
to provide those teachers with absolutely the best of
everything we know how to do in education but we do--what we do
constantly is flip the system around and give the kids who need
the most--we give them the least. So the role of NCLB and the
role of title I has to be to shift that equation and to figure
out how we better resource those schools and apply everything
that people like Dr. Sanders and other educational researchers
have done to ensure that those kids have a fighting chance
because if our schools abandon those kids, the rest of their
lives are doomed. That's all I can say.
The Chairman. My time, unfortunately--I would have liked to
have heard from others on it but I'll try and see if I can come
back.
Senator Alexander.
Senator Alexander. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have two
questions and one, Mr. Schnur, I want to ask you about the
Teacher Incentive Fund in the continuing resolution, which we
passed--cut it nearly to zero and there were about 18 programs
around the country which are aimed almost at the very thing
we're talking about today. You're involved in many of them. I'm
hoping it was an oversight. Senator Durbin came on the Senate
Floor and said it just got caught in the confusion and it
wasn't really a partisan issue and given Senator Clinton's and
Senator Kennedy's long work on this, maybe they can help me a
little bit with it but would you want to make any comment about
the Teacher Incentive Fund that is important to No Child Left
Behind?
Mr. Schnur. Thank you, Senator Alexander. My views on this
question around performance incentives for educators reflects
what I was saying earlier. I think that we're not, as a
country, ready to do this nationally everywhere. This is a time
when we should be trying things out with careful research and
evaluation and learning from them and I do believe the Teacher
Incentive Fund--well, you could always argue about details
about how it might be tweaked a bit. Overall, it's a very
crucial effort to help support experimentation with efforts to
reward teachers and principals. Briefly, New Leaders is working
with four cities that got grants, including Memphis and
Washington, DC. and Denver and others on this and what we've
said is, ``look, we're going to identify high performing
teachers and principals and in exchange for their sharing their
effective practice with others, we're going to have them get
additional compensation.'' So it is rewarding individual
teachers and principals but in a way that helps others learn
from their practice and those efforts and the efforts in
Chicago and elsewhere are jeopardized by the virtual
elimination of that funding. Anything that Congress could do to
restore that this year would be critical.
Senator Alexander. Thank you. Let me go to Dr. Sanders. I
would say that Senator Clinton and Senator Kennedy--nearly 25
years ago, Governor Clinton and his wife--Governor Graham,
later Senator, Dick Riley and I all were struggling with the
same issue. How do we reward outstanding teaching in our
States? Our State of Tennessee as well as Florida, passed what
many of you have mentioned today, a Master Teacher Program, to
reward outstanding teaching and we had a variety of ways to
measure progress. At that time, 1983, not one State paid one
teacher one penny more for being a good teacher. Not one State
paid one teacher one penny more for being a good teacher. And
so we looked at ways to fairly evaluate that since there had
been so little help with it and teachers' portfolio, principal
observation--we went through all this but the one area that we
couldn't measure well was student achievement. That's really
what gave rise to Mr. Sanders' career. I had never met him--I
had never met him until today, even though he did this. So my
question here--I've listened this morning. We've talked about
master teachers, the importance of keeping teachers longer than
5 years, the importance of teacher mentors, the highly
effective teachers for these children who come from poverty.
We've talked about the National Board of Professional Teaching
standard. That's sort of a master's teacher, which I supported
as Education Secretary. We've talked about all these needs for
exceptional teachers, yet we persist in being unwilling to find
fair ways to pay teachers and principals more for doing their
job well and I obviously can't do that myself but do you see
any evidence, Dr. Sanders, across the country, that we're
coming to any sort of consensus about how to reward outstanding
teaching so we can assign them all these responsibilities or
attract them and keep them to help especially low-income
children?
Mr. Sanders. Well, what we're beginning to see is we have
more and more people make requests for us to do the kind of
analysis we do. First of all, people are really struggling
with--and I don't think anyone has the answer yet--how you
incentivize teachers, the highly effective teachers, to go
teach in this high-need schools. Linda Darling-Hammond and I
were talking before the hearing today and basically, I'm the
numbers guy. I'm not the policy guy. But I'm telling you, that
is one of the biggest inequities in American public education.
You don't have anywhere close to an equitable distribution of
the teaching talent.
But on the other hand, you can't move people around like
checkers on a board and Senator Alexander, in response to your
direct question, there are, indeed, various attempts, now,
scattered in various places, to create incentives for teachers
to go. What happened in Chattanooga with the schools, is an
excellent example. There are others floating around.
Senator Alexander. But he was supported by the local NEH
affiliate, if I'm not mistaken.
Mr. Sanders. That's correct. You had a convergence with a
local foundation, the mayor, now Senator Corker. You had the
NEA local affiliate. You had a whole group of people come
together and so forth and what they've done in those high-
poverty schools is amazing. It's happened in the--it's not a 1-
year phenomenon. It's a 5-year phenomenon. The TAP Program that
you're beginning to see, the lady from Texas called about it--
that is a different approach that marries staff development and
ways for people to earn greater compensation as they make more,
I think. I know there is a district in North Carolina right now
that indeed, is offering sizable salary supplements to recruit
math teachers to those high-need schools. So I'm the numbers
guy. I'm not the policy guy but there are lots of efforts that
are springing up around the country. Inevitably, it comes down,
though--can we have a reasonable, fair measure of what is
effective and that's where this whole technology in the last 5
or 6 years--it's no longer just Bill Sanders. There are all
kinds of people now in various universities and so forth who
are focused on--this technology has really moved big time in
the last 5 or 6 years.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Clinton.
Senator Clinton. Well, thank you so much. This is such a
stimulating discussion and one that Chairman Kennedy has been
leading for so many decades and certainly Senator Alexander has
been in the middle of and as he said, so have I for a very long
time. I think this is exactly the right question to ask, how we
attract and retain high quality teachers and give them the
mentoring and the support they need to do that and then, how do
we deploy them? I thought that Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond's
testimony was particularly interesting because she pointed out
that we don't have a teacher shortage but we certainly don't--
we have mal-distribution of where we need our highest quality
teachers, in certain subject areas and certain kinds of
teaching environments. I would just like to ask everyone to
briefly, because I know we don't have a lot of time, just if
you could give us one recommendation for what we should do in
this re-authorization on No Child Left Behind, what would it
be? What would you have this committee recommend to the
Congress that we do using this re-authorization opportunity
that you believe would move us closer to having the number and
quality and effectiveness of teachers? Maybe we could just
start with Linda and kind of go around to Dr. Sanders.
Ms. Hammond. Well, the one is a hard number.
Senator Clinton. That's why I want to hold you to it.
Ms. Hammond. I think that given that the distribution issue
is so critical and as Bill Sanders just said, getting
accomplished teachers to these high-need schools is a really
key piece of it and keeping people, once they get there. Our
biggest single difficulty has been that as we've dealt with the
appearance of shortages, we've had people come into classrooms
with not enough training and mentoring to keep them there once
we get them there. So I think if there is one thing that we
need to do, it's to build the kinds of high quality programs to
get people there that Jesse talked about with the Boston
Teacher Residency that other universities do with these school-
based professional development school or teacher residency
programs with mentoring attached for all beginning teachers. So
I put in two in that one. But we could afford to get every
beginning teacher in this country a mentor for about $500
million and if we did it on a matching basis, we could do it
for $250 million and we'd have that coaching that almost
everyone has talked about. We could incent highly qualified
teachers, National Board teachers, teachers who in a variety of
ways have demonstrated effectiveness or high performance. I
think we're at a stage where we have a lot of different
measures we have to use to come in and be those mentors. And
you get the high quality teachers in a place where you could
train people up to do a good job for the kids who most need it.
