Educational Research Service Making a Difference in Our Children’s Future

A quarterly journal of school research and information providing access to research studies and reports produced by administrators in local school districts across the nation. Spectrum also features practical research conducted by the academic community, as well as data relevant to public school operation produced outside the field of education.

ERS Spectrum—Winter 2002

A recent Education Week commentary by a teacher educator puts the issue of teacher quality front and center in efforts to improve schools:

Teacher quality is not just an important issue in addressing the challenges facing our schools: It is the issue…Based on everything I have heard and read, and everything I have experienced myself about what works and what doesn’t work in schools, the quality of the teacher is the most important factor in students’ achievement. What teachers know (or do not know) and what they do (or do not do) makes all the difference in the world in learning (Minner 2001).

Educators, students, and parents agree. It takes high quality teachers to ensure that students receive a solid education. For example, in both 1998 and 2000, a survey of Americans ranked the quality of teachers as having the greatest influence on learning, with the percentage increasing from 55 to 60 percent over the two year period. In 2000, 89 percent of the respondents rated “ensuring a well-qualified teacher in every classroom” as very important, with an additional 10 percent saying that it is somewhat important (Haselkorn and Harris, 2001).

Students who report having high quality teaching (“A” overall) are more likely than those who grade their teachers as “D” or “F” quality to agree that students in their school care about learning and getting a good education (70 percent vs. 23 percent); they are also more likely to report that they really want to learn (70 percent vs. 35 percent) (Markow, Fauth, and Gravitch, 2001).

However, there are also concerns. For example, 53 percent of the respondents to a 2001 survey of high school principals said that not enough qualified people apply for positions in their schools, and 49 percent said that the best applicants often have better offers from outside education (NASSP, 2001). And a recent analysis of the teacher shortage has identified job dissatisfaction as a major reason teachers give for leaving the profession, with low salaries, problems with student discipline, and lack of support from school administration given as primary factors (Ingersoll, 2001). Ingersoll cautions school leaders that, due to this “revolving door,” educators should not focus all their efforts on teacher recruitment but should also address issues identified as contributing to turnover.

There are also concerns about the quality of the current teacher workforce. While 71 percent of Americans surveyed in 2000 feel that teachers in their own communities are either highly qualified or well qualified, nearly a quarter (24 percent) feel that the problem of incompetent teacher in public schools is “very widespread,” with another 54 percent indicating that it is “somewhat widespread.”

In Add It Up: Using Research to Improve Education for Low-Income and Minority Students (2001), Anne Lewis and Sandra Paik highlight quality teaching as key to ensuring that students receive a solid education. With the permission of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, their discussion is reproduced below.*

Nothing affects the achievement of low-income and/or minority children as much as the quality of the teaching they receive. No curriculum package, test, governance rearrangement, regulation, or special program can equal the impact of a good teacher, one with the knowledge, skills, and commitment to foster student success.

Linda Darling-Hammond and Deborah Loewenberg Ball identified key research on the importance of quality teaching. One study, by economist Ronald Ferguson of Harvard University, analyzed large-scale data sets and found, after controlling for the socio-economic status of students, that the gap between black and white student achievement was explained almost entirely by differences in their teachers’ qualifications.

Factors in teacher expertise included their education, licensing exam scores, and experience. Overall, teacher expertise accounted for more variation in student achievement than any other factor (about 40% of the total). Every additional dollar spent on more highly qualified teachers, according to Ferguson, netted greater increases in student achievement than other, non-instructional uses of school resources.

A research team led by William Sanders conducted a longitudinal study in Tennessee of teacher effectiveness, based on student scores on state assessments, and found that elementary school students taught by ineffective teachers three years in a row score significantly lower than students taught by highly effective teachers. In fact, three years in a row with poor teaching almost wiped out a student’s chances of keeping up in school.

