Tag Archives: human capital

Getting the Best Teachers into the Toughest Jobs

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center for american progressEven 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/

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Great People over Great Models

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Mario Marino of Venture Philanthropy Partners recently blogged on the importance of great people for the success of any education reform. Although his audience consists mostly of nonprofits and philanthropies, his reflections are appropriate for anyone working in the education sector. Marino writes:

I’d be the last to discourage innovation, but our problem is not a shortage of ideas, models, knowing what works, or best practices. Instead, it is our failure to execute, deliver what we promise, and convert concepts to sustainable reality. And that failure is squarely rooted in our acute shortage of the kind of leaders that high-performing nonprofit and public agencies require….

Bluntly put, the number-one limiter on our ability to create meaningful, lasting change in our social and public sectors is an acute shortage of the “right people on the bus.” We sometimes give lip service to the need to invest in leadership. We sometimes knit our brows when we think about the impending wave of retirements in our sector. But in spite of the hundreds of leadership development programs in existence, we have not given leadership recruitment, development, and retention anything close to the focus they deserve!

Why? Because “leadership” is much more difficult to define and assess than models and practices… I’ll stay at the organization level and share six Talent Principles that have served me well over the years.

  1. Acknowledge Your Most Important Resource: People
  2. Do, Adapt, Achieve—Day in and Day out
  3. Use Evaluation for Learning and Growth, Not Punishment
  4. Leverage External Resources for Talent Development
  5. Use Succession Planning for Talent Development
  6. Acquire Talent Through Consolidation

In and of themselves, innovative models simply do not drive change. Innovative models and best practices in the hands of mediocre players give you mediocre results, but worse, in the hands of ineffective players are a pure waste of effort and dollars. Yet, innovative models and best practices in the hands of the right people—those with the talent and values the roles require—almost always lead to real change and impressive results.

To read the entire blog post and for more details on the six Talent Principles, see http://www.vppartners.org/learning/chairmans-corner/ill-take-great-people-over-great-models-any-day

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The Missing Piece in Teacher Evaluation Laws: Empowering Principals

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Sara Mead of Bellwether Education recently wrote in an Education Week blog about her investigation into teacher evaluation legislation in 21 states that have passed laws in the last three years requiring teacher evaluations based in part on student achievement. Bellwether’s study finds that 12 states’ laws link tenure to teacher effectiveness, 16 explicitly give districts the ability to dismiss teachers rated ineffective, and 14 require or incentivize performance-based compensation.

Does this legislative activity represent a victory for human capital in the education profession? Maybe not. Mead’s big takeaway from the analysis is that states are more willing to pass evaluation laws than to empower principals and districts to manage human capital decision-making. She writes:

We have to give school districts–and in particular, principals–the ability to effectively manage their teaching staffs, by making decisions about hiring, assignment, and so forth. Right now, a host of provisions in state laws, district policies, and teacher contracts–such as seniority-based transfers, excessing, and “bumping” policies–limit principals’ ability to make decisions about who teaches in their schools or even the positions to which teachers are assigned. Taken together, these provisions also prevent districts from developing sound human capital strategies based on the interests of students, rather than adults…

This is a problem. New evaluation systems have been sold as a way to drive improvement in teacher performance–but evaluations can’t do everything that’s been promised. Driving real improvement in teaching and student learning requires a degree of human judgement and effective management that must be done by people acting in principal and district-level leadership roles–who currently are too often precluding from using this judgement to effectively manage staffing. Moreover, the theory of action behind new evaluation systems remains largely untested in public education, and there are many implementation and design principals. That’s not an argument against new evaluation systems–the status quo they replace was clearly deeply flawed. But, in contrast, it’s abundantly clear why assigning teachers to schools without a principal’s say or agreement undermines the principal’s ability to create a coherent culture in the school and drive improvements in teaching and learning. And it’s worth asking why many states are addressing the former while ignoring the latter.

For more, see Mead’s full blog post: http://tinyurl.com/8sruhgr
See the report: http://bellwethereducation.org/recent-state-action-on-teacher-effectiveness/

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The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis

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A study released yesterday finds that urban schools are systematically neglecting their best teachers, losing tens of thousands every year even as they keep many of their lowest-performing teachers indefinitely-with disastrous consequences for students, schools, and the teaching profession.

The study by TNTP documents the real teacher retention crisis in America’s schools: not only a failure to retain enough teachers, but a failure to retain the right teachers.

The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools, spans four urban school districts encompassing 90,000 teachers and 1.4 million students. It focuses on the experiences of the “Irreplaceables”: teachers so successful at advancing student learning that they are nearly impossible to replace. Schools rarely make a strong effort to keep these teachers despite their success-and rarely usher unsuccessful teachers out.