Ms. Wilkins. Hi, how are you? A lot of people around this
table will talk to you about some very good programmatic things
that we could do to begin to attract and retain more effective
teachers in high-poverty schools but the fact is that there is
systemic inequity that has to go away before these good
programs can kind of work to their full potential. So I would
argue when I argued before you came in that the most important
thing you can do is fix the comparability provisions of the law
to ensure that teacher salaries are counted such that as more
experienced teachers and their bigger paychecks migrate away
from high-poverty schools, that is no longer hidden by the law
nor sanctioned by the law, to ensure that title I dollars
aren't gap-fillers for poor kids but indeed, can buy extras for
poor kids.
Senator Clinton [off mic]. That's the old--not to
substitute for substance.
Ms. Wilkins. Yes. I'd include that in my one also.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Burtnett. What a good question. My thought is that when
teachers are in school with children, they are focused on the
teaching and learning experience at that time. In order to plan
for instruction, teachers need time to do it and it's not just
1 hour a day. The test scores in Florida come out at the end of
May and teachers leave. I would really like to see time in the
work year for teachers to collaborate during the day, when kids
are there but also time beyond the 180 days of students, for
teachers to work together, to look at the scores, to do the
analysis, to collaborate on the curriculum and make decisions
in anticipation, as Dr. Sanders said, looking at that
longitudinal progress of each child--make decisions in June
that will begin the work in August and September. Teachers need
time to consider before they move and that's my offer to you.
Mr. Solomon. I'm going to try to get two for one also, if
that's okay with you. I think we've talked a little bit about
the teaching hospital model and my belief is that you learn how
to teach by teaching and you do so in a structured, supported
environment where you're having critical conversations and I
think moving schools to places that support that kind of
learning would support the real learning that our new folks
need but it would also create different roles and different
career paths for our veteran folks, thereby keeping them in
teaching as well.
Senator Clinton. Barbara.
Ms. Maguire. I would agree with Dr. Hammond on the need for
mentors in our buildings, particularly if we can work one on
one with different teachers. As an experienced teacher, I can
go in and help that teacher find that magic balance. As we talk
more about high stakes testing, what I found in our schools is
that we have pre-schools where teachers are being told they're
not doing enough academics with 3- and 4-year-olds and I find
that appalling and we're taking away play in kindergarten,
we're taking away physical education and the arts from our
students who need them the most and as a beginning teacher, I
think people are frustrated in how to approach an administrator
or how to speak out on their feelings about that and as an
experienced teacher, I'm no longer afraid. So I can go in and
help that teacher make a plan for how to combine a need for the
test scores with the need of the child. I think that's my
biggest fear from someone in the trenches, is we're losing
sight of the children. In pre-school and in kindergarten,
they're still just babies and they need to play and they need
to learn to get along and yet, we're worried about how many
letters they know and what level they are reading at, when in
fact, there is so much more to that child.
Ms. Young. Thank you for this good question and I'm going
to put in two, too. You're absolutely right that it is a
distribution problem. As Amy talked, our lowest performing
schools have the least prepared teachers. It would be nice if
we could focus on every child, we'd get a highly qualified,
well-prepared teacher and eventually that should be our goal
but we do need to focus on the kids that need the most. I think
one of the ways specifically in NCLB that we fix this is look
at that definition of what is currently called highly qualified
and how do we fix that? In my State, in California, NCLB will
consider a teacher highly qualified and in California, they're
not fully qualified. That makes no sense. We need to fix that
and I think by doing that by a definition that is truly about
high qualifications with teachers, put that into place along
with incentives and mandates for schools and districts to focus
on these high-need schools and get the truly highly qualified
expert experienced teachers in place and don't just hold them
accountable--hold us accountable too, at the universities.
Force us to show you that we are preparing teachers who are
suited for those challenging environments, who have preparation
to work with these kids who need them most, not just as new
teachers but through those careers.
Ms. Watkins. Thank you so much, Senator Clinton. I want to
add that what I would suggest is support that works and support
that has been proven effective. As we talk about highly
qualified teachers and teaching, I would just beseech you to
remember that highly qualified teaching is not synonymous to
experience and as we look at distribution, there are lots of
teachers who've been teaching and who are doing a great job
with children across the district of Richardson that would not
be effective teachers with my high-need students. They have
very specialized needs. What they are doing in other schools
with the experiences that their students have would not work
for my students. I need specialists who we can train to do that
and that's what the TAP Program does. I need people who can be
mentored and look at data, understand data, know how to analyze
it and let us help them to drive their instruction, adjust
instruction and monitor instruction, monitor the data to meet
the needs of the students. No more than any of us would want to
go to an orthopedic surgeon with a heart problem, I could not
use a teacher from another school necessarily with 20 years of
experience to come over and do what some of our teachers, who
are trained last year through TAP after only 1 year of teaching
experience, are doing with my children at Thurgood Marshall
Elementary. So please support what works.
Mr. Schnur. Thank you, Senator for the good question and
for your leadership on school leadership issues. My single
recommendation is grounded in a concept that my friend, Alan
Khazei--who you know, Mr. Kennedy, you know and others, who
founded City Year and was the model for Americorp and Alan is a
terrific leader and he coined this term of the notion of an
action tank instead of a think tank. There are a lot of think
tanks, which are good, doing research and thinking about what
works but Alan's idea is create action tanks where there is a
particular policy goal piloted in a real serious way. Have a
rigorous evaluation and then learn from that action what works
at scale and I actually think an action tank around principal
and teacher effectiveness would be a terrific contribution to
the national work in education, in particular to say the goal
is that principals and teachers in this country, the primary
responsibility must be, as hard as it is, to ensure academic
success for every child. And this is not just a question of
shortages or distribution as important as those are but I think
embedded in all those comments are about focus on teachers and
principals whose job it is to secure success for every student
and the question is how do we move forward a system that can
identify, select, reward, differentiate support, professional
development, teachers and principals who can do that and I'd
say an action tank that supports experimentation could bring
back terrific data 5 years from now, which we'd be serving a
lot of kids across the country and help them form the next re-
authorization 5 years from now.
Mr. Sanders. Your question was the one thing that we would
advise you. Prior to No Child Left Behind, the analyses that
I'd been doing for years showed that the kids
disproportionately, across many States that were getting
hammered the hardest, were the early high achieving kids in
schools with a high concentration of poor and minority. Those
schools were under-serving those early higher achievers even
more than they were the low achievers. No Child Left Behind has
had a very positive impact on balance, with regard to the
raising of achievement for the lowest achieving kids. But there
is this negative unintended consequence in there that I
strongly recommend that the Congress remove and that is, this
teaching to the bubble kids, the kids that are just below
proficiency because these schools are under the heat of failing
AYP, are focusing right there and they are letting those early
high achieving kids often slide. And when an old nerd like
myself, comes along and analyzes it, you will see those early
high achieving kids' achievement level being pulled back toward
the achievement level of the lowest achieving kids. Okay, this
needs to be fixed. We need to have in the AYP, with regard to
the growth trend, a way to give States and districts incentives
to keep the appropriate academic progress for all kids to
varying levels of future achievement and if I could recommend
one thing to you--now, all these other things I concur with.
