Getting the Best Teachers into the Toughest Jobs

Posted on May 14, 2013 by coreeducation

Even though it has been known for some time that teachers and principals play the largest role in student success, it is only recently that districts and schools have started making requisite changes to their strategic management of talent. This is the central contention of Allan Odden’s new report, Getting the Best People into the Toughest Jobs: Changes in Talent Management in Education, which delves into detail about how those changes began, just what those changes are, and how that process of change is progressing.

Allan Odden is the director of Strategic Management of Human Capital, professor emeritus of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. His recently authored report was written for the Center for American Progress.

The executive summary states the following:

The issue of strategic talent management in education leapt onto the policy and practice agenda quite recently. Yet in a short time period, huge changes in policy and practice have occurred. From a set of disjointed policies and even-worse practices, a comprehensive and holistic view of strategic talent management in education is developing, supported by new and ambitious federal and state policies and rapidly changing local practices. Admittedly, policy design still needs significant calibration, and local implementation is far from complete. But the landscape of how teachers and principals—the education talent—are managed is dramatically changing. A once-haphazard mix of approaches is moving toward many more strategic systems that are designed to ensure that only effective teachers and principals are recruited, tenured, retained, and well-compensated—particularly in urban and poor rural communities.

This paper examines the evolving landscape of talent management in education, broken in five sections:

Section one: Talent management, or lack thereof, in education at the close of the 20th century
Section two: Educational change that began at the dawn of the 21st century
Section three: Rumblings of change that evolved into comprehensive new federal and state human-capital management policies and local practices
Section four: Rumblings of change that coalesced into a foundation of change across the country and the new world of talent management
Section five: Why the focus on talent evolved and quickly assumed such a prominent role in the nation’s education policy and practice agendas

In part, due to positive state and local response to federal requirements for new education programs such as Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and No Child Left Behind waivers, states and districts are identifying and using new channels for recruiting better talent into the nation’s schools, especially high-poverty schools in urban and rural areas. States and school districts are also developing new ways of evaluating teachers—methods that use a measure of instructional practice and evidence of student learning, and in some cases student surveys on the academic environment. States and districts are then using these new metrics to determine whether or not to tenure teachers, as a condition for promotion, to implement new salary schedules, and for dismissal—instead of seniority.

Though there is steady progress toward designing and implementing all these new policies and practices across the country, there is also opposition, and the road forward will certainly be bumpy. To be successful, these initiatives need to solve some major challenges such as making the new evaluation systems affordable; ensuring that the scores that teachers receive on their evaluations derive from “cut” scores that are set at rigorous levels in order to accurately identify the most effective and most ineffective teachers; deciding where to put the toughest requirements for entering the teaching professions so the talent that flows from the new recruitment sources are not shut off; and embedding all this in an effective school improvement strategy that is linked to the new Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Among the recommendations is adjustment of entry standards to the profession to ensure that only the top talent meets the entry standards—based on rigorous assessments of content knowledge and by implementing a rigorous “bar exam,” which should assess both instructional expertise and impact on student learning—as well as standards for full professional license to be required of every novice teacher at some point after three to five years of teaching. This approach supports both traditional and alternative pathways into the profession, while also ensuring that only demonstrably effective teachers earn the full professional license and then tenure—whatever their pathway into the profession.

For access to the full report, see: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2013/04/04/58474/getting-the-best-people-into-the-toughest-jobs/

Related video from the Center for American Progress is available at the following link: http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2013/03/26/58049/getting-the-best-people-into-the-toughest-jobs/

Reflections on the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession

Posted on May 1, 2013 by coreeducation

Back in mid-March, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, hosted the third International Summit on the Teaching Profession. This particular summit focused on teacher quality, including professional standards and teacher appraisal. The past two took place in New York City at the invitation of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) composed a summary of his thoughts on the event. About the purpose of the event, he said, “The aim was to provide a venue in which the top officials involved in making policy for teachers and teaching in their countries could, aided by analyses provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Education International (EI), compare notes on strategy and implementation, and by so doing, further improve their own education systems. Nothing quite like this had ever happened before.”

