ESEA Come, ESEA Go

The chatter among the education cognescenti this week is about what is and what isn't in the bipartisan ESEA draft released by Senate education chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-WY).

Let me repeat my prior contention that, politically, ESEA reauthorization is an issue for 2013 -- not 2011 or 2012. The Republican-led U.S. House is not going to give President Obama any kind of a political victory, despite the solid compromise put forth by the Senate HELP Committee. For that reason, the work currently underway is in part about laying the groundwork for a future compromise, in part a genuine attempt to get something done (despite the House), and in part political cover.

The bill itself represents a sensible step back from a pie-in-the-sky accountability goal of 100% proficiency in favor of annual state data transparency, continued data disaggregation among subgroups, and greater state flexibility over educational accountability. Personally, I am not an accountability hawk and am unswayed by spotty evidence and advocates such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who contends that it was Florida's accountability system (rather than its major investment in literacy and other interventions) that fueled student test-score gains. Chairman Harkin nails it by saying that the bill "focuses on teaching and learning, not testing and sanctioning." Amen to that.

Seeing as I have a day job that doesn't allow me to analyze the entirety of 800-page bills, here is my quick take on a few elements in the draft bill:

Positives

• Accountability: Eliminates AYP. Requires states to identify 5% lowest-performing schools and 5% of schools with the largest achievement gaps.
  
• CSR: Tightens up the use of Title II, Part A for class-size reduction to ensure that those dollars are directed at research-based implementation of smaller class sizes. [UPDATE: This could potentially free up some Title II, Part A dollars for teacher professional development and new teacher support.]
  
• Teacher & Principal Training & Recruiting Fund: This Fund would support state & local activities that further high-quality PD, rigorous evaluation and support systems, and improve the equitable distribution of teachers. The bill's language significantly strengthens existing federal policy language regarding the elements of comprehensive, high-quality educator induction and mentoring.

Concerns

• Equitable teacher distribution: The bill would require states to ensure that high-poverty and high-minority schools receive an equitable distribution of the most effective educators as measured by new teacher evaluation systems that must include four performance tiers. Sounds good and fair. But given that teacher working conditions significantly impact an individual educator's ability to be effective in the classroom (and garner a "highly effective" rating [see DC]), wouldn't this just create a massive game of musical chairs and major disruptions in the teaching pool unless a determined effort were mounted to improve the often poor teaching and learning conditions present in high-poverty schools?
  

Good Coverage & Analysis

Alyson Klein - Politics K-12 - Education Week
Joy Resmovits - Huffington Post
Stephen Sawchuk - Teacher Beat - Education Week
The Quick and the Ed (Education Sector)

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Unintended, Unforeseen Consequences

The challenges surrounding the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) plan to replace principals at underperforming schools across the nation (New York Times: "U.S. Plan to Replace Principals Hits Snag: Who Will Step In?") reminds me of the unintended consequences of California's class size reduction policies during the 1990s.

As the New York Times reported yesterday about the ED's $4 billion plan to radically transform the country’s worst schools by installing new principals to overhaul most of the failing schools, "[T]here simply were not enough qualified principals-in-waiting to take over."

California experienced a similar human capital problem when it reduced class sizes statewide in grades k-3. An unintended consequence of its state policy was the hiring of more emergency-credentialed and unqualified educators as a result of the additional teaching positions needed to enable smaller class sizes. As this Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning report noted, "[T]he implementation of class size reduction ... dramatically increased the shortage" of fully qualified teachers. In addition, the Public Policy Institute of California reports that it exacerbated educational inequality and disproportionately affected schools that served low-income and minority students:

CSR led to a dramatic increase in the percentages of inexperienced and uncertified teachers. In 1990, there were few differences in these characteristics by racial/ethnic and income groups. Even as late as 1995–1996, the year before CSR, schools with high percentages of nonwhite and low-income students were only slightly more likely
than other schools to have inexperienced teachers who lacked full certification and postgraduate schooling. By 1999, large gaps in teacher qualifications had emerged between schools attended by nonwhite and low-income students and other schools. For black students in schools with more than 75 percent of the students enrolled in subsidized lunch programs, nearly 25 percent had a first- or second-year teacher; almost 30 percent had a teacher who was not fully certified. At the other extreme, for white students attending schools with 25 percent or fewer of the students enrolled in subsidized lunch programs, only 12 percent had a first- or second-year teacher, and only 5 percent had a teacher who was not fully credentialed. These differences reflect the varying levels of difficulty that many schools experienced in attempting to attract and retain teachers following the implementation of CSR.

With all the current hullabaloo about wanting to fire more underperforming teachers as a chief reform strategy, the critical question is: "Who will replace them?" The belief that 'we can do better' does not necessarily make it so. We've got to attend to and recognize such human capital challenges before we put forth such policies, however well intended.

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Movement on Teacher Residency Requirements

As a follow up to my post last September ("Teacher Residency Requirements"), there appears to be legislative movement in both Illinois and Wisconsin to eliminate such requirements in Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively. Both cities require teachers to be residents in order to be employed in the public schools.