That is the one that needs Congress's greatest attention.
Senator Clinton. Thank you very much. That was extremely
helpful.
The Chairman. Senator Allard.
Senator Allard. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this
hearing. I've found the comments here by the panel very
interesting and I want to bring up an issue that is pertinent
to No Child Left Behind in the fact that we are moving into a
new parameter that is beginning to measure now, I think, which
is science. We've had math and then the year 2007, 2008, you
begin to measure science and I have talked with a lot of people
that are in the sciences--physicists, chemists, engineers,
biological sciences and they are concerned about a shortage of
people who are interested in the sciences. And in fact, they
feel like they have to go to other countries to pick up these
sciences. And I've talked to them and said look, maybe what we
need to do is think about introducing our students to sciences
earlier in the grades. I've made this assessment and I'd like
to have you comment that elementary teachers are somewhat
intimidated by the sciences so they like to--that's why they
are elementary teachers. But you get up to the higher levels
then--you know, you get in there, they are more dedicated to
the sciences.
If somehow or the other we could teach elementary teachers
to learn that science is fun. It's magic or whatever it is to
attract the student's attention.
So I want to structure my question this way. Do you feel
that if we talk about getting elementary teachers to introduce
science at an earlier level, that they are prepared to do that
and are they prepared to go into the workforce to meet these
requirements of science, which we're going to begin to test
now, in 2007 and 2008. I just bring this up because I think
it's very pertinent to where we are with No Child Left Behind,
the goals we've set out there and how you think teachers might
be prepared to address this and I'll leave this open to anybody
that might want to tackle that. Yes?
Ms. Hammond. I'd like to say one word. One is that the
degree to which teachers are prepared to teach science in
elementary school differs by States because some States have
put a lot of energy into both the preparation of teachers to
teach science in the elementary grades and they have a lot of
requirements around it and others have not.
So we would want to incent States, either in this context
or in title II of the Higher Education Act, to develop stronger
preparation for teachers in science if they haven't yet done
so.
But the other piece of it has to do with curriculum
instruction and assessment. In a lot of States, science is not
being taught until after March, until after testing time
because it's not one of the tested subjects and there are
concerns. Then, there are some States that do a wonderful job
with performance assessments in science, where kids in fact,
are both encouraged to conduct experiments early on and learn
the scientific method and demonstrate it on State assessments
that actually look at science investigation. Connecticut is
one, New York is another and then there are other States where
science is really being configured only as kind of memorizing
some facts and doing multiple choice tests. So the other piece
of the incentive that we need in No Child Left Behind is for
good performance assessments and strong curriculum that
supports scientific inquiry from early on in the grades as well
as the training for teachers to support that.
The final thing I'd say is that the kind of master teacher-
mentor teacher models that you've been hearing about all up and
down this panel, which provide coaching for teachers in school
to improve their practice, are really helpful in terms of
improving the quality of science instruction because teachers
who don't have either strong experience to do it or incentives,
need coaching to learn how to bring science into their
classrooms. So supporting those master teacher models will also
be helpful.
Senator Allard. Yes, ma'am.
Ms. Young. I would just add that you're right about the
importance of adding science to our testing program because our
experience has been in the university that when we talk about
the elementary--the preparation of elementary teachers and they
go out in the field and they are student teaching, to teach
science, they found that very many K-6 schools were not
teaching science at all because they are so focused on high
stakes testing and what's on the test that that's all they had
time for in their curriculum. So adding science to the testing
is going to help drive it in the curriculum. About whether our
science elementary teachers are prepared for that, they're
going to be better prepared, they are going to be better
prepared, now that they'll have the opportunity to do that.
One of the things that we found really valuable at CSU is
partnering with private industry about strengthening science
curriculum and opportunities for elementary science teachers to
learn more good science. We partner with JPL, with Boeing, with
NASA, with all kinds of think tanks about strengthening our
science ed curriculum for elementary teachers.
Senator Allard. Yes, ma'am.
Ms. Burtnett. You are correct in your assessment that
elementary teachers have not had the opportunities to learn
about science and consequently, they haven't--they haven't
focused on it. What I can tell you is that the National Board
process--through that process, those teachers are looking at
science in a different way and they begin to understand and
realize how important it is for especially young children who
are so curious about the world, to have opportunities to
explore and discover in a scientific way. So the National Board
process is helping in that regard and teachers who go through
it are also helping at their schools, helping others see the
critical need for bringing science curriculum into schools.
I'm glad to hear that in many States--we're moving in that
direction in Florida, we're moving in that direction. So I do
think there needs to be more focus on science and use what is--
use those best practices out there because the Board has ways
of doing that and coaching teachers up in it.
Senator Allard. Yes, sir.
Mr. Schnur. So in addition to the excellent ideas that
you're hearing from others on this panel, I do believe that one
of the keys is to attract people with expertise in math and
science and to retain them and so I think there are policies
that are being discussed that are targeted to math and science.
I know some of these are well supported--not all of them but
one. I do believe that national standards of some kind in math
and science would send the message, however that's implemented,
that we value math and science as a country and that we want
the best and brightest people with expertise in math and
science to become teachers. Second, I think that restoration of
the funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund would send a
powerful message that we actually have a profession beginning
to look at how we can actually reward excellence in fair ways
and give leadership opportunities and learning opportunities to
attract math and science teachers and others. And third, I do
think loan forgiveness, for people coming out of institutions
with an expertise in math and science, that Senator Kennedy has
called for would also help this problem.
Senator Allard. I see my time----
The Chairman. Good. Thank you. We've heard about a variety
of them. We have the Teaching Centers that Pam Burtnett had
talked about, residencies by Mr. Solomon. We've had the TAP
Program and others, and they are all somewhat different. Where
are the funding for these programs? Obviously we want programs
suitable to different parts of the country and we ought to try
and encourage those. I mean, I think Jesse--I think there was
support from the Boston Foundation and one of the instruments
that started or helped out there. But my basic question is,
should we be trying to incentivize these types of programs? All
of which you've commented that make a difference and all of
which are somewhat different. What are the kinds of things you
think that we might be able to do to incentivize the local
kinds of communities or States to be able to move in these
directions and in ways that's going to have 1,000 flowers
bloom?
Mr. Solomon. I think in our case, we were started
completely on private money for the first 2 years and I think
we would have never been able to convince the school district
to spend its own money on this without seeing it up and
running. So some kind of pilot fund and maybe it's similar to
the sort of action tank idea, to get programs started. Because
now the Boston Public Schools pays 60 percent of our program at
this point. But we needed to be able to have sort of a
demonstration proof in order to be able to get it started.
The Chairman. Good.
Pam.
Ms. Burtnett. The U.S. Department of Education has funded
the National Board project along with the National Science
Foundation. That's critical. The Teacher Center that we had
came out of a sliding grant from the Conrad Hilton Foundation a
long time ago. The collaboration between the union and the
district is very, very important. The union trains our
facilitators in thinking mathematics, reading--that's our
Educational Research and Dissemination Project for the AFT and
the district pays for the substitutes for teachers to come out
of the classroom. Anything that we can do to incentivize
ongoing professional development with high quality research,
current research on teaching practice and in content areas like
science and reading, is important.
The Chairman. Let me just ask one other question. Qualified
teachers in these classrooms, when the States make their
submission, they are also supposed to have a distributive
aspect of that program. You know, we've talked about the mal-
distribution in response to earlier. What is your assessment
about which States are doing much better than others? Clearly
they are but I mean, is there anything we should know about
that that we don't or do you want to let us know at some time,
do you want to take a look at it? Is there anyone that wants to
comment about that?
