Tag Archives: teacher selection

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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Inquiries Into Effective Teaching

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In the most recent issue of the Harvard Educational Review, Anthony Bryk, Heather Harding, and Sharon Greenberg report on a roundtable jointly sponsored by Teach For America and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  The authors brought together a group of scholars and practitioners with a broad range of perspectives and asked them to explore several questions related to the emerging national narrative on effective teachers: What is an effective teacher? How do we leverage this moment of enormous energy in produc­ing more effective teaching to advance meaningful improvements at scale? Where are the current sites of success? What can we learn from what is working?  Through this process, the authors sought to “illuminate and reimagine the current “nonsystem” in order to accelerate progress toward a wholly new approach to developing the teaching force our nation and our children need.”

The article is essentially an abridged transcript of the roundtable discussion, followed by closing commentary from Bryk and Greenberg.  They concluded that, though the voices in the discussion varied widely on many points, there was some common ground:

  1. There was a “broad endorsement” for improving teaching by placing a sharper focus on candidate selection, teacher knowledge and skill development, the immediate contexts where teachers work and learn to practice, and the larger institutional environment in which all this is embedded.
  2. The effective learning progressions for new teachers need to be detailed in practical terms, much like we are now attempting to do for K-12 students via the Common Core.
  3. Practical measurement tools need to be developed that schools, districts, and HR development organizations can use to introduce change, track progress, revise-retry, and continuously improve.  We need stronger capacities to learn collectively from innovation,  develop a common language for describing problems, create shared frameworks for guiding hypothesized solutions, and formalize common measures for testing progress, guiding revisions, and iterating toward higher standards.

To read the full article, please visit http://her.hepg.org/content/k58q7660444q1210/fulltext.pdf

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Straight Talk on Teaching Quality: Six Game-Changing Ideas

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The Annenberg Institute for School Reform and the Schott Foundation for Public Education recently released a new report, Straight Talk on Teaching Quality: Six Game-Changing Ideas and What to Do About Them.  The report, which is more of a guide for improving teaching effectiveness, is based on the plethora of evidence that links teaching quality and student achievement.  Though clearly emphasizing that teaching quality is the single largest in-school influence on student learning, the guide also stresses that there are internal and external factors that have tremendous influence on teaching quality.

At the beginning of the report, two important caveats are put into place:  First, as discussed above, is that teaching quality is the most important variable in student performance.  Second, though there is not a common definition of what effective teaching looks like and how to measure it, “there is enough common ground and common knowledge right now to make better policies and implement more effective practices.”

Each of the six strategies is given their own chapter, and dealt with in a problem-solution manner, a short case study of a success story, and accompanied by “What Can I Do?” boxes that help educators know what questions to ask, both of themselves and policymakers, and what to advocate for.  The strategies are:

1. “Follow Your Bliss: Career Pathways for Teachers”

2. “Evaluation Nation: Multiple Ways of Measuring Performance”

3. “Supports for Teachers, Not Just Rewards and Sanctions: Why Firing Teachers Won’t Lead to Large-Scale Improvement”

4. “Environmentally Friendly: Why School Culture and Working Conditions Matter”

5. “No Teacher is an Island: The Importance of In-School Partnerships and Teacher Collaboration”

6. “No School is an Island: Partnerships with Parents and Community”

In the end, the authors stress their definition of the effective teacher: “one who helps students learn more and spreads her or his own expertise to colleagues.”  They also urge all stakeholders in public education to keep the conversation about teaching quality “on the right track” by using the strategies in the guide as a template for what needs to be addressed.

To read the guide, please visit http://annenberginstitute.org/VUE/wp-content/pdf/StraightTalk.pdf

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Three Ways to Improve America’s Teachers

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Last month, Wendy Kopp of Teach for America and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association discussed their thoughts on ways to improve the teaching force in the US in an article that appeared in USa Today.  “As [education] leaders…we know from experience that great teachers are made, not born…Unfortunately, not all teachers are getting the high-quality preparation they need to excel…”

Applauding Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s recent blueprint for teacher education reform, they yet have three things they would like policymakers and reformers to keep in mind as they go about the work of overhauling teacher preparation systems.

1. Use data to improve teacher prep.  In Louisiana, statistics have shown that there are significant differences in student outcomes depending on where their teachers trained.  The state is using a three-tiered system to assess its teacher prep programs; similar systems are being used in California and Maryland.

2. Bring new talent to the teaching profession.  It is critical for all people entering the career, whether recent college grads or career changers, to receive high quality training.  One viable path for quality preparation is the proposed Presidential Teaching Fellows program, supported by the federal government that would give states committed to improving their teacher prep funding to do so, as well as merit-based scholarships for teacher candidates.  The scholarships would favor candidates from low-income backgrounds as well as those of color.

3. Give teachers opportunities for continuous professional development.  Training should not stop once the teacher enters the classroom.  Mentoring, leadership opportunities, etc. should be a part of every teacher prep program.

In short, Kopp and Van Roekel want reformers and policymakers to remember that one third of all K-12 students will, at some point, have a teacher who is in his or her first three years of teaching.  In order to ensure that these students have the same instructional quality as their peers assigned to veteran teachers, “we must commit to giving [teachers] the best preparation possible.”

To read the full article, please visit http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2011-12-20/teachers-education-public-schools/52121868/1?AID=4992781&PID=4166869&SID=y2200ify8yar

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Principals’ Approaches to Developing Teacher Quality

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Principals arguably play the most important role in ensuring that excellent teaching occurs in their school. Principals’ Approaches to Developing Teacher Quality: Constraints and Opportunities in Hiring, Assigning, Evaluating and Developing Teachers by The Center for American Progress and The Education Trust provides key findings from a study of 30 principals working in charter and conventional schools in two northeastern states. In doing so, it aims to inform policymakers regarding how principals could exert a more positive influence on teacher quality.

Findings suggest that policymakers would be wise to address four major barriers to principals’ ability to improve teaching quality in their schools:

  • Economic influences
  • Contractual limitations
  • Interpersonal challenges
  • Cultural impediments

Additionally, policymakers should address:

  • Rethinking resources for professional development and teacher compensation. State and district policymakers should consider supporting bonuses and salary increments to help attract and retain teachers to remote regions, hard-to-staff schools, and shortage assignments. They should also improve the quality of professional development and reduce its dependence on unreliable funding sources. This may involve rethinking the way districts and schools currently use professional development dollars.
  • Decreasing contractual limitations to raising teacher quality. State and district policymakers should work with union leaders to ensure that seniority does not govern important personnel decisions at the expense of other important considerations such as the quality of a teacher’s instruction. This change should be balanced by the introduction of greater career opportunities and rewards for individuals who have dedicated their life’s work to teaching. They should also work to ensure that teacher evaluation systems reflect teachers’ typical instruction.
  • Reducing cultural and interpersonal impediments to efforts to raise teaching quality. Policymakers should address principal preparation and in-service training to ensure that principals develop an ability to act strategically as human capital managers. In particular, principals need to develop vital skills in how to assess instruction and communicate effectively regarding instructional quality.

The report may be accessed here:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/pdf/principal_report.pdf

 Core Education is dedicated to teacher effectiveness. By focusing on the alignment of human capital systems (standards, evaluation and professional development), we support principal leadership around teacher quality. See how we can help you: http://www.coreeducationllc.com/page12.php

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