From District 299: The Chicago Schools Blog (Alexander Russo), 3/8/2010:

It's an age-old question for Chicago, which is one of few big cities to require teachers to live inside the city limits. Teachers complain about it. Once in a while they get caught living outside the city and have to move or leave their jobs. The recession in making jobs scarcer and the city more expensive. And now State Sen. Steans has introduced language [Residency Bill SB 3522 (Amendment 1)] that, with the support of the CTU, would remove that requirement.

From Wisconsin State Journal editorial, 3/10/2010:

Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature and the state's big teachers union are on the same side pushing for a smart school reform in Milwaukee.

They're backing Assembly Bill 89, which would prohibit Milwaukee Public Schools from requiring their teachers to live in the state's largest city.

My belief is that, while this might be good politics or even economic policy, it is bad education policy. In urban school districts that struggle to attract and retain talented and effective teachers, such a residency policy needlessly reduces the number of qualified candidates for teaching vacancies and lowers the quality of the overall selection pool.

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Rhode Island Targets Teacher Assignments

The latest edition of the National Council of Teacher Quality's newsletter highlights the efforts of Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist to eliminate the practice of transferring teachers based on seniority. Instead, openings should be filled "based on a set of performance criteria and on student need," according to a memo sent by Gist to the state's school superintendents.

Generally, given the evidence that veteran teachers tend to flee so-called hard-to-staff schools and leave those schools populated by less experienced peers, I am generally agreeable to such policies that promise to lessen such inequitable teacher distribution. I say that with two caveats. First, policymakers and researchers should work to ensure that there are no unintended consequences as a result of such a policy. For instance, might this policy result in some veteran teachers leaving a needy district, leaving the state, or taking an early retirement rather than continue to teach in a location that they no longer want to? Second, the state of Rhode Island would do well to address teacher working conditions which research shows have greater bearing on teachers' decisions to stay at or leave a given school more than other factors, such as pay.

The state's teacher unions -- the National Education Association Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals (RIFT) -- are not happy with Gist's approach and may take the issue to the courts, saying that Gist does not have the authority to direct such a change and that it limits collective bargaining rights. That all said, however, this aggressive leadership on the part of Commissioner Gist is why folks are beginning to mention the Ocean State as a serious Race to the Top contender.

See some past thoughts on this issue.

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Teacher Residency Requirements

Apart from being marginally good local politics to require city employees (including teachers) to live within city boundaries, why would an urban district create barriers that make it more difficult to attract the highly effective teachers that it needs?

Ask Chicago and Milwaukee. (Boston, too, has a residency requirement for city employees, but it excludes teachers.) Any others out there we should be aware of?

From the Chicago Tribune (9/11/2009):

The city, for its part, maintains that teachers should be contributing to the tax base that funds their schools, among other reasons.

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (1/24/2008):

The residency rule has been controversial for years. Some say it is unfair and MPS needs good teachers too much to restrict the pool of possible teachers. Others say it doesn't actually have much effect on who teaches overall and it's good for the city to have employees live within the city line. Efforts in the state Legislature to repeal the residency rule recently have not succeeded.

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Superteacher To The Rescue!

Given the recent spate of federally-funded studies showing no effect of a variety of educational innovations and interventions, my predicted answer to the question ('Can Teachers' Talent Translate Elsewhere?') posed in this Houston Chronicle story is "no."

I worry, however, that the basic premise of the federally funded Talent Transfer Initiative is faulty and builds upon the notion of teaching (as reinforced by popular culture) as an individual rather than as a collective pursuit. Can 'superteachers' walk into dysfunctional school cultures and work magic that can result in a quantifiable impact on student learning? Some surely can. (It's too bad we can't clone Jamie Escalante and Frank McCourt, isn't it?) More important to ask is, should we expect them to?

What is more desperately needed than an expensive scheme to redistribute 'superteachers' is a serious attention to teaching and learning conditions. My New Teacher Center colleague, Eric Hirsch, spearheads assessment of school culture and the training of school administrators to more effectively shape it. His and independent research (here and here) has identified that teacher effectiveness is facilitated by a positive school context, including support from leadership, the existence of a collaborative working environment, and time for professional learning.

It doesn't appear that the Talent Transfer Initiative envisions teaching and learning conditions as part of the solution, and that's terribly unfortunate. I wonder if the TTI is even collecting such data to investigate the relationship between these variables and teacher success, or lack thereof? Until we address these contextual issues in low-performing and hard-to-staff schools, we're not going to get the results that we expect and students deserve.

UPDATE (9:35 p.m.) -- Claus von Zastrow offers an excellent blog post on Public School Insights about this study as well.

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Thoughts on Equitable Teacher Distribution

In a U.S. News & World Report article (“In Urban Classrooms, the Least Experienced Teach the Neediest Kids”), the New America Foundation’s MaryEllen McGuire offers a compelling analysis of the problem of inequitable teacher distribution in American schools.

Why are our least experienced professionals consistently being handed the most challenging teaching assignments? Because of the way seniority is rewarded in teacher contracts. More often that not, union contracts dictate that veteran teachers get first dibs on available positions within a school system. As a result, when given the chance, teachers often choose to transfer to more desirable, low-poverty schools. As a result of these transfers, students with the greatest educational need are time and time again taught by the least experienced teachers.