Ms. Wilkins. I think actually Senator Alexander and Dr.
Sanders--Tennessee is doing one of the better jobs on
distribution. In that, one of the things Tennessee has is a
data system that can tell them who is who. Because it's kind of
hard to distribute people when you can't identify them. So that
is why sort of getting good teacher data systems is so
important and Tennessee's work kind of shows you that. But I
think the larger point here is, you all put those distribution
provisions in the law when you passed it and the Department of
Education ignored them until last spring so that there was no
pressure on States to do anything. There were States that
didn't even know that they were required to address the
distribution issue until last spring. So that you have a lot of
States who've pretty much done nothing because they were never
asked to do anything.
Ms. Watkins. I would like to add something, with your
permission, Chairman Kennedy. If in areas of TAP funded in
different ways--I know in Texas, individuals in independent
school district, we use title I money, title II, title V and
our local tax dollars and across the State, where TAP has been
implemented, it is my understanding that they are using all of
their resources to fund that. I can't give you specific data on
which States are doing a great job with TAP and how they are
funding but I would be happy to provide that for you if you are
interested.
Chairman Kennedy. Good. Thanks.
Senator Alexander.
Senator Alexander. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This has been a
terrific morning and I hope you'll do this again. I want to go
back to the question I asked Dr. Sanders and see if anyone else
would have a comment on it. Let me take it this way. Almost
everybody here has said something like teacher experience does
not equal teacher effectiveness and for example, in the
Richardson district, you may have very good teachers in this
setting but you're not effective in this setting. That's one
thing we see. The second thing I think I'm hearing is that over
the last 25 years, not just Dr. Sanders but we're beginning to
develop in a way, a variety of ways, to say what a highly
effective teacher is. And okay, that's some real progress. I
mean, 25 years ago when we tried to have a Master Teacher
Program in Tennessee, I went to every college of education in
America who said it was foolish to try to measure that and to
reward people for that. They didn't do that. So we had to do
it. We had a bunch of politicians figuring it out because the
education community wouldn't do it.
So that leads us to the Teacher Incentive Fund and let me
just take an example. The city with the largest number of low-
performing schools is Memphis. That's where we have our poorest
children. I've been in many of those schools. I've seen the
tremendous results that can be achieved there in a relatively
short period of time, with what are obviously highly effective
teachers. In a couple of years, the kids who had so little
coming in are already up to levels that one would hope they
would be.
Under the Teacher Incentive Fund, New Leaders for New
Schools has $3.1 million, the first year of a 5-year grant
totaling $18 million. Now that is being used in two ways.
Eighty-three principals serving a third of the schools are in
this program to make sure they are good principals but they are
getting paid $15,000 more a year than the other principals and
491 teachers with demonstrated records of improving student
academic achievement in high-poverty schools are getting $6,000
more dollars a year than the other teachers. Now we all dance
around this but what happens is, some education community rises
up and wants to stomp that out because some teachers are making
more than others. I don't think we'll ever get anywhere with
this discussion until we find some way to reward these mentors,
master teachers, and people who go into low-income areas and
science teachers and great principals until we get some
consensus in the education community about a fair way to do it.
And with all respect, I don't think we in the Senate can do
that. Now some step was made with the National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards. That's one way. But we need
more ways. And when Philadelphia and Memphis and all these
places try to--Chattanooga--reward outstanding teachers, the
last thing we need is for national education organizations to
jump in and try to kill the program, which is exactly what
happens.
Now, am I being unfair to say that or am I misreading what
I'm hearing or is there some sort of emerging consensus about
how to do that? What could we do here to kind of encourage this
rather than discourage it over the next 5 years in this bill?
Ms. Hammond. I think that the point that John made a few
times, that we need to be able to experiment with these things
and figure out what is going to work is an important one. I
think there is a growing consensus that it's valuable to
recognize teachers' capacities. As you said, the National Board
is one way to do it. When you were Governor, you introduced, I
think, one of the first career ladders that set the stage for
some of the programs like TAP that are now beginning to take
hold. We have only a few places where these programs are
growing and being studied and looked at. The TAP Programs,
Denver has an innovative compensation system and so on. I think
the key for the next few years is to try to get some of that
work done right in some local places because we're not quite
ready to mandate some single approach.
Several ways that one would look at it--I think there are
three--would include things like the National Board of
Certification. There is a New Beginning Teacher Performance
Assessment also, that has been piloted and found to predict
teacher effectiveness, using methods like Dr. Sanders, so you
can get a gauge on performance. There are some standards-based
evaluation systems that have been found to predict teacher
effectiveness and then there are methods like the ones that Dr.
Sanders has piloted and really guided us in. He's been a
national treasure in this. But that's going to be a ways off
for a lot of States because most States don't have the kind of
systems that have value-added types of tests. Massachusetts,
New York, California--don't have scaled testing systems. People
are in disagreement about whether it's a good or a bad idea to
go to those tests because they're different in measurement. I
think we want to use ways to look at student learning, where
those methods are useful and appropriate as a part of a system,
look at other ways to look at student learning in States that
will not be able to move in that direction and have teachers
begin to assemble evidence about their own contributions to
student learning in their evaluation systems, which is one of
the things that's going on in Denver and some other places, so
that we begin to build a capacity to think about performance,
contributions to student learning in a variety of ways and then
see where we are with some systems that have been tested in the
next few years.
Mr. Sanders. Senator, I would just add to that. I think the
incentive fund in which States were allowed to submit and
compete for has begun to create the very pilots that Linda was
referring to. In other words, it's not across the board but
there have been various approaches and so forth so I think this
whole notion of adding to the ongoing experimentation would be
something--Senator Kennedy's comment earlier of who initially
finances these things--sometimes we've seen it from private
money. We found that Chattanooga started primarily with those
local foundation dollars that became the seed for it so I think
that what I would like to see Congress consider is the notion
to have more experimentation to go through as opposed to--
because each of the 50 States are not at the same level
presently with regard to longitudinal data structures, just as
Linda just pointed out. But I do think there ought to be an
encouragement for more experimentation.
Ms. Hammond. When we do that though, we need to be sure
that we're allowing--giving teachers incentives to teach the
whole child, that we're giving incentives to teach the kids who
have high levels of need so that we don't dis-incentivize
teachers taking special-needs students, English language
learners, in their classrooms and that we figure out ways that
acknowledge the breadth of work that teachers do and I think a
multiple measure system is going to be what helps us do that.
The Chairman. Just the final two comments here.
Ms. Burtnett. And let me just add one--teachers need to be
a part of that conversation, the conversation about the
incentives, the opportunities, the career ladder, the criteria
by which effective teaching is looked at. They need to be at
the table talking about what they know. Senator Alexander, my
teachers tell me that they are understanding of the desire to
build career ladders and give teachers more opportunities. They
are not reluctant--they are hesitant because there isn't this
body of evidence out there that helps them know what it is
going to look like and how they are a part of it and have a
voice in it.
Senator Alexander. Well, if I may say, if they keep trying
to kill every effort to experiment with it, there will never be
such a body of evidence.
The Chairman. Amy.
Ms. Wilkins. Senator Alexander, I just have two points that
I'd like to make.
The Chairman. Take the microphone, please.
Ms. Wilkins. I just have two points that I'd like to make.