As a result, the best and worst teachers leave urban schools at strikingly similar rates. The nation’s 50 largest districts lose approximately 10,000 Irreplaceables each year. Meanwhile, about 40 percent of teachers with more than seven years of experience are less effective at advancing academic progress than the average first-year teacher.

The study attributes negligent retention patterns to three major causes:

  • Inaction by school principals. Less than 30 percent of Irreplaceables plan to leave for reasons beyond their school’s control. Simple strategies, like public recognition for a job well done, boost their plans to stay by as many as six years. Yet two-thirds indicated that no one had encouraged them to return for another year. Similarly, principals rarely try to counsel out low performers, even though replacing them with a brand-new teacher will immediately achieve better academic results 75 percent of the time.
  • Poor school cultures and working conditions. Schools that retain more Irreplaceables have strong cultures where teachers work in an atmosphere of mutual respect, leaders respond to poor performance, and great teaching is the priority. Turnover rates among Irreplaceables were 50 percent higher in schools lacking these traits.
  • Policies that impede smarter retention practices. A number of policy barriers hamper principals from making smarter retention decisions. Because of inflexible, seniority-dominated compensation systems, for example, 55 percent of Irreplaceables earn a lower salary than the average low-performing teacher.

The report notes that current retention patterns stymie school turnaround efforts and prevent the teaching profession from earning the prestige it deserves. It offers two major recommendations:

  • Make retention of Irreplaceables a top priority. Districts should aim to keep more than 90 percent of their Irreplaceables annually, monitor and improve school working conditions, pay the best teachers what they’re worth and create new career pathways that extend their reach.
  • Strengthen the teaching profession with higher expectations. Leaders at all levels should set a new baseline standard for effectiveness: Teachers who cannot teach as well as the average first-year teacher should be considered ineffective and dismissed or counseled out (unless they are first-year teachers). Policymakers should change teacher hiring and layoff policies that discourage schools from enforcing higher expectations.

To read the full report, please visit http://www.tntp.org/irreplaceables

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Managing Talent for Coherence: Learning from CMOs

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A new report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) finds that leaders in the charter sector hire teachers based on their fit with a school’s mission, not just their individual characteristics and talent, as a way to build strong schools.  The report, Managing Talent for Coherence: Learning from Charter Management Organizations, details how some CMOs have created personnel systems focused on hiring, developing, and rewarding teachers who best suit their approach and mission.

“As reformers continue to push public education away from compliance-driven human resource policies and toward performance-driven approaches, they need to ask not only how they can hire and reward effective teachers, but also how they can build talent management systems…and create coherent work environments that develop and support their performance,” write the authors of the report.

The CMOs in the study used three broad strategies to find and develop their teachers:

  1. Recruiting and hiring for fit.  CMO leaders sought out teachers with the skills they valued, used focused recruitment messages to communicate their mission and expectations for teachers, and watched candidates teach and interact with members of the school community.
  2. Intensive socialization on the job.  Teachers were continually socialized toward the school’s particular goals and strategies.  This was largely done through teachers and principals watching each other work and constantly sharing information about the schools’ expectations.
  3. Purposeful pay and career advancement opportunities.  Exceptional teachers were given chances to work as staff developers or start new schools.  Some CMOs use flexible, performance-based compensation rather than traditional step-and-lane models.  The promotions and rewards were often determined by a combination of student performance and the professional judgment of leaders, rather than by hard-and-fast performance metrics or assessments.

Most CMOs are non-unionized, which gives them flexibility to try more creative approaches to hiring and compensation.  As a result, the authors acknowledge that not all of these practices can be easily transferred to traditional school districts and union contracts.  However, there are a few things districts could do to develop a more intentional, coherent approach to personnel management.  For example, districts could:

  • Press schools to decide what skills and values their teachers need to be successful
  • Help to create recruiting messages that communicate those priorities
  • Build relationships with different training programs that deliver the right teachers
  • Incorporate demonstration lessons and other assessments into the hiring process
  • Develop classroom-based teacher supports aligned to each school’s values and practices
  • Provide career opportunities and financial rewards for teachers who exemplify the type of teaching the district wants, beyond raising test scores

To read the full report, please visit http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/view/csr_pubs/500

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Studies Give Nuanced Look at Teacher Effectiveness

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In a recent blog post for Education Week¸ Sarah Sparks reported on the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in Vancouver, BC.  Under discussion was the massive Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, funded by the Gates Foundation. MET is finding that their teacher effectiveness assessments “aren’t good at showing which differences are important between the most and least effective educators, and often totally misunderstand the ‘messy middle’ that most teachers occupy.”  Yet the most recent findings of the studies suggest that more nuanced teacher tests, multiple classroom observations, and even student feedback can all create a better picture of what an effective teacher looks like.