Despite not having attended himself, his comments reflect conversations with several attendees. His goal in the comments was to address some of the differing opinions of those who attended.

It was broadly agreed that teacher evaluation and appraisal is very important and that it could be effective only in systems also designed to:

Make teaching an attractive profession,
Provide very high-quality initial teacher education,
Create a school management system in which teachers could act as autonomous professionals within a collaborative culture, and
Engage teachers in developing the evaluation system.

And that was frame with which OECD and EI opened the third summit.

This is a very sensible approach. It could potentially provide a roadmap leading to sound policy that would also provide an opportunity for all parties to claim victory, but it would have been too much to expect that it would relieve all the tensions with which the second summit ended.

In the eyes of several observers, no one at the table at the third summit was advocating that teacher evaluation and appraisal be used to weed out bad teachers. And everyone agreed that teachers both needed and wanted feedback. But, with that off the table, there was still tension between those who are most comfortable with the use of evaluation for professional growth and development, on the one hand, and those who see it as a vital tool in the design and implementation of tough-minded accountability systems on the other. And, in the middle were those who were naturally inclined to the position apparently so well articulated by Andreas Schleicher at the meeting, namely that teacher evaluation is best thought of as an important component of a much larger system built around a conception of teachers as highly capable professionals, not as cogs in a Tayloristic management design.

That vision assumes that the criteria against which teachers are being judged is not limited to student performance on basic skills in a narrow range of subjects but on their ability to help students succeed against the full range of outcomes now widely referred to as 21st century skills, many of which are difficult if not impossible to measure. In Tayloristic systems, everyone assumes that management will assess the workers in any way they see fit, usually according to fairly simplistic criteria; in professional environments, the direction of accountability is at least as much to one’s colleagues as to one’s superiors in the organizational structure. So who is to devise the criteria for judging teachers and who is to decide whether an individual teacher meets them? In blue collar environments, all workers are regarded as equal, if not interchangeable. But, in a professional environment, the professionals acquire increasing responsibility, authority and compensation as they demonstrate increasing competence and skill. Perhaps, as nations move toward conceptions of teachers and teaching grounded in the idea of teacher as professional, the idea of teacher evaluation and appraisal should be inextricably connected to the development of formalized career ladders for teachers.

The third summit did indeed address these and other issues. This made for some tough conversations. It became very clear that it was going to be hard to resolve these issues without some real trust among the parties, both at this table, and, by implication, within the countries represented.

For Tucker’s full comments, see: http://www.ncee.org/2013/04/tuckers-lens-the-2013-international-summit-on-the-teaching-profession/

For the summit website, see: http://www.teachersummit2013.org/

Following is a link to a blog post about the summit from the Education Department’s website: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2013/03/third-international-summit-on-the-teaching-profession-sitting-at-our-table/

Teacher leadership crucial to teacher development

Posted on March 21, 2013 by coreeducation

Two new reports from the New Teacher Center and the Aspen Institute both highlight the importance of rigorous training for new teachers. By looking at the work currently being done by certain model school districts, both reports highlight models through which novice teachers become master teachers. Interestingly, both reports also assert the importance of incorporating teacher-leaders into a rigorous teacher training system that goes far beyond simply tying student test results to teacher evaluations.

The press release for the Aspen Institute report provides a summary:

A new report by Rachel Curtis for the Aspen Institute explains how school systems can thoughtfully design and advance teacher leadership efforts to improve teacher performance, increase student achievement, and meet the heightened expectations ushered in by the Common Core. Finding a New Way: Leveraging Teacher Leadership to Meet Unprecedented Demands, articulates critical issues, and offers recommendations for systems interested in developing teacher leaders and career pathways. Teacher leadership work in Achievement First Charter Schools, Denver Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Singapore are compared and contrasted to illustrate common approaches and areas of divergence in these systems.

Finding a New Way provides timely advice and guidance on how to replace the anachronistic and incredibly flat structure of the teaching profession with dynamic career opportunities. By recognizing the deep of well of leadership potential that currently lies fallow in effective teachers, public education can take advantage of existing talent, expand high-quality feedback and development opportunities, and increase the number of students taught by effective teachers.