What does good teaching look like? A five-year study of classrooms by the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools at the University of Wisconsin/Madison identified three characteristics of “intellectual work” in the classrooms: students constructed new knowledge based on what they previously knew through organizing, synthesizing, explaining or evaluating information (not repeating what they already knew); students engaged in disciplined inquiry, gaining in-depth understanding of problems and using elaborated communication to express their ideas and findings (not superficial studies that require only short answers); and students knew how to use their knowledge outside of the school environment, performances that have a value beyond school (not just through quizzes or final exams).

All students, according to the principal researchers, Fred Newmann and Gary Wehlage, “are capable of engaging in these forms of cognitive work when the work is adapted to students’ levels of development.”

In order to provide this kind of instruction, which the researchers term “authentic instruction,” teachers need to meet four standards: they engage students in higher order thinking, they can address central ideas thoroughly in order to help students acquire deep knowledge, they foster substantive conversation among students, and they connect student learning to the world beyond the classroom.

Another study by Michael Knapp, Academic Challenge for the Children of Poverty, focused on elementary schools serving low-income children and came to much the same conclusions. Contrary to the belief that instruction for children from poverty backgrounds must be limited to “the basics,” this study found that non-traditional instruction worked just as well, or even better.

Such instruction was defined as emphasizing meaning and understanding, embedding skills in context, and connecting subjects studied to life outside of the school. Dividing the students into three achievement-level groups, the researchers found that alternative practices worked as well for low achievers as for high ones. On average, “low-performing children increase their grasp of advanced skills at least as much as their high-achieving counterparts when both experience instruction aimed at meaning and understanding. And for both groups, this approach to instruction produces results superior to those of conventional practices.”

The problem for high-poverty and/or high-minority schools, however, is that they are least likely to have teachers who can teach an “authentic” pedagogy.

In Tennessee, for example, black students are more likely to be assigned to the least effective teachers and far less likely to be assigned to the most effective ones. This pattern is repeated nationally.

California’s reduced-class-size initiative created significant teacher shortages, and it was in urban areas such as Los Angeles where the largest percentages of teachers hired to fulfill the lower class size initiative were non-certified (statewide, 20% of teachers in high-poverty elementary schools were not fully credentialed, compared to 4% in low-poverty schools).

Parents in Oakland, for example, organized by the local ACORN group, researched the backgrounds of teachers and found that schools in the “flats,” or the lowest income areas of the city, received the bulk of uncertified teachers hired by the district. In New York State, only one of 33 teachers is uncertified; in New York City, the figure is one of every seven teachers.

Similarly, studies by Jeannie Oakes show that in schools with the highest minority enrollments students have less than a 50% chance of being taught by science or math teachers with a license and a degree in the field they teach. According to an analysis by Hamilton Lankford of the State University of New York/Albany, one in three teachers hired in the 1990s by New York City failed the main licensure exams at least once. Outside of the city, fewer than one in 20 did so. This information was used in Thinking K-16, a publication of The Education Trust, which also critiques teacher licensure exams for their mediocrity, pointing out that most are set about the level of grade 9 to 10.

Union seniority rules often block administrative plans to shift teaching resources to low-income schools. This is one reason why districts might want to “reconstitute” a school, a move that allows the school leadership to select the faculty. John Norton described a different approach taken by schools in Long Beach, California. Focusing on one middle school experiencing low achievement and high teacher turnover, the district assigned expert coaches in the four core subjects to work four days a week at the school—mentoring teachers, modeling instruction, and helping to select and use resources. The strategy proved so useful that the use of coaches has spread throughout the district as a means of delivering professional development on site. Optimally, however, district hiring, evaluation, and support policies work to ensure that every classroom is staffed by a competent teacher.

Critical to building staff expertise is leadership by the principal. Principals who stay in one school can build, over time, the capacity of the staff to set and carry through high academic expectations for students.