“The middle is a lot messier than a lot of state policies would lead us to believe,” says Steve Cantrell, who oversees the MET project.  “Teachers don’t fall neatly into quartiles.  Based on the practice data…all that separates the 25th and 75th on a class (observation) instrument is .68—less than 10 percent of the scale distribution.”  Furthermore, differences in classroom practices between effective and ineffective teachers mostly in classroom management and behavior.

In interviews with 60 teachers at the high and low ends of the spectrum, Drew Gitomer, education chair at Rutgers Graduate School of Education, found that the lowest-performing teachers often had weak reasoning for their instructional decisions, often providing no justification for an approach beyond personal preference.  Strong teachers tended to use questions to look at larger classes of problems and could describe how their approach supported students’ learning.

Ron Feruson, senior lecturer in education and public policy at Harvard, believes that student observations may be key to identifying what works in teaching.  He analyzed surveys from 2,985 MET classes and found that the practices most highly correlated with high achievement were, in order:

  1. Control, in which students reported treating the teacher with respect, that their class behaved, stayed busy and didn’t waste time;
  2. Challenge, in which students reported that they “learn a lot every day” and “learn to correct our mistakes,” and
  3. Clarify, in which students noted that their teacher explains difficult things clearly.

To read more, please visit http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2012/04/the_most_and_least_effective.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2

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The Talent Teacher Initiative: Early Impacts

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Mathematica and the Institute of Education Sciences released a joint report earlier this month on the implementation experience and intermediate impacts of the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI), a pilot transfer-incentive strategy launched in seven school districts.  TTI offered $20,000 to each teacher who transferred from a high-performing to a low-performing school, and the program helped hard-to-staff schools fill 90% of their vacancies.  The goal was to expand disadvantaged students’ access to the most effective teachers.

The report, Moving Teachers: Implementation of Transfer Incentives in Seven Districts, discusses the early impacts of TTI on teacher hiring and support in seven large and diverse districts (including Mobile County (AL) Schools, Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) Schools, and Houston Independent School District.  The study revealed that:

1. A large pool of candidates (16 per slot in this study) is needed to yield an adequate number of successful transfers.

2. In addition to their high value-added scores, TTI teachers had an average of five years’ more teaching experience and were significantly more likely to have a post-graduate degree than were teachers who would normally have been selected to fill vacancies at the low-achieving schools.

3. On average, TTI teachers moved to classrooms with a lower percentage of white students (12 versus 30 percent in their original schools), a higher percentage of Hispanic students (42 versus 31 percent) and a higher percentage of low-income students (89 versus 64 percent).

4. There was no evidence that TTI changed the way students were assigned to teachers within schools.

5. Principals in receiving schools did not report significant impacts, positive or negative, on teacher collaboration, trust and sharing of ideas.

6. TTI teachers used less mentoring and spent more time mentoring their colleagues (25 minutes per week, on average, compared to less than one minute per week for non-TTI teachers), even though there were no specific requirements for TTI transfers to serve as mentors.

In a future report, expected to be released in 2013, Mathematica and IES will estimate the impacts of TTI on student test scores and retention of high-performing teachers. This report will include results from all seven districts participating in this phase of the study as well as from three other districts that were added in 2010 but were not included in the current report (Los Angeles Unified School District, Sacramento City Unified School District and Miami-Dade County Schools).

To read the full report, please visit http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20124051/

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US Department of Education Releases Draft TIF Regulations

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Districts and states planning to apply for Teacher Incentive Fund Round 4 (TIF4) funding need to take steps to engage teachers and administrators, their Boards of Education, and the public in planning for applications.

The TIF 4 draft regulations place emphasis on the core elements of both performance- based compensation and human capital management systems. Additionally, The US Department of Education (US ED) looks for grant proposals that demonstrate an applicant has already engaged stakeholders on these core elements.  The RFP for this round will be released on May 17, with proposals due July 2.  Winning grants are expected to be announced in late August.  This timeline means it is not too early to get started!

The proposed regulations, which are subject to comment and change, place greater emphasis on several areas for TIF 4. Applicants will need to make a direct connection between their state and district teacher and principal evaluation systems and the TIF grant. Therefore, TIF initiatives should work seamlessly with the new teacher and principal evaluation systems being implemented through Race to the Top, as well as those being implemented under new state legislation or through the US ED waivers granted to states through the ESEA Flexibility process. Performance-based compensation will need to be awarded based on teacher evaluation and can also be based on teachers accepting additional professional responsibilities and career ladder positions.
In addition, measures of student and teacher success under both TIF and new teacher and principal evaluation systems need to include measures of student academic growth. Many states are implementing value-added measures of student growth in tested subjects which should be incorporated into the TIF grant. Others are using student growth percentiles.

