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/

TNTP says Teachers’ First Year is Crucial

Posted on April 22, 2013 by coreeducation

TNTP, a national nonprofit committed to ending the injustice of educational inequality, has released a new report that seeks to help first year teachers become better teachers. TNTP was created by teachers in 1997, so the TNTP team has a vested interested in creating cohorts of new teachers who have the critical dispositions that they need to succeed.

Over the last two years, TNTP has radically evolved the way it trains and evaluates new teachers, becoming an organization that certifies teachers based mainly on their actual performance in the classroom. The experience gained during those two years means that TNTP can now share what it has learned in its latest report entitled, “Leap Year: Assessing and Supporting Effective First-Year Teachers.”

Leap Year explores a simple idea: The first year is the most important year of a teacher’s career, and it should be treated that way. Right now, most schools and preparation programs treat teachers’ first year like a warm-up. Instead, it should be seen as a critical window of opportunity to help teachers develop essential skills and make thoughtful decisions about whether they can make a successful career teaching.

TNTP has put this philosophy into practice in 15 programs across the country with the Assessment of Classroom Effectiveness (ACE), a multiple-measures evaluation system designed specifically to ensure that first-year teachers in the TNTP Teaching Fellows and TNTP Academy programs meet a high standard of effectiveness.

Leap Year explains the development of ACE and what its first year taught TNTP about evaluating and supporting the growth of approximately 1,000 new teachers. Here are some of the key conclusions:

New teachers perform at different levels and improve at different rates. Contrary to conventional wisdom, first-year teacher performance is not uniform. Some start strong, while others struggle. Many improve as they gain experience, but some do not.
Teachers’ initial performance predicts their future performance. In particular, teachers who struggled from the start rarely came close to becoming effective, even in their second year.
A few core skills appear to be important to first-year teachers’ success. TNTP found that first-year teachers who are purposeful, responsive and focused on student understanding develop more quickly.

The report goes on to make the following conclusions based on the experience of ACE and similar programs of the last two years:

Certification should be linked to a teacher’s actual performance in the classroom, not just coursework and seat time. Nothing better indicates a teacher’s future success than his or her first-year performance.
Teacher preparation programs should stop certifying teachers who are unlikely to become effective, which only does a disservice to those teachers and their students.
Schools need to help first-year teachers focus on the skills that matter most for their future success, providing regular useful feedback along the way.

To learn more, please download Leap Year from TNTP’s website:

http://tntp.org/ideas-and-innovations/view/leap-year-assessing-and-supporting-effective-first-year-teachers

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

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/

Teacher raises: What works best?

Posted on December 16, 2012 by coreeducation

A crucial question at the nexus of the issues of student achievement and battles between school districts and teachers unions is the issue of teacher pay scale. A helpful study by Jason A. Grissom of Vanderbilt University and Katharine O. Strunk of the University of Southern California has recently delved deeply into this question and come to the conclusion that creative options may be best for districts seeking to boost student achievement while also facilitating teacher growth.

The two primary types of pay scale options used by school districts and evaluated by Grissom and Strunk are front loaded pay schedules and back loaded pay schedules. In the first model, young teachers, who may be attracted outside of the teaching profession by other, more lucrative job opportunities, are offered rapid increases in pay in their first years of teaching. The goal of the front loaded model is to bring in high achieving new teachers so that students will make corollary improvements. In this front loaded model, young teachers receive an average of 37% greater raises based on years of experience than do teachers who have been in the profession longer. Critics of this model argue that these teachers are not yet equipped to provide their students with the same level of quality instruction as their veteran counterparts.

The more common model in districts that use collective bargaining, due to the dominance of older, more experienced teachers in teachers unions, is the back loaded pay schedule. The theory here is that veteran teachers are the ones who will help students make the greatest achievement gains, so those teachers should be retained through attractive pay scale options. On average, these veteran teachers receive salary increases of 135% more than non-veteran teachers. This model has sometimes been held up as a paragon of the problem of teachers unions: older, burned-out teachers protect each other but do not help students make gains.

Grissom and Strunk, after serious study of the empirical evidence, suggest that neither plan is the silver bullet for satisfying teachers or increasing student achievement. First, the authors argue that there is correlation between back loaded pay schedules and a lack of student achievement gain; however, the correlation is so small that it cannot be seen as causal. Further research here would help clarify the efficacy of back loaded pay schedules. Furthermore, the authors argue that front loaded schedules do help attract quality, young teachers, but that this cannot as of yet be conclusively linked with greater student achievement. In conclusion, Grissom and Strunk offer creative options that may break the mold of these two dominant pay scale models. As succinctly summed up by Amber M. Winkler of the Fordham Institute for Advancing Educational Excellence, “For districts struggling under onerous collective-bargaining agreements, other financial perks such as loan-forgiveness or signing bonuses might make sense instead.”

For a link to a summary by Amber M. Winkler, see http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-weekly/2012/september-13/how-should-school-districts-shape-teacher-salary-schedules.html#body

For the original article, please see http://epx.sagepub.com/content/26/5/663

Is DCPS a model urban school district?

Posted on December 7, 2012 by coreeducation

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) has recently released a new report, Keeping Irreplaceables in D.C. Public Schools: Lessons in Smart Retention, which holds up the reforms begun in DC public schools by former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee as a model for human capital reform. The main thrust of the reforms highlighted concerns good teacher retention through new processes of teacher evaluation and compensation.