Equally important is a principal’s skill at creating a sense of community with a purpose within the school. The Chicago Annenberg Research Project, gathering survey data from 349 of the 489 elementary schools in the district and observations/interviews in 14 schools, found school leadership to be essential for shaping a school’s ability to foster student learning. While the capacity of schools in the Chicago system to produce higher student scores has improved overall, the trends among schools involved in the Annenberg Project showed slightly higher progress—and school leadership was a factor critical to affecting school practice and, thus, student learning. Teachers rated leadership high if the principal supported shared decisionmaking and broad involvement (including parents). They also rated leadership high if the principal was very involved in instructional improvement.

The factors that produce good teaching–beyond the competence of teachers and of principal leadership—certainly are interrelated and centered on the culture of the school. According to the research by Newmann and Wehlage, schools need a clear, shared purpose for student learning; collaborative activity to achieve the purpose; and collective responsibility among teachers and students. Certain structural conditions within schools can create such a professional community:

• Shared governance that increases teachers’ influence over school policy and practice.
  
  
• Interdependent work structures, such as teaching teams that encourage collaboration.
  
  
• Staff development that enhances technical skills consistent with school missions for high quality learning.
  
  
• Deregulation that provides autonomy for schools to pursue a vision of high intellectual standards.
  
  
• Small school size, which increases opportunities for communication and trust.
  
  
• Parent involvement in a broad range of school affairs.

Professional development for teachers should be school based, preferably embedded in instructional efforts through collaborative analysis of student work. This is contrary to most traditional professional development, such as courses leading to certificates or degrees but unrelated to the specific needs of the school, quick fix workshops that do not offer consistent feedback, or professional development offered by external trainers to help teachers adopt specific programs.

The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future recommends that teachers “develop professional discourse around problems of practice” as a central component of professional development. What is needed, the Commission says, is replacing the isolation of teaching with “forums in which teaching and learning can be discussed and analyzed, and where serious examination of practice, its outcomes, and its alternatives is possible.”

Studying mathematics reform in California, David Cohen and Heather Hill found that it is important to align professional development with curriculum. Curriculum workshops in California, in which teachers studied new units for math, used them, and shared results with each other over time, created opportunities for teachers to discuss content as well as pedagogy and curriculum. Their students performed much higher on the state assessment in use at the time than those of teachers who participated in more generic professional development, such as sessions on learning styles or cooperative learning.

While the brief overview above by Lewis and Paik highlights the importance of good teaching and suggests some ways that schools and districts can work toward this goal, the job of attracting and retaining high-quality teachers is becoming ever more difficult. Large numbers of retiring teachers, class size reduction initiatives, low retention of new teachers, and continuing increases in student enrollment are all adding to what could become a critical situation. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that approximately 2.2 million new teachers will be needed in the next decade (1999), and, although a national shortage is anticipated, more severe problems in specific areas such as special education, bilingual education, mathematics, and science are also projected (American Association for Employment in Education 2000).

While many of the suggested solutions to the problem are outside the control of schools and districts, there are actions that education leaders can take to address the need to hire and retain high-quality teachers.

Recruitment

First, review your hiring process, what Clement (2001, 2) describes as the “candidate’s first impression of the school or school district,” to ensure that it helps, rather than hinders, efforts to hire well-qualified teachers. Smith and Knab (1996) found that the best hiring systems:

• identify those attitudes, behaviors, and skills that characterize the kind of teachers most wanted in classrooms;
  
  
• screen for these characteristics at every stage of data collection and candidate evaluation;
  
  
• validate the selection process to ensure that it predicts excellence in classroom and professional performance;
  
  
• ensure that the hiring process complies with federal, state, and local laws;
  
  
• eliminate unproductive paperwork so that the best candidates have confidence in the speed and skill of the system recruiting them;
  
  
• automate the process whenever possible to reduce staff time spent on clerical tasks;
  
  
• reserve labor-intensive personal evaluative techniques only for the most promising candidates;
  
  
• provide prompt, accessible, and accurate information to candidates at all stages of the hiring process; and
  
  
• give decision makers accurate and timely information about the overall process and its results.