One is I want to be careful as we talk about these experiments
that we try to move from the boutique level to at least the
small chain level. Let's try and get some scale here instead of
just nibbling around the edges with one cutie thing here and
one cutie thing there. We do know a lot and we should apply
what we know to scale up and get very aggressive about this
because we know how important good teachers are to poor kids
and we don't have time to nibble around the edges. So I think
aggressive experimentation that tries to move to scale very
quickly is important.
The other thing, I think, that we really need is outside
evaluation of these programs so that the learning that is done
can be No. 1, reliable but No. 2, quickly turned around and
plowed into to get to the scale that John was talking about.
The action tank stuff is nice but I think the emphasis needs to
be on action and the small tank.
The Chairman. Aggressive experimentation. We want to thank
all of you. It's been enormously helpful. I think we've touched
on a lot of different subject matters, that have been raised
here and I think a lot of people were able to make brief
comments--others didn't get a chance. Without going back and
having to write a long essay, but if you want to give us some
bullet points on some of these parts, we'd very much appreciate
it. I don't want to ask you to go back and create a whole
other--you know, feel you have to go back and do all additional
testimony but you've listened to a lot. If you have comments on
items we didn't hear from anyone, you can just put these things
down--you know, a couple of sentences and/or if you know of
different studies that we and our staff ought to reference. Do
you think they can give us some additional ideas or suggestions
or ongoing studies that will be coming up that we ought to be
aware of. We're thirsty for information and what we will do is,
as the legislation is drafted, we'll get it out to you to get
your comments, as we get this. And then you can give us your
comment on that. So we'll have you hopefully as involved as you
want to be in terms of this whole process.
We have additional kinds of statements and I'll ask that
those statements be included as part of the record and I thank
all of you very much for appearing. The committee stands in
recess.
[Additional material follows.]
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Prepared Statement of Leslie Burger, American Library Association (ALA)
Chairman Kennedy, Senator Enzi, and members of the committee, thank
you for allowing me to submit testimony on behalf of the American
Library Association (ALA). I appreciate the opportunity to comment on
the value of the school library media specialist in achieving the
laudable goals of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
My name is Leslie Burger, and I am the President of the American
Library Association, the oldest and largest library association in the
world with some 66,000 members, primarily school, public, academic, and
some special librarians, but also trustees, publishers, and friends of
libraries. The Association provides leadership for the development,
promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the
profession of librarianship to enhance learning and ensure access to
information for all.
In 2001, with strong bipartisan support, the Nation embarked on an
ambitious school reform plan entitled the No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB). Among other things, NCLB requires States to set high standards
for all students and holds schools accountable for the results.
Further, it requires that there be a ``highly qualified'' teacher in
every classroom. This emphasis has resulted in significant changes in
how teachers are hired and retained as well as how professional
development is provided. The ALA applauds the highly qualified teacher
requirements in NCLB, but believes the same standards being applied in
our classrooms should be extended to our Nation's school libraries--
that every school library should be staffed by a highly qualified,
state-certified library media specialist.
Section 1119 of NCLB outlines the minimum qualifications needed by
teachers and paraprofessionals who work in any facet of classroom
instruction. It requires that States develop plans to achieve the goal
that all teachers of core academic subjects be highly qualified by the
end of the 2005-6 school year.
Yet, despite the vital role school libraries play in helping meet
those requirements, NCLB is silent when it comes to the qualification
of those individuals in charge of our school libraries. The over 62,000
state-certified library media specialists in public schools and 3,909
state-certified library media specialists in private schools in the
United States fill multiple roles--teacher, instructional partner,
information specialist, and program administrator--ensuring that
students and staff are effective users of information and ideas.
School libraries are critical partners in ensuring that States and
school districts alike meet the reading requirements that are part of
NCLB as well as President Bush's unequivocal commitment to ensuring
that every child can read by the end of third grade. President Bush and
the Congress recognized the important role school libraries play in
increasing literacy and reading skills when they created the Improving
Literacy Through School Library program as part of NCLB (Title I, Part
B, Subpart 4, Sec. 1251).
The Improving Literacy Through School Library program--the first
program specifically aimed at upgrading school libraries since the
original school library resources program was established in 1965--is
designed to improve student literacy skills and academic achievement by
providing schools with up-to-date library materials, including well-
equipped, technologically advanced school library media centers, and to
ensure that school library media centers are staffed by professionally
certified school library media specialists.
Multiple studies have affirmed that there is a clear link between
school library media programs that are staffed by an experienced school
library media specialist and student academic achievement. Based on
analysis from the first year of funding for the Improving Literacy
Through School Libraries program, 95 percent of local education
agencies have reported increases in their reading scores. The
Department of Education's November 2005 evaluation of the Improving
Literacy Through School Libraries program found it has been successful
in improving the quality of school libraries. Fourteen statewide
studies demonstrate that a strong library media program helps students
learn more and score higher on standardized achievement tests than
their peers in library-impoverished schools. Unfortunately, about 25
percent of America's school libraries do not have a State-certified
librarian on staff.
The skills needed to function successfully in a 21st century global
workforce have gone beyond reading. Business leaders are concerned that
people are now entering the workforce without information literacy
skills--those skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze and use
information--which equip people with the ability to work proficiently.
Who better to teach information literacy than librarians, the
information experts.
When it comes to our children's education, we must ensure that they
receive the best instruction possible from competent, qualified
instructors. This is true in the classroom and should be true in our
school libraries. Education is not exclusive to the classroom; it
extends into school libraries and so should the qualification we demand
of our school librarians. To be a critical part of a comprehensive and
renewed strategy to ensure that students learn to read (and to read
well), every school library should be staffed by a highly qualified,
state-certified library media specialist and every school should have a
school library.
As Congress begins consideration of NCLB reauthorization, ALA
recommends the following:
1. Encourage each State to review their requirements for library
media specialists and to define for their own State what it means to be
a ``highly qualified library media specialist;''
2. Set a goal for all schools receiving title I funding to have at
least one ``highly qualified library media specialist'' as defined by
the State; and
3. Provide local flexibility for schools and districts to use funds
under title II, part A to help hire, retain and train library media
specialists so they are able to meet the ``highly qualified''
definition set by the State.
We appreciate your responsiveness and look forward to determining
how we can work with you to ensure that all schools are staffed by a
highly qualified, state-certified library media specialist.
Thank you again for this opportunity to comment on behalf of the
American Library Association.
______
National School Boards Association (NSBA),
Alexandria, Virginia,
March 5, 2007.
Hon. Edward M. Kennedy,
Chairman,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
U.S. Senate,
Washington, DC. 20510.
Hon. Michael B. Enzi,
Ranking Member,
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
U.S. Senate,
Washington, DC. 20510.
Re: Letter for the Record on NCLB Hearing--``Strategies for Attracting,
Supporting, and Retaining High Quality Educators''
Dear Chairman Kennedy and Ranking Member Enzi: On behalf of the
95,000 school board members who serve the Nation's 48 million students
in our local public school districts, the National School Boards
Association (NSBA) respectfully requests that this letter be entered
into the record in conjunction with tomorrow's important hearing on
teaching quality. We commend your leadership in holding a hearing on
this matter that is inextricably linked to the ability of schools and
districts to fulfill the lofty goals of the No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB), particularly raising achievement for all students.