However, some states and districts are seeking an alternative route: to measure student growth and improve instruction by using Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). The Community Training and Assistance Center (CTAC) has been developing, implementing, and evaluating SLOs as a measure of student growth for more than a decade and currently supports SLO projects in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC), Volusia County (FL), and throughout New York State.

For more information on the proposed rule for TIF4, please visit https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/02/29 (look under “Education Department” heading)

For more information on CTAC and SLOs, please visit www.ctacusa.com/slos.html.

Core Education is pleased to have assisted The College-Ready Promise in securing TIF funding in a previous round. For information about our project management and grant writing services, see www.CoreEducationLLC.com/services.php

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The “Tyranny” of the Self-Contained Classroom

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In a recent opinion piece for Education Week, Arthur Wise of the Center for Teaching Quality writes that current mainstream ideas on how to improve American public schools will result in “at best, a marginal improvement for small numbers of students.”  Teacher effectiveness is worthy of increased research, but the proposals for value-added evaluation measures “will work only if schools do not change.”

In short, Wise argues, the problem is not evaluation methods, unions, or school boards that are preventing change.  The primary force resisting change is the self-contained classroom.  Continued adherence to the “egg crate” school reinforces the status quo, retarding any attempts at transformation.  Additionally, when teachers are absent for other activities or responsibilities, a substitute must be found, who is also fully qualified (by whatever measure the state chooses to recognize as “fully qualified”).

Technology has “failed to transform the way schools operate.”  It does not substitute for labor, and efforts to improve the distribution of human capital have not been successful overall.  Wise cites examples such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which was created to certify accomplished teachers who would then share their expertise; however, those certified by the NBPTS have reported they have not had opportunities to mentor.  Additionally, tenure is generally awarded “too easily and quickly…[usually] the tenure decision is made by default.”  Firing poor performing teachers is difficult, high-quality, individualized PD is hard to come by, and teacher preparation by and large is lacking in practical, longer-term classroom experiences.

Wise encourages every educator to imagine a system that is “free of the tyrannical hold of conventional, self-contained classroom thinking…schools that can responsibly and effectively use short-term teachers, part-time scientists, and community members…with differentiated staffs carrying out roles and responsibilities commensurate with their knowledge and skills…free to devise human-capital strategies that achieve instructional goals at lower costs…and accomplished teachers free to share their expertise with other teachers.”

Wise ends his piece with emphasizing his number one reason for “ending the tyranny:” the student.  As Americans we have a choice between stretching the self-contained classroom paradigm “to sizes that are unacceptable to parents, teachers and students.”  Or, we can develop teams of teachers and technology that can deliver individualized instruction to meet the needs of each student—to “finally begin to prepare all students for the demands of the 21st century.”

To read the full article, please visit http://tinyurl.com/7bjz498

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Teacher Characteristics and Class Assignments

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There is ample research on the differences in teacher distribution across schools vis-à-vis teacher demographics and experience, but what about teacher distribution within schools?  A paper published by the Urban Institute looks at this issue.

By comparing teachers within the same grade level and school in an urban district during a given year, the authors found that less experienced, minority, and female teachers are assigned students with lower and more variable prior achievement, more prior behavioral problems, and lower prior attendance rates; also, they are assigned more low-income and minority students.  Their more experienced, white and male colleagues generally have a lower proportion of the low-achieving, poor and minority students.

Furthermore, the authors found that the teachers’ human capital, which they measured by experience, highest degree earned, attendance at more competitive colleges, and effectiveness at raising student achievement, consistently correlates to the types of students they are assigned—in that, the more effective teachers are assigned higher achieving students with few behavior issues.  The authors propose that this may be because principals want to reward teachers they want to retain and punish those they want to get rid of via an informal method; however, other research suggests that this may not be the case.  Generally the argument is that teachers with more human capital are assigned more advanced courses because they are assumed to have a better grasp of the subject matter; students in these courses of course tend to be higher achieving.

The authors concede that this last explanation may be plausible at the high school level, but argue that it does not explain the patterns of assignment they saw at the elementary level.  Therefore, they are inclined to agree with the former argument that “good” classes are assigned as rewards.  Altogether, these practices are part of the complex leadership process in most schools, which tries “to balance both short and long-term goals as well as pressures from students, teachers and parents.” It suggests that one avenue for decreasing the achievement gap may be through the principalship, with a focus on class assignment.

To read the full paper, please visit http://www.urban.org/publications/1001530.html

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