TNTP was founded by Michelle Rhee in 1997, and current DCPS chancellor Kaya Henderson is also a former TNTP executive, so it may come as no surprise that TNTP supports the reforms that have been taking place there, but the findings merit serious consideration because DCPS is “the first large school district in the country known to be retaining far more of its Irreplaceables than its low-performing teachers.”

The report claims that schools lose their best teachers due to the combination of “weak school leadership, poor working conditions, and restrictive policies.” Most school districts retain good and bad teachers at about the same level—bad news for students. But since the reform began in DC in 2007 under Rhee, according to the report, DCPS has retained 88% of its “Irreplaceables” and kept only 45% of its lower performing teachers (2010-2011); both statistics are markedly better than other similar, large school districts.

These statistics are also important because they contradict the main worry that many had about the reforms put in place by Rhee, namely that in the attempt to remove poor teachers, higher performing teachers would also be driven away. In fact, the “Irreplaceable” teachers, according to the surveys of teachers, principals, and reviews of teacher evaluation results used in the report, feel more valued and have the chance to achieve compensation to the tune of $100,000 per year after at least four years of experience.

Finally, the report makes three recommendations about how to continue and extend the recent successes in DCPS:

Schools should maintain higher expectations for teachers
DCPS should do more to evenly distribute its top teachers across the District because DCPS is weaker here than other school districts
DCPS should do more to help principals create the sort of healthy learning environments which will retain the “Irreplaceables”

For more information including links to summaries of the report and the full report itself, please visit the following websites:

http://thenewteacherproject.createsend1.com/t/ViewEmail/r/EC8C4848BCB6C6C2/4A7FCE5F9C0A574EB4B1B1F623478121

http://tntp.org/irreplaceables/dcps

The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis

Posted on July 31, 2012 by coreeducation

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

Retaining Public Charter Teachers for Student Success

Posted on July 26, 2012 by coreeducation

In a new paper from TeachPlus, public charter school teacher turnover and its effects on student achievement is addressed. According to recent research, the teacher turnover rate at public charter schools is about 25% annually. Teacher turnover has been shown to negatively impact student achievement.

Retaining Public Charter Teachers for Student Success offers several recommendations to school leaders and charter management organizations to help reduce teacher attrition in public charters:

Build a culture of mutual feedback for continuous improvement. This means that communication must be a two-way street: teachers must be able to approach school leadership with suggestions for improvement and building a professional learning community.
Protect teachers’ time for great teaching. Schools should be giving teachers ample planning time, and creative solutions to minimize additional responsibilities (i.e., lunch duty) should be found to prevent teacher burnout.
Establish clear career pathways for teachers.
Establish practices that respond to the personal needs of teachers. Like professionals in all fields, teachers have higher job satisfaction when their workplaces allow them to fulfill their personal needs.

To read the full report, please visit http://www.teachplus.org/uploads/Documents/1340224253_WhyAreMyTeachersLeaving062012.pdf

Strategic Data Project Provides New Findings on Teacher Placement and Retention Patterns

Posted on July 20, 2012 by coreeducation

The Strategic Data Project (SDP) released two Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs) that highlight specific areas that education leaders should examine to improve the overall effectiveness of their teacher workforce and the performance of their school districts. The first of these SPIs focuses on teacher placement patterns, examining which students are generally assigned to first-year teachers. The second SPI looks into teacher turnover, asking if districts are identifying and working to retain their most-effective novice teachers.

SDP developed these indicators through a series of studies conducted in partnership with four large urban school districts across the United States. SDP’s analyses help school systems more accurately understand how specific movements and improvements in teachers’ careers may influence student outcomes.

In The Novice Teacher Placement Pattern (Infographic), SDP researchers observed that first-year teachers are systematically being placed with students who start the year performing considerably behind their peers. These results were seen in each of the districts studied, regardless of the demographic make-up of that district, across all schools in the district. In three of the four districts examined, these patterns persisted within schools as well.

This is important because on average, first-year teachers are less effective than teachers with more experience. Therefore the students most in need of accelerating their academic performance are being placed in the classrooms of teachers who are not likely to help them catch up.

The Effective Teacher Retention Rate (Infographic) shows whether districts retain their most-effective novice teachers at higher rates than their least-effective teachers. When SDP researchers examined teacher retention by level of teacher effectiveness, they found that there is very little difference in retention rates between the most-effective teachers compared to their least-effective ones, and that this difference is virtually indistinguishable after the first year. Since districts should ideally try to retain their most-effective teachers, and counsel out their least-effective ones, this suggests that districts aren’t yet differentiating retention strategies by teacher effectiveness. It also raises the question of how, or even if, districts are considering effectiveness when forced to lay off teachers.

The Strategic Data Project developed the SPIs with the goal of establishing common indicators – not unlike a debt-equity ratio in business finance or the on-base percentage of a hitter in baseball – that can be measured in a standard way and analyzed repeatedly over time and in many places. Education systems can use these indicators to benchmark their progress – against themselves, over time, and in relation to other districts with similar populations.

In the last 50 years, sectors such as business, health care, public safety and even professional sports have been transformed through increasingly sophisticated analyses of the huge amount of information being collected. Currently, a vast amount of educational data is left untapped for policy development and strategic planning. For example, few school districts track where they find or place their most effective teachers or what their students go on to after high school. SDP’s goal is to work with its partners – school districts, state education agencies, and charter school networks – to build a growing network of leaders who use rigorous and thoughtful analysis to transform K-12 education in America.

To learn more, please visit www.gse.harvard.edu/sdp/spi

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