TNE News & Views #30 – December 14, 2007

Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape: Improvements in the Teacher Pool
Drew Gitomer
ETSPolicyInformationCenter
December 2007
"To examine whether changes in the academic quality of the teaching force are associated with this unprecedented policy focus, ETS Distinguished Research Scientist, Dr. Drew Gitomer, revisits an earlier study of teacher quality to see if the academic quality of prospective teachers in a recent cohort has changed from that of an earlier cohort. His findings are both encouraging and sobering. The encouraging news is that, taken together, the findings suggest that recent policy initiatives have helped improve the academic quality of the teacher pool. Among the sobering findings is the fact that the pool is no more diverse now than it was a decade ago."
Building a Better Teacher: Confronting the Crisis in Teacher Training
Grace Rubenstein
Edutopia Magazine
November 2007
"Though there are some leading lights, far too many of America's 1,200-plus schools of education are mired in methods that isolate education from the arts and sciences, segregate the theory and practice of teaching, and provide insufficient time and support for future teachers to learn to work in real classrooms.... Based on scientific research, good teaching is one thing we know makes a big difference in children's learning. (Researchers at the University of Tennessee in 1996 found that elementary school students who had three highly effective teachers in a row achieved math scores more than fifty percentile points higher than those who had three ineffective teachers in a row.) The challenge now is to figure out how to make a good teacher -- or, as Thomas Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), puts it, 'to close the gap between the way we prepare teachers and the way teachers actually teach in the classroom'. Dozens of education schools -- and a few independent agencies, such as the Boston Public Schools -- are pioneering ways to do that. The research on how well these new methods work ranges from nascent to nonexistent so far, but these early models provide a compass for how to begin building better programs -- changes that hold the promise to better equip would-be teachers and, by extension, their future students, for success."
Value Added Assessment of Teacher Preparation in Louisiana: 2004 - 2006
George H. Noell, Bethany A. Porter, R. Maria Patt
Louisiana Department of Education
October 2007
"Analyses were conducted examining the feasibility of using Louisiana's student achievement, teacher, and curriculum databases to assess the efficacy of teacher preparation programs within Louisiana... The model nested students within teachers and teachers within schools. The model included effects for teachers and schools. Separate models were developed for each content area. These models were used to assess the efficacy of teacher preparation programs. The same VAA model was applied to the educational data for the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 school years. Examination of ELA indicated poor stability of estimates across years and raised issues regarding the alignments of the analysis with the way ELA teaching assignments are made... Results also clarified the need to set a higher standard for the number of program completers necessary before reporting results... Additional analyses suggested that the bulk of the variance shared between a family demographic survey and student educational achievement was accounted for by data in Louisiana's educational databases...As teacher preparation programs increasingly produce graduates from their redesigned programs it should be possible to assess the impact of an increasing number of redesigned programs and compare their results to their programs prior to redesign."
Are Public Schools Really Losing Their Best? Assessing the Career Transitions of Teachers and Their Implications for the Quality of the Workforce
Dan Goldhaber, Betheny Gross, Daniel Player
NationalCenter for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER)
October 2007
"Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers
have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers' performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina public schools from 1996 to 2002. Our findings suggest that the most-effective teachers tend to stay in teaching and in specific schools. Contrary to common expectations, we do not find that more-effective teachers are more likely to leave more-challenging schools."
Value-Added Analysis and Education Policy
Steven Rivkin
NationalCenter for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER)
November 2007
"This brief describes estimation and measurement issues relevant to estimating the quality of instruction in the context of a cumulative model of learning. The discussion highlights the importance of accounting for student differences and the advantages of focusing on student achievement gains as opposed to differences in test scores."
Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects
Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob L. Vigdor
National Bureau of Economic Research
November 2007
Full article available for download for $5.
"We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the non-random distribution of teachers and students among classrooms within schools. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials affect student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant. As a result, the uneven distribution of teacher credentials by race and socio-economic status of high school students -- a pattern we also document -- contributes to achievement gaps in high school."
Reducing the Achievement Gap Through District/Union Collaboration: The Tale of Two School Districts
National Commission on Teaching and America's Future
November, 2007
"In looking for examples of districts that were making gains both in assuring teacher quality and in reducing gaps in student achievement, we continually came to Clark County, Nevada and Hamilton County, Tennessee. While the road to reform and the specific steps each district took were different, they shared a fundamental element - in both districts, success can be directly linked to the collaboration of the local teachers' union and the school district. Single-minded focus on improving student achievement and a willingness to be flexible allowed these two, often adversarial groups, to work together with outstanding results. Their stories are proof that unions and districts can collaborate successfully to improve student achievement. ClarkCounty and HamiltonCounty also provide guidance to other districts as they seek support in teaching and learning for all."
A More Accurate Growth Model: Using Multigrade Adaptive Assessments to Measure Student Growth
Steering Committee of the Delaware Statewide Academic Growth Assessment Pilot
October 2007
"Recently, NCLB permitted up to ten states to pilot Growth Models, which are intended to give schools credit for students who are on track to reach proficiency based on the growth trajectory of their scores from multiple years. This approach is far superior, and will support efforts to set or maintain rigorous state standards. However, it also currently is flawed because it is required to use the same grade-level assessments as the Status Model.... For instance, no one would argue that a student who begins 4th grade with 1st grade skills and ends with 3rd grade skills hasn't made excellent progress, but current 4th grade tests cannot document this progress. Nor can current tests document the accomplishments of a 4th grader reading at the 6th or 8th grade level.... By contrast, based on a 47-school, 11,000-student pilot during the 2005-06 and 2006-07 school years, our Delaware partnership found that multigrade adaptive growth assessments provide a far more accurate measure of student and school improvement."
Is Mentoring Worth the Money? A Benefit-Cost Analysis and Five-Year Rate of Return of a Comprehensive Mentoring Program for Beginning Teachers
Anthony Villar, Michael Strong
ERS Spectrum
Summer 2007
"This study describes a benefit-cost analysis of a comprehensive mentoring program for beginning teachers conducted in a medium-sized California school district. Using actual program cost information and data on student achievement, teacher retention, and mentor evaluations, the authors performed a benefit-cost analysis to determine whether comprehensive mentoring for beginning teachers makes financial sense. The data showed that, contrary to expectations, increases in teacher effectiveness yielded greater savings than the reduction in costs associated with teacher attrition. Overall, the benefit-cost analysis showed that, after five years, an investment of one dollar produces a positive return to society, the school district, the teachers, and the students, and the state almost recovers its expenses. Implications are drawn for both education and public policy."