New, more rigorous teacher evaluations create an unprecedented opportunity by identifying the most effective teachers; public education must respond to this opportunity with more deliberate systems for retaining top talent and developing leadership potential. Distributing leadership responsibility to teacher leaders can elevate the status of the profession, improve recruitment and retention of talent, and make the job of principals more manageable – all in service of increasing student achievement.

Finding a New Way establishes a clear process for establishing shared purpose for pursuing teacher leadership and for designing, implementing, and learning from teacher leader work. Throughout the report, examples from the field are woven together with advice and guidance on how to launch teacher leadership work that is strategic and sustainable.

In addition to the report by the Aspen Institute, the New Teacher Center has released a new report, Cultivating Effective Teachers Through Evaluation And Support: A Guide For Illinois Policymakers And Educational Leaders, which “explores whether a new state teacher evaluation law – Illinois’s Performance Evaluation Reform Act – provides sufficient growth and learning opportunities for beginning teachers. It concludes that evaluation alone cannot inform and accelerate new teacher development. Teacher learning must be supported through an aligned talent management system that includes the induction of beginning teachers.”

While the Guide is customized for policy and school leaders in Illinois, its content may potentially interest a national education audience. The Guide raises important questions about whether teacher evaluation as currently construed and designed provides a depth and frequency of feedback to meet the learning needs of beginning teachers. It offers three examples of school districts (Hillsborough County, Florida; Montgomery County, Maryland; Pleasanton Unified, California) that have implemented teacher evaluation systems that are purposeful about developing and supporting new teachers.

Following are direct links to the reports:

http://newteachercenter.org/products-and-resources/policy-reports/illinois-guide-policy-makers-educational-leaders

http://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/finding-new-way-leveraging-teacher-leadership-meet-unprecedented-demands

How satisfied are educators with their jobs?

Posted on March 10, 2013 by coreeducation

According to a MetLife survey, educators’ levels of satisfaction have dropped appreciably in recent years, but others see the change as a result of poor surveying techniques.

“According to the survey, principal and teacher job satisfaction is declining. The responsibilities school leaders face have become increasing complex, and the biggest challenges leaders face are beyond the capacity of schools alone to address.” The survey can be found here: https://www.metlife.com/metlife-foundation/what-we-do/student-achievement/survey-american-teacher.html?WT.mc_id=vu1101 and a detailed summary of the findings can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/21/u-s-teachers-job-satisfaction-craters-report/

In addition, the Alliance for Excellent Education has posted a recorded webinar entitled, “The Metlife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership”. The webinar “capture[s] the viewpoints and experiences of teachers and principals working to implement the Common Core State Standards, transform curriculum and instructional practice, address the individual needs of diverse learners, and ensure all students are college and career ready in an environment of continued strained resources.” The link for the webinar is here: http://www.all4ed.org/webinars

However, Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education sees it quite differently. He argues that the reason for the decline in teacher satisfaction has much more to do with the fact that the survey question was changed this time around:

“Metlife asks about job satisfaction in different ways in different years. In 2008 and 2009 they asked teachers, ‘How satisfied would you say you are with teaching as a career?’ The survey didn’t ask about satisfaction in 2010, but in 2011 and 2012 teachers were asked, ‘How satisfied would you say you are with your job as a teacher in the public schools?’”

“Veteran pollster and polling expert Mark Blumenthal, who is now the polling editor for The Huffington Post, says they are different questions and that ‘presenting the two questions on a single trend line is questionable.’”

“He’s being polite, too. What Metlife did would be akin to asking a soldier on a tough deployment how he likes his job vs. asking him how he likes his career in the armed forces — and claiming that it was the same question.”

Rotherham’s full views on the report can be found here: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/02/25/poll_finds_teacher_satisfaction_but_reports_skew_results_117148.html

“Un-MET’ Goals”: Questions about Gates Foundation’s MET Study

Posted on February 10, 2013 by coreeducation

In response to the release of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project final results , which this blog posted about here, the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) has released a review of the long-awaited study on teacher evaluation that strongly questions the spin that has been put on the findings.

