NCTQ's Pretty Darn Quick

21 School Districts Added to TR3 Database

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

We've added 21 school districts to TR3, our online database of policies governing teachers in 112 school districts nationwide. These new districts include Broad prize winners, Gates investment districts, and members of the Council of the Great City Schools. TR3 also contains the 50 largest districts in the nation as well as the largest school district in each state.

The new districts are:

Atlanta, GA

Birmingham, AL

Brownsville, TX

Buffalo, NY

Caddo Parish, LA

Charleston, SC

Desoto County, MS

Harrison County, CO

Jefferson Parish, LA

Louisiana Recovery School District

Minneapolis, MN

New Haven, CT

New Orleans, LA

Norfolk, VA

Oakland, CA

Oklahoma City, OK

Richmond, VA

Rochester, NY

Sacramento, CA

Spokane, WA

St. Paul, MN

Ginger Moored

Months of Learning v. Years Teaching

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

A recent Ed Trust-West study quantifies the impact of one of the more troubling findings of our June study of the LA Unified School District: Quality-blind layoffs are bad for Los Angeles students. Of teachers laid off by seniority in 2009, 20 percent were top quartile teachers and 27 percent were bottom quartile. Using performance instead of experience could have meant an additional 8 months' worth of learning for students!

-Priya Varghese

The Double Trouble of Teacher Turnover

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

Teacher turnover has long plagued school leaders and administrators, particularly in urban districts. But a new CALDER paper suggests that teacher turnover may be even more serious than was previously thought.

For districts, turnover poses the challenge of finding replacement teachers that are at least as good or better than the ones who were lost. But what Matt Ronfeldt, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff found is that even if a district can hire teachers of the same effectiveness as those who left, teacher turnover would still have a detrimental impact on learning. Teachers who remain in schools with high rates of attrition actually become less effective.

This conclusion may not come as a surprise. Nonetheless, it should inject a note of caution into the thinking of hard-charging school leaders who understandably want to move quickly to reform underachieving schools. And it makes it all the more imperative for districts to hire and support effective principals who can identify good teachers and encourage them to stay in their schools.

—Graham Drake

The Scarlet I

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

The states and districts engaged in the hard work of developing new teacher evaluation systems face plenty of challenges, including making sure there are actually consequences for low performers. But making ineffective teachers wear a scarlet letter—through publication of evaluation results—shouldn't be one of those consequences.

We raised this point in our paper on state evaluation policies last fall, and we're pleased to see Bill Gates drawing attention to it in an op-ed in the New York Times.

If the evidence says a teacher consistently underperforms, then that teacher shouldn't be in the classroom. States and districts need unambiguous policy that makes it clear that such teachers can be dismissed. But if we believe the purpose of teacher evaluation is to help all teachers grow and improve, then the reality is some students are going to have to be in those classrooms while lower-performing teachers are trying to grow and improve. And those teachers need to be able to go to the supermarket without their job performance being public knowledge while they are trying to grow and improve.

Even putting the humiliation issue aside, publishing ratings creates a staffing nightmare. How can a school run with individual ratings published? This doesn't just affect the low-rated teachers: what parent would be satisfied with a teacher who is just effective when the teacher next door is highly effective?

Parents most certainly need assurance that their children have good teachers. But that assurance needs to come from a system that doesn't allow ineffective teachers to stay on the job, not from public notification of individual teacher ratings.

We think Rhode Island has a better idea. Districts have to ensure that no student is placed with an ineffective teacher two years in a row. Combined with policy that clearly ties ineffective ratings to dismissal and prevents the awarding of tenure to teachers with ineffective ratings, this approach can give parents and the public confidence about the state's teaching force.

-Sandi Jacobs

Studying teacher prep: the more, the merrier

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

The word is out that the National Academy of Education and George Washington University have partnered to launch an extensive research project entitled "The Evaluation of Teacher Education Programs." The project is led by GW's dean, Michael Feuer, and the panel overseeing it includes such heavy hitters as Deborah Ball, dean of the University of Michigan School of Education, and Jeanne Burns, who has helped make Louisiana a leader in the use of value-added data to assess teacher preparation program effectiveness.

The panel's aims are to "synthesize research . . . about existing approaches to evaluate teacher education program quality" and establish a "design framework for new and innovative approaches." So it sounds like the panel's leaders agree with us that state approval and accreditation processes at the very least need a long, hard look, insofar as these processes currently do not distinguish between strong and weak programs. And it seems that they also agree with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who called on teacher prep to consider major structural changes rather than mere "evolutionary tinkering." These are good signs indeed.

Further scrutiny into teacher preparation is exactly what this country needs if we are serious about giving teachers the tools they and their students need to succeed. That's why we have published ten reports over the past seven years on teacher preparation, and why we have spent $2 million developing the standards and methods for our upcoming national review. But in the end, the point of all of this work is to determine which preparation programs are already doing a good job readying teachers for the classroom, and how we can get other programs to emulate them. The stakes for the 1.5 million students being taught by new teachers every year are too high for anything less.

—Arthur McKee