This is a topic that the Education Optimists have written about previously (see here and here). In addition, The Education Trust has done some good work on this issue, including this 2006 report ("Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality") by Kati Haycock and Heather Peske.

But compared to her solid conception of the problem, McGuire somewhat misses the mark on proposed solutions to inequitable teacher distribution. She writes:

This will require a long-term commitment to systemic reform including investing in low-poverty schools to make them more attractive teaching placements and funding incentives to initially attract experienced and, we hope, higher quality teachers to low-income schools. Will this require dollars beyond what we have? Not necessarily. Federal law already provides schools with money to pay for this. It's just that the funds typically go to reduce class sizes or provide professional development for teachers instead - strategies that have mixed results. Some of these funds should be redirected to pay for incentives drawing teachers into high-poverty schools. This is also a great use of stimulus money.

Should some federal Title II dollars be used for recruitment incentives? Sure - but let's not take that idea too far. The distribution problem is one of retention as much as it is one of recruitment. Title II funding should and can be used for high-quality professional development and high-quality induction and mentoring focused on improving teaching practice – efforts directed at making teachers more effective that simultaneously improve retention and self-efficacy. This legislation, sponsored by U.S. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, would go a long way toward these ends. Arguably, these approaches to teacher development are arguably a far better use of stimulus money than recruitment incentives.

In addition, as the author suggests (“more attractive teaching placements”), we need to work with school leaders and policymakers to improve the working conditions in these hard-to-staff, high-poverty schools and districts. We need to provide educators time to collaborate and a role in school decision-making—things that don't cost a whole lot of money but that do require a new way of doing business. Research has shown these factors are often more important than often paltry recruitment incentives in keeping the highest-quality, most effective teachers at hard-to-staff schools.

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Measurement Is Not Destiny

Stephen Sawchuk has written an excellent cover story ("Stimulus Bill Spurs Focus on Teachers") in this week's edition of Education Week. It discusses the federal stimulus legislation which directs states to abide by the equitable teacher distribution provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act -- as well as to improve teacher effectiveness -- in exchange for state stabilization funds and the opportunity to apply for competitive grants as part of Secretary Duncan's "Race To The Top Fund."

With regard to teacher effectiveness, there's just one little problem. There's no definition in federal law -- let alone in state laws -- about what that actually means. From Education Week:

Several states, and some districts, now endorse performance-based teacher evaluations that define good teaching, determine which teachers exhibit such practices, and identify those who fall short for assistance. Others are reorienting professional development toward sustained school-based approaches that researchers say are more likely to change teacher behavior and improve student achievement than “one shot” workshops.

Some efforts to improve teacher effectiveness have proved politically challenging. The federal Teacher Incentive Fund, a performance-pay program, has promoted interest in using test scores to estimate teacher effectiveness. That approach has generally not been favored by teachers’ unions. The tif program received an additional $200 million in the stimulus.

Additionally, a limited number of states have the ability to match teacher records to student data, and even those with the technical capacity have not always used their data to estimate teacher effectiveness. The unions fear such links could ultimately be used to establish punitive policies, and they have successfully lobbied legislators to curb the use of “teacher effect” data in some states. ("Growth Data for Teachers Under Review," Oct. 12, 2008.)

But the possibilities of “value added” are enticing to policymakers. Officials in Tennessee, the lone state that has incorporated teacher-effect data into personnel decisions, are awaiting new data that will reveal whether efforts to attract effective teachers to the most challenged schools have improved results, said Julie McCargar, the state director of federal programs.

This is a huge issue – and it will be interesting to see if the U.S. Department of Education focuses its regulatory definition and its expectations of states – like so many others – simply on measuring and identifying and perhaps rewarding effective teachers. The logical and more purposeful next step, of course, is to look at what behaviors, characteristics, or knowledge make certain educators more effective and then determine how to scale up approaches to initial training or on-going professional development programs to help make the vast majority of teacher candidates, beginning teachers and veteran teachers better. I have no insider knowledge about the Department's thinking around all this, but I’m always astonished at the wealth of policymakers, policy organizations, and foundations that never seem to get past square one on this topic.

Measurement is not destiny.

If all we do is use value-added metrics to determine who the best teachers are and pay them more money for being better, we will be sacrificing the quality of public education for a short-sighted reform. While more money might keep some effective educators from leaving a particular school or district, or from leaving the profession entirely, it won't do anything to make existing and future teachers a whit better.

The teacher effectiveness conversation must be about more than value-added measurement and performance pay, although it can certainly include those elements. It can't be simply about rewarding the good and getting rid of the bad. Fundamentally, it must be about a concerted human capital strategy to use existing knowledge as well as future data and research to strengthen teacher preparation, induction and professional development to improve the skills and abilities of all teachers. Hopefully, the Department's focus on teacher effectiveness will impel such an effort.

We can do better -- by learning from the best teachers and finding ways to replicate their success. Now, that would be effective.

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