The MET project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, released its final set of reports this month. Those reports are supposed to advise schools and districts about how to design teacher evaluations.

However, a review by the NEPC of the MET research – an ambitious, multi-year study of thousands of teachers in six school districts – finds that the study’s results were inconclusive and provide little usable guidance.

“The MET research does little to settle longstanding debates over how best to evaluate teachers comprehensively,” said Jesse Rothstein of the University of California Berkeley. Rothstein and William Mathis, NEPC’s managing director, conducted the review for the policy center’s Think Twice think tank review project.

The MET study compared three types of teacher performance measures: student test scores, classroom observations, and student surveys. The project concluded that the three should be given roughly equal weight in teacher evaluations.

Rothstein and Mathis found that the data do not support that conclusion. Instead, the data indicate that each measure reflects a distinct dimension of teaching. Rothstein said, “Any evaluation system needs to be founded on a judgment about what constitutes effective teaching, and that that judgment will drive the choice of measures. Nothing in the MET project’s results helps in forming that judgment.”

“While we commend The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for investing millions of dollars in tackling critical education issues, the conclusions in this case do not jibe with the data,” said Mathis.

Teacher evaluation has emerged as a prominent educational policy issue; it was, for instance, one of several contested points during the Chicago teachers’ strike in September 2012. And it is a key element of the Obama administration’s education policy. Debate over teacher compensation, hiring and firing, which once centered on traditional salary matrices and teacher observation systems, is increasingly focused on finding concrete outcome measures – particularly, student test score gains. But these measures are controversial, as critics claim that they miss important dimensions of teacher effectiveness.

Following are some of the issues NEPC’s reviewers found with the MET study:

Samples Were Not Representative of the Teaching Force
The centerpiece of the MET study was an experiment that randomly assigned students to teachers. This experimental approach was meant to determine once and for all whether value-added (VA) scores are biased by student assignments. That is, do teachers who are assigned more successful students benefit in terms of their VA scores? But the group of teachers who participated in the MET experiment turned out not to be representative of teachers as a whole, and many participating schools failed to comply with their experimental assignments. As a result, the experiment did little to resolve the question.

No Single “Quality” Factor
Each type of measure explored in the MET study (student test scores, classroom observations, and student surveys) captures an independent dimension of teaching practice. But each measure provides only minimal information about the others. These results indicate that there is no single general teaching “quality” factor– or that if there is any such factor it accounts for only a small share of the variation in each of the measures. Rather, there are a number of distinct factors, and policymakers must choose how to weight them in designing evaluations.

MET Results do not Impact Student Performance on Conceptually Demanding Assessments
None of the three types of performance measures captures much of the variation in teachers’ impacts on alternative, conceptually demanding tests. There is little reason to believe that an evaluation system based on any of the measures considered in the MET project will do a good job of identifying teachers who are effective (or ineffective) at raising students’ performance on these more conceptually demanding assessments.

Find the full review at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013

New Pathways for Teachers, New Promises for Students

Posted on January 30, 2013 by coreeducation

In a recent AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 report, Timothy Knowles argues persuasively for radical changes with a practical mindset. His article is called “New pathways for teachers, new promises for students: A vision for developing excellent teachers.” Knowles, John Dewey Director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, writing as part of the American Enterprise Institute’s Teacher Quality 2.0 series, focuses on reform of teachers and concludes, “If we are to significantly improve academic outcomes for American children, we must re-conceptualize what it means to teach, and build ambitious new systems to recruit, prepare, place, retain, incent, and hold individuals and institutions accountable for results. . . And, finally, everyone—organized labor included—must put a stake in the ground, and take unfamiliar steps toward making teaching a legitimate profession.”