The research on this matter is clear: no other school-related
factor has a greater impact on student achievement than the ability of
the student's teacher. In short, teachers matter. School districts and
States are striving to recruit and retain qualified and effective
teachers but face significant targeted staffing challenges. The Highly
Qualified Teacher requirements within NCLB have added to those
challenges in some instances.
While hiring decisions remain the responsibility of local school
boards, NSBA believes that Congress does have a role to play in
assisting local school districts and States in their ongoing efforts to
attract, support and retain qualified and effective teachers. The needs
are particularly acute in high-poverty schools and for certain subjects
in which teacher shortages are too common, including math, science,
special education, and classes for English Language Learners.
NSBA's legislative recommendations cover recruitment and retention,
professional development, needed improvements to the Highly Qualified
provisions in NCLB, and strengthening teacher preparation. While we
recognize that there may be several legislative vehicles in which
Congress can assist districts and States in strengthening teacher
quality--including the reauthorizations of NCLB and the Higher
Education Act, and legislation on U.S. economic competitiveness--we
wish to take this opportunity to outline our recommendations since your
committee will be leading any effort on this matter.
RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION
Through Federal incentives and funding for existing programs,
Congress can provide important assistance to supplement districts' and
States' teacher recruitment and retention programs. For example,
adequate funding for title I and especially title II (Improving Teacher
Quality State Grants), as well as incentives like the Teacher Loan
Forgiveness Program need continued support. NSBA also supports newer
concepts, such as the Teacher Incentive Fund, which can assist district
programs that reward teachers and principals who demonstrate positive
results in high-poverty schools. Such programs can also help foster the
creation and expansion of differential pay initiatives for teachers of
high-need subjects and hard-to-staff schools. We also are encouraged by
efforts in Congress to provide scholarships for undergraduates who
commit to teach for several years in hard-to-staff schools or high-need
subjects, and for experienced teachers who further their education and
take on added responsibilities, including mentoring.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Improving professional development or in-service training is
critical to supporting and retaining teachers. We recommend partially
redirecting NCLB's focus and funding requirements from unproven
sanctions to support for comprehensive professional development
programs that can improve teaching and raise student achievement.
Comprehensive professional development would include analysis of
students' learning needs, intensive induction and mentoring support,
and peer collaboration. This approach would also result in additional
title I monies available for professional development.
HIGHLY QUALIFIED IMPROVEMENTS
States and school districts have made strong progress in their
efforts to meet the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements within NCLB.
Those requirements have also added to pre-existing recruitment and
retention challenges, particularly for rural schools and certain
subjects, such as special education. The Department of Education has
recognized this by granting some flexibility to districts and States,
and clarified in the IDEA regulations that States can develop a single
multi-subject HOUSSE (High Objective Uniform State Standards of
Evaluation) to allow special education teachers of multiple core
subjects to demonstrate subject-matter competency in every core subject
they teach. We recommend that Congress make that provision permanent,
or permit a special education teacher with full State special education
certification and a bachelor's degree to be considered highly
qualified.
Additionally, Congress should streamline existing highly qualified
requirements by requiring instructional personnel employed by
supplemental service providers to meet the same requirements as public
school educators. Under current law, they are not held to the same
standard.
Finally, some States and school districts are attempting to develop
accurate and appropriate methods, such as ``value-added'' models, for
determining and rewarding teacher effectiveness. It is a costly and
complicated process that requires extensive collaboration among key
stakeholders, including school boards, administrators and teachers, in
order to develop a system that is viewed as fair and accurate. Congress
can assist in this progress by providing funding (through matching
grants) for States to develop the necessary data systems. Although
value-added assessments provide information on student performance,
they should never be the sole determining factor in evaluating teacher
performance, which must include other factors including peer and
principal evaluations.
If Congress considers amending the highly qualified definition to
take into account a teacher's effectiveness, NSBA recommends that it be
added only as an alternative method by which teachers can meet the
standards, not as an additional requirement. This approach could allow
teachers who have a track record of success in raising student
achievement but who may not meet all the current credentialing or
subject-matter requirements, to be deemed highly qualified. However,
because of the complexity in developing such systems, Congress might
consider creating a demonstration program for interested States wishing
to utilize or create a value-added model for this purpose.
TEACHER PREPARATION
Quality teacher preparation programs, whether traditional or
alternative, are an integral component to ensuring the Nation has an
adequate supply of outstanding teachers today and in the future. Few
would disagree that the Nation's teacher preparation programs have room
for improvement. Congress should encourage schools of education to
collaborate with local school districts to ensure appropriate alignment
with NCLB requirements and State academic standards, as well as the
proper education needed to enable teachers to effectively reach and
educate today's increasingly diverse student body. NSBA also recommends
that Congress increase accountability for teacher preparation programs
by providing incentives to States to develop accountability programs
which track the preparedness and success of graduates of its teacher
preparation programs in raising student achievement (e.g., Louisiana's
Teacher Preparation Accountability System).
Again, we appreciate your leadership and interest in strengthening
the efforts of school districts and States to recruit, support and
retain quality teachers. We look forward to working with the committee
on this issue as you consider legislation to address these challenges.
If you have any questions or would like further information, please
contact Marcus Egan, Director of Federal Affairs, at (703) 838-6707, or
[email protected].
Sincerely,
Michael A. Resnick,
Associate Executive Director.
______
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA,
March 9, 2007.
Dear Senator Kennedy: It was a privilege to testify before the HELP
committee earlier this week on matters of teacher quality. At that time
you invited us to submit additional comments on matters before the
committee.
Attached is additional testimony on the question of value-added
modeling of test score gains as a basis for evaluating teachers--a
practice that is emerging as a valuable but complex research tool, and
one that has severe limitations as a primary means for evaluating
individual teachers. I outline some of the challenges with this method
with respect to individual teacher evaluation. I also describe
proposals for how policymakers might encourage workable and productive
means for recognizing exceptional teachers, taking into account their
performance and contributions to student learning, and enabling them to
contribute to the improvement of the profession and the teaching of
underserved students.
I thank you and the members of the committee for your hard work to
improve our public education system. We are all the beneficiaries of
that work.
Sincerely,
Linda Darling-Hammond,
Charles E. Ducommun Professor.
MEASURING AND RECOGNIZING TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS
Recent policies aimed at improving teacher quality have begun to
make a positive difference in the distribution of qualified teachers to
traditionally under-served groups of students. Policymakers are now
turning to ways to augment these efforts to evaluate and stimulate
greater teacher effectiveness. Because of a desire to recognize and
reward teachers' contributions to student learning, a prominent
proposal is to use value-added student achievement test scores as a key
measure of teachers' effectiveness. The value-added concept is
important, as it reflects a desire to acknowledge teachers'
contributions to students' progress, taking into account where students
begin. However, there are serious technical and educational challenges
associated with this approach, which limit its use as a primary measure
of individual teacher effectiveness. (These issues are described
below.)
Perhaps the challenges associated with this approach were
illustrated most vividly by the statement of an expert veteran teacher
in Springfield, Massachusetts last year--a district being asked to put
in place a system of merit pay based on value-added student achievement
test scores. Springfield is a predominantly minority, overwhelmingly
poor district that is under-resourced by the State. Fiscal woes had
prevented salary increases for 3 years and about half of the 2,600
teachers in the district had left over this time. Nearly 25 percent of
the teaching force was uncertified and inexperienced. Susan Saunders, a
Springfield native with more than 20 years of experience, was one of
the local heroes who had stayed and worked tirelessly to assist the
revolving door of beginning teachers, who shared the few current
materials with these teachers, and who took on the highest need special
education students (comprising more than half of her class of 32
students), as she was one of the few teachers who could work with them
successfully. When asked how she would feel about working in this new
system of test-based merit pay, Saunders said the introduction of the
system would force a teacher like herself either to leave the system or
to stop taking on the special education students and helping the other
teachers in her building (since one teacher's greater success would
come at the expense of another teacher's rating).