By providing principals and others involved with recruiting with information on the extensive research about effective teaching, they will have a better idea of what they are looking for and interviews can focus on these critical factors. Kaplan and Owings also suggest that districts:

Consider equity, achievement, and accountability when making teaching assignments. At-risk students require the most effective teachers. Use your most persuasive leadership skills to challenge traditional school culture and practices that assign the “best” teachers only to the highest achievers. Work with faculty members and school communities to increase the esteem and status of instructors who successfully teach weaker students. These teachers are the heroes who will save your school’s accreditation and increase your graduation rate (2001, online).

Development

Kaplan and Owings also have suggestions for principals as they work with teachers: provide “support, specific feedback, and professional development when needed.” This development should be “connected to their work with students, linked to concrete learning tasks, organized around problem solving, informed by research, and sustained over time by ongoing coaching, collaboration, and conversation” (2001, online).

Studies of school districts that are successfully—and substantially—improving student achievement show that these schools have typically identified the use of assessment data to improve instruction as a topic for staff development. Teachers need training in how to use assessment results to help identify and address the needs of individual students to improve their own instructional techniques (Cawelti and Protheroe 2001). These successful districts are also careful to align staff development with school and district priorities. For example, a district initiative focused on early grades literacy is supported by extensive and aligned staff development on the teaching of reading.

It is important that special support and development efforts be focused on the beginning teacher, both to quickly increase his or her effectiveness in the classroom and to increase the likelihood for long-term retention. Clement suggests that discussing these supports during job interviews may encourage candidates to sign on with the district and also stresses that schools should “follow up on the promises” (2001, 7). She then follows with specific suggestions:

While it is generally a fact of life that new teachers will struggle somewhat, school leaders can do their part to minimize the time and energy they spend struggling. Teachers who participate in planned, effective induction, support, and mentoring programs will feel less stress and alienation in the initial phases of their job, and probably will have more energy to put into their classroom teaching.

Installing a solid induction program that enables new teachers to ride out rough times has several benefits. New teachers will become more effective more rapidly. Veteran teachers will spend less time hand-holding and supporting new teachers. By reducing the potential for early burnout of the new teachers, you may have to hire fewer teachers in the spring.

Induction can include orientation, support groups, seminars, and mentoring. Each district needs to evaluate its current practices for inducting and supporting new teachers, then customize a program to ensure that newly hired teachers feel supported during the critical first years in the district (7).

In her view, the supports should be comprehensive and include an orientation with time for new teachers to meet other teachers and to prepare for the arrival of students, support seminars on topics such as parent teacher conferences, and mentoring by both a teacher and the principal or other school leader.

Retention

The efforts above for new teachers can have a substantial impact on district efforts to increase retention—but a broader view is needed. Eubanks (2000) suggests that the district start by routinely asking a key question: why do teachers leave the district or specific schools within the district? While some may be beyond the immediate control of the district, for example, opportunities for significantly higher salaries outside education, others can definitely be addressed. For example, teacher satisfaction has been shown to be higher in schools in which teachers work together to learn and to solve problems. The sense of being a part of a professional community is both a powerful motivator and a significant source of job satisfaction.

Problems should also be addressed. For example, an often-identified source of teacher dissatisfaction is inadequate support from building administrators. Conversations between building administrators and teachers can focus on identifying what this really “means” and then on developing construction solutions.

In Summary

Teacher quality is a multifaceted issue, but one that all agree is critical to student success. Leadership is essential at both the central office and building levels to ensure that there is a qualified teacher in every classroom, and that teachers have the support they need to do their jobs well. Clement suggests that “dynamic administrators who support teachers and use teachers’ expertise in decision-making will create a school where teachers want to work” (2001, 3).

For many districts, developing a more coordinated view of the professional life of a teacher, from recruitment to retirement, and discussing ways to enhance efforts to recruit and retain high-quality teachers may be a key first step.

Copyright © 2002 by Educational Research Service

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