The article makes compelling arguments for changes that are big enough to offer hope of real change yet realistic enough to be feasible certainly. Knowles consolidates his recommendations into six categories:

Recruitment: Aggressively subsidize teacher education programs that deliver results; eliminate federal policies that conflate certification with quality; increase beginning teacher salaries; improve tools to assess aspiring teacher candidates.
Preparation: Demand an undergraduate major in the teaching subject area for all teacher candidates; dramatically diversify approaches to teacher training; institute results-based, renewable teacher licensure.
Placement: Encourage “preparation to placement” pipelines; invest in district-level recruitment; place cohorts of teachers from particular training institutions in specific schools.
Early Retention: Encourage school systems and teacher education programs to jointly support new teachers; measure and report on which schools are or are not good places to learn and work.
Career Incentives: Diversify roles for exemplary teachers; base compensation on student success; provide ongoing, job-embedded training and development.
Accountability: Develop tools that accurately measure multiple indicators of teacher success; measure and report on the extent to which schools are organized for improvement; hold all teacher training institutions publicly accountable for graduate hiring, retention, and classroom success; give students incentives to care about their learning.

Frederick M. Hess, the Director of Education Policy Studies at AEI, in the foreword to the report, fits Knowles’ work into the larger framework of the AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 Reports:

As we start to rethink outdated tenure, evaluation, and pay systems, we must take care to respect how uncertain our efforts are and avoid tying our hands in ways that we will regret in the decade ahead. Well-intentioned legislators too readily replace old credential- and paper-based micromanagement with mandates that rely heavily on still-nascent observational evaluations and student outcome measurements that posit as many questions as answers. . . AEI’s Teacher Quality 2.0 series seeks to reinvigorate America’s now-familiar conversations about teacher quality by looking at today’s reform efforts as constituting initial steps on a long path forward.

For more information, including a link to the full report, please visit the following website:

http://www.aei.org/papers/education/k-12/teacher-policies/new-pathways-for-teachers-new-promises-for-students-a-vision-for-developing-excellent-teachers/

Three-year Study offers Conclusive Findings on the Crucial Role of Teachers

Posted on January 22, 2013 by coreeducation

The Measures of Effective Teaching Project, the collective work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Harvard University’s Center For Education Policy Research, has recently released a detailed report on three years of research on 3,000 teachers in seven school districts that conclusively finds that “the quality of teachers directly affects test score results regardless of a student’s past performance.”

The seven school districts involved in the study include Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Dallas Independent Schools, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Memphis Public Schools, New York City Public Schools, and Pittsburgh Public Schools.

According to the report, three key measures should be used collectively for teacher evaluation: observations of teachers, student surveys, and student test scores. The MET Project explains them as follows:

Classroom observation instruments, including both subject-specific and cross-subject tools, define discrete teaching competencies and describe different levels of performance for each.
Student perception surveys assess key characteristics of the classroom environment, including supportiveness, challenge, and order.
Student achievement gains on state tests and on more cognitively challenging assessments.

The formal title of the final report of the MET study is, “Ensuring Fair and Reliable Measures of Effective Teaching: Culminating Findings from the MET Project’s Three-Year Study.” The MET Project has released four previous preliminary reports, all along similar lines, which have addressed the issue of how effective teaching can effectively be evaluated. In the initial report in 2010 (Learning about Teaching), researchers found that a well-designed student perception survey can provide reliable feedback on aspects of teaching practice that are predictive of student learning. In 2012 (Gathering Feedback for Teaching), they presented similar results for classroom observations and found that an accurate observation rating requires two or more lessons, each scored by a different certified observer.

This final report of the MET Project has reached three main conclusions:

Effective teaching can be measured. The data show that we can identify groups of teachers who are more effective in helping students learn. Moreover, the magnitude of the achievement gains that teachers generated was consistent with expectations.
Balanced weights for multiple evaluation measures indicate multiple aspects of effective teaching. A composite with weights between 33 percent and 50 percent assigned to state test scores demonstrated the best mix of low volatility from year to year and ability to predict student gains on multiple assessments. Multiple measures produce more consistent ratings than student achievement measures alone.
Adding a second observer increases reliability significantly more than having the same observer score an additional lesson. These additional observations may be for shorter periods.