The Springfield system was not adopted because an arbitrator deemed
the technical validity of the proposed system inadequate to carry the
weight of personnel decisionmaking. In addition, this example suggests
how important it is to exercise care in developing systems of rewards
for teachers, so they do not create incentives that would discourage
teachers from working collaboratively with each other and taking on the
most challenging students. Since any measures used are likely to drive
instruction, it is also critically important that the assessments used
to evaluate student learning cover the broad goals of learning that are
valued.
For any high stakes purpose associated with personnel
decisionmaking or compensation, multiple measures should be used in
combination, as all measures give a partial picture of teacher
performance. These measures should include evidence of: (1) teacher
practices, (2) teacher performance, and (3) teacher contributions to
student learning. Specific characteristics of students as well as of
the learning environment should be taken into account in making
judgments about teachers' effectiveness. These elements, and indicators
of teacher qualifications, are all used in the Denver, Colorado system
of teacher compensation based on knowledge, skills, and performance, as
well as innovative systems in Helena, Montana; Portland, Maine; and in
Minnesota's Alternative Professional Pay System.\1\
WHY VALUE-ADDED TEST SCORES ARE PROBLEMATIC FOR EVALUATING
INDIVIDUAL TEACHERS
While value-added methods are valuable for research on groups of
teachers, researchers agree that value-added modeling (VAM) is not
appropriate as a primary measure for evaluating individual teachers.
Henry Braun of the Educational Testing Service concluded in his review:
VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis
for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are
many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher
effectiveness on the basis of the kinds of data available from
typical school districts. We still lack sufficient
understanding of how seriously the different technical problems
threaten the validity of such interpretations.\2\
The problems with using value-added testing models to determine
teacher effectiveness include:
Teachers' ratings are affected by differences in the
students who are assigned to them. Students are not randomly assigned
to teachers--and statistical models cannot fully adjust for the fact
that some teachers will have a disproportionate number of students who
may be exceptionally difficult to teach (students with poor attendance,
who are homeless, who have severe problems at home, etc.) and whose
scores on traditional tests are problematic to interpret (e.g. those
who have special education needs or who are English language learners).
This can create both misestimates of teachers' effectiveness and
disincentives for them to want to teach the students who have the
greatest needs.
VAM requires scaled tests, which most States don't use.
Furthermore, many experts think such tests are less useful than tests
that are designed to measure specific curriculum goals. In order to be
scaled, tests must evaluate content that is measured along a continuum
from year to year. This reduces their ability to measure the breadth of
curriculum content. As a result, most States have been moving away from
scaled tests and toward tests that measure standards based on specific
curriculum content, such as end-of-course tests in high school that can
evaluate standards more comprehensively (e.g. separate tests in
algebra, geometry, algebra 2, and in biology, chemistry, and physics).
These curriculum-based tests are more useful for evaluating instruction
and guiding teaching, but do not allow value-added modeling. Entire
State systems of assessment that have been developed over many years--
such as the NY State Regents system and systems in States like
California, Washington, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Kentucky,
and many more--would have to be dismantled to institute value-added
modeling.
VAM models do not produce stable ratings of teachers.
Teachers look very different in their measured effectiveness when
different statistical methods are used. In addition, a given teacher
may appear to have differential effectiveness from class to class and
from year to year. Braun notes that ratings are most unstable at the
upper and lower ends of the scale, where many would like to use them to
determine high or low levels of effectiveness.
Most teachers and many students are not covered by
relevant tests. Scaled annual tests are not available in most States
for teachers of science, social studies, foreign language, music, art,
physical education, special education, vocational/technical education,
and other electives in any grades, or for teachers in grades K-3 and
nearly all teachers in grades 9-12. With many grades and subjects
uncovered by scaled tests, and with 3 years of data needed to get a
reasonably stable estimate for a teacher (thus excluding 1st and 2nd
year teachers), at best only about 30 percent of elementary teachers
and 10 percent of high school teachers would be covered by data bases
in most States. Once teacher and student mobility are factored in, the
number of teachers who can be followed in these models is reduced
further. In low-income communities, especially, student mobility rates
are often extremely high, with a minority of students stable from 1
year to the next. Although researchers can make assumptions about score
values for missing student data for research purposes, these kinds of
adjustments are not appropriate for the purposes of making individual
teacher judgments.
Many desired learning outcomes are not covered by the
tests. Tests in the United States are generally much narrower than
assessments used in other high-achieving countries (which feature a
much wider variety of more ambitious written, oral, and applied tasks),
and scaled tests are narrower than some other kinds of assessment. For
good or for ill, research finds that high-stakes tests drive the
curriculum to a substantial degree. Thus, it is important that measures
used to evaluate teacher effectiveness find ways to include the broad
range of outcomes valued in schools. Otherwise, teachers evaluated by
such tests will have no incentive to continue to include untested areas
such as writing, research, science investigations, social studies, and
the arts, or skills such as data collection, analysis, and synthesis,
or complex problem solving, which are generally untested.
It is impossible to fully separate out the influences of
students' other teachers, as well as school conditions, on their
apparent learning. Prior teachers have lasting effects, for good or
ill, on students' later learning, and current teachers also interact to
produce students' knowledge and skills. For example, the essay writing
a student learns through his history teacher may be credited to his
English teacher, even if she assigns no writing; the math he learns in
his physics class may be credited to his math teacher. Specific skills
and topics taught in 1 year may not be tested until later years. A
teacher who works in a well-resourced school with specialist supports
may appear to be more effective than one whose students don't receive
these supports. As Braun notes, ``it is always possible to produce
estimates of what the model designates as teacher effects. These
estimates, however, capture the contributions of a number of factors,
those due to teachers being only one of them. So treating estimated
teacher effects as accurate indicators of teacher effectiveness is
problematic.'' To understand the influences on student learning, more
data about teachers' practices and context are needed.
Thus, while value-added models are useful for looking at groups of
teachers for research purposes--for example, to examine the results of
professional development programs or to look at student progress at the
school or district level--and they might provide one measure of teacher
effectiveness among several, they are problematic as the primary or
sole measure for making evaluation decisions for individual teachers.
Congress should fund research on a range of models for examining
student progress in relation to teaching, including value-added models,
in order to understand the technical properties of the models, how they
intersect with desired properties of assessments, and what kinds of
inferences they can support about teacher effects under various
circumstances.
HOW MIGHT TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS BE EVALUATED AND RECOGNIZED?
The fact that value-added models are not ready for prime-time as
tools for evaluating teachers does not mean that we cannot make
progress in recognizing and rewarding excellent teachers, and creating
incentives for them to help other teachers and serve the neediest
students.
One critical need is to identify highly effective teachers who can
serve as mentors and master teachers and who might be recruited to
high-need schools through a variety of incentives, including additional
salary, improved teaching conditions, and opportunities to redesign
schools so that they are more effective.
Based on the experiences of districts that have worked to develop
career ladders and innovative compensation systems, such teachers might
be identified by requiring districts, in collaboration with the local
teachers association, to construct a system which incorporates multiple
measures of teacher performance to identify highly effective teachers,
including:
Attainment of National Board Certification \3\ or superior
performance on a teacher performance assessment, offered by the State
or district, measuring standards known to be associated with student
learning. Such standards-based teacher evaluations should include
evaluation of teaching practices based on validated benchmarks
conducted through classroom observations by expert peers or
supervisors, as well as systematic collection of evidence about the
teacher's planning, instruction, and assessment practices, work with
parents and students, and contributions to the school.\4\
Contributions to student learning and other student
outcomes, drawn from classroom assessments and documentation, including
pre- and post-test measures of student learning in specific areas,
evidence of student accomplishments in relation to teaching activities,
and analysis of standardized test results, where appropriate.\5\ The
evidence should include a wide range of learning outcomes and take
student characteristics into account.
Teachers eligible for master/mentor teacher designation should have
met the Highly Qualified Teacher requirement under NCLB and have at
least 4 years of successful teaching experience as evidenced by
outstanding performance on regular teacher evaluations. These
evaluations should be based on a portfolio of evidence about planning,
teaching, and learning environments, as well as student learning, and
classroom demonstrations of teaching excellence.
Another need is to strengthen the evaluation process for all
teachers so that it provides evidence of teachers' performance that is
related to student learning. Improved teacher evaluation can be
encouraged at both the State and local levels.
At the district level, incentives should encourage districts to
develop standards-based teacher evaluations that include evaluation of
teaching practices based on validated benchmarks conducted through
classroom observations by expert peers or supervisors, as well as
systematic collection of evidence about the teacher's planning,
instruction, and assessment practices, work with parents and students,
and contributions to the school. This collection of evidence can
include evidence of student learning and progress drawn from teacher
documentation, student work samples, and classroom, district or State
assessments, as appropriate.
This portfolio of evidence about teacher performance should include
practices that are associated with improvements in students' school
performance and learning. For example, in addition to gains in student
learning demonstrated through tests or assessments, a teacher might
document how she increased student attendance or homework completion
through regular parent conferences and calls home and show evidence of
changes in these student outcomes, as well as other outcomes associated
with them, such as improved grades, graduation, and college-going.
In some systems, teachers receive stipends for demonstrating that
they have implemented particular new practices associated with
schoolwide or districtwide goals, such as the use of common literacy
practices across classrooms, or the use of formative assessments in
planning and modifying instruction, or the implementation of a new
system of writing instruction. Where possible, these practices are
documented along with evidence of how the changes have affected student
participation and learning. The rationale for using these measures of
effective teaching practices is that they support teacher development
and schoolwide change initiatives, and are related to improvements in
the conditions for student learning.
At the State level, teacher performance assessments can be used to
go beyond paper qualifications to evaluate teachers' ability to perform
effectively in the classroom. Such assessments, modeled after the
National Board assessments, are being used in teacher education or the
early induction period as the basis for licensing recommendations in CA
and CT. Beginning teachers' ratings on the Connecticut performance
assessment have been found to significantly predict their students'
value-added achievement on State tests \6\ and to help teachers improve
their instruction and effectiveness. The assessments require teachers
to document their plans and teaching for a unit of instruction,
videotape and critique lessons, and collect and evaluate evidence of
student learning. The Teach Act contains a provision to develop a
nationally available beginning teacher performance assessment, based on
these models, which could provide a useful measure of effectiveness for
new teachers and could leverage stronger accountability and improvement
in teacher education.
CONCLUSION
In any of these systems, it will also be important to include
evidence about the students being served and to consider their progress
in appropriate ways. Evidence in medicine as well as teaching indicates
that where assessments do not fairly represent professional practice,
incentives can be created to avoid serving high-need clients, which
works against the goals of the system. For example, mortality ratings
for cardiac surgeons in one State were found to result in doctors
referring very sick patients to other States, and to refuse service to
needy patients with high levels of risk. Similarly, accountability
based on test score ratings have led some schools to keep and push out
low-scoring students. To create systems that measure and encourage
teacher effectiveness, it is important to use multiple measures of
practice, performance, and outcomes so that a more complete picture of
practice emerges, so that assessments are fair and produce the right
incentives, and so that educators are encouraged to improve what they
do instead of trying to game an unfair system.
ENDNOTES
\1\ For more detail about Denver, see http://denverprocomp.org. For
more detail about the Minnesota plan see http://
www.educationminnesota.org/index.cfm?
PAGE_ID-15003.
\2\ Henry Braun, Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A
Primer on Value-Added Models (Princeton, NJ: ETS, 2005), p. 17.
\3\ A number of studies have found that the National Board
Certification assessment process identifies teachers who are more
effective than others who have not achieved certification. See for
example, Bond, L., Smith, T., Baker, W., & Hattie, J. (2000). The
certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards: A construct and consequential validity study (Greensboro,
NC: Center for Educational Research and Evaluation); Cavaluzzo, L.
(2004). Is National Board Certification an effective signal of teacher
quality? (National Science Foundation No. REC-0107014). Alexandria, VA:
The CNA Corporation; Goldhaber, D., & Anthony, E. (2005). Can teacher
quality be effectively assessed? Seattle, WA: University of Washington
and the Urban Institute; Smith, T., Gordon, B., Colby, S., & Wang, J.
(2005). An examination of the relationship of the depth of student
learning and National Board certification status (Office for Research
on Teaching, Appalachian State University). Vandevoort, L. G., Amrein-
Beardsley, A., & Berliner, D. C. (2004). National Board certified
teachers and their students' achievement. Education Policy Analysis
Archives, 12 (46), 117.
\4\ Standards-based teacher evaluations used by some districts have
been found to be significantly related to student achievement gains for
teachers and to help teachers improve their practice and effectiveness.
See Milanowski, A.T., Kimball, S.M., White, B. (2004). The relationship
between standards-based teacher evaluation scores and student
achievement. University of Wisconsin-Madison: Consortium for Policy
Research in Education. These systems for observing teachers' classroom
practice are based on professional teaching standards grounded in
research on teaching and learning. They use systematic observation
protocols to examine teaching along a number of dimensions. The Denver
compensation system, which uses such an evaluation system as one of its
components, describes the features of its system as including: well-
developed rubrics articulating different levels of teacher performance;
inter-rater reliability; a fall-to-spring evaluation cycle; and a peer
and self-evaluation component.
\5\ Measures of student learning in specific subject areas may be
scored writing samples or reading samples, mathematics assessments,
assessments of science or history knowledge, or even musical
performances. These typically provide better measures of classroom
learning in a specific course or subject area because they are
curriculum-specific and can offer more authentic measures of student
learning. They are also more likely to capture the effects of a
particular teacher's instruction and be available for most students. In
some schools, teachers use their own fall and spring classroom
assessments (or pre- and post-unit assessments) as a way of gauging
student progress. These measures can also be tailored for the learning
goals of specific students (for example, special education students or
English language learners.) As part of a portfolio of evidence, these
measures can document teacher effectiveness in achieving specific
curriculum goals. In Denver's system, teachers set two goals annually
in collaboration with the principal, and document student progress
toward these goals using district, school, or teacher-made assessments
to show growth.
\6\ Wilson, M. & Hallum, P.J. (2006). Using Student Achievement
Test Scores as Evidence of External Validity for Indicators of Teacher
Quality: Connecticut's Beginning Educator Support and Training Program.
Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley.
[Whereupon, at 12:05 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]