To read the report, see http://www.metproject.org/downloads/MET_Ensuring_Fair_and_Reliable_Measures_Practitioner_Brief.pdf

For more in-depth analysis of the report, please visit the following links:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/08/17teach_ep.h32.html?tkn=QLVFELV%2FijsUPd9rgNLNZ%2FBjlvQWlnlxwYsx&cmp=clp-edweek

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/gates-study-weve-figured-out-what-makes-a-good-teacher/2013/01/08/05ca7d60-59b0-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html

Video Teacher Evaluations: Memphis Schools say Yes

Posted on January 20, 2013 by coreeducation

Memphis City Schools has partnered with Teachscape to install a city-wide system of video capture systems that will allow for improved teacher professional growth. The city expects to use the system for teacher development, support, as well as evaluation. Each school will have at least one device as part of the district’s long term goal of creating a library of successful teaching practices that can be used to instruct Memphis teachers.

“The use of Teachscape’s video technology allows our teachers to be their own first observer,” said Monica Jordan, coordinator of reflective practice and teacher support at Memphis City Schools. “Teachers have so many ways in which they can use video to enhance their practice. They can use it for self-reflection, feedback, instructional planning, lesson prep, co-teaching, and more.”

Memphis teachers first had the opportunity to use video for professional growth as part of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ms. Jordan added, “As a result of the MET Project, teachers started using video to deconstruct and analyze their lessons and saw its value in improving their teaching effectiveness, and ultimately student achievement.”

Use of video for teacher evaluations has been a growing, yet contentious, issue in recent years. One other example of the possibility of using video for evaluations is the proposed Teacher Performance Assessment for pre-service teacher candidates. Wisconsin, as well as some other states, have discussed the future possibility of having teaching candidates record sessions of themselves teaching. Those sessions would be judged by master teachers or administrators to analyze readiness for that candidate to enter the teaching field.

For more information, please visit the following websites:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/memphis-city-schools-selects-teachscape-video-solution-to-augment-teacher-effectiveness-initiative-186016762.html

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/new-teachers-getting-ready-to-be-graded-on-classroom-work-dg4fu8e-142232725.html

January Issue Brief: The Importance of Teachers

Posted on January 17, 2013 by coreeducation

With new standards, technology-facilitated curriculum, and extensive formative and summative assessment design, the importance of the teacher is at risk of being overlooked. In study after study, the teacher is held up as the most significant variable for student success. In this month’s issue brief, we explore the importance of teachers and their insights for the success of any reform effort.

What are your best practices for hiring, retaining and involving great teachers? Please respond to our call for commentary. We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for all you do to support and inspire great educators and engaging education.
Kim Fleming
President, Core Education LLC

To check out this month’s newsletter and access these resources, please follow this link:

http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=a4ae2b1b129b9f8a29d50b80f&id=eef7e52f13&e=19cfa03b4e

To ensure you do not miss future issues, we encourage you to subscribe to the monthly newsletter by following this link:

http://eepurl.com/lcVM

Analysis of achievement data to measure teacher effectiveness

Posted on January 2, 2013 by coreeducation

The Strategic Data Project (SDP), part of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, has teamed with Los Angeles Public Schools (LAUSD) for the last two years and has just released findings based on “analysis of student achievement data to measure teacher effectiveness.” The formal title of the revealing report is The LAUSD Human Capital Diagnostic.

The report argues that while we have known for some time that teachers are the single most important variable for student success, we have not had the data, or more importantly the accurate analysis of data, to prove this notion fully.

The major policy goal of the SDP is to effectively make use of the wealth of data available today, and they have done this with LAUSD by evaluating student and teacher data between the 2004-5 school year and the 2010-11 school year. SDP looked at “the placement of students to teachers, the usage of extended substitutes, the impact of layoffs based on seniority, the relative success of novice teachers recruited from alternative pathways, and the improved effectiveness of teachers as they gain experience, degrees and certification.”

The most salient results concern teacher placement and development:

New teachers are too often placed with students who are already behind, only compounding students’ problems.
Teachers from Career Ladder and Teach for America are better than typical novice teachers.
National Board Certification is a stronger indicator of teacher effectiveness than is an advanced degree.
Wide variance in teacher effectiveness indicates a range of possibilities for teacher development.

For more information, and links to the press release and full report, please visit: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/cepr/news-events/index.php

The "Core" of Education

Category Archives: Teacher Effectiveness & Retention