Recognizing and Enhancing Teacher Effectiveness:
A Policymaker’s Guide
Linda
Darling-Hammond
Charles
E. Ducommun Professor of Education
Stanford
University
As the nation’s attention is
increasingly focused on the outcomes of education, policymakers have undertaken
a wide range of reforms to improve schools, ranging from new standards and
tests to redesigned schools, new curricula, and new instructional strategies. One important lesson from these efforts has
been the recurrent finding that teachers are the fulcrum that determines
whether any school initiative tips toward success or failure. Every aspect of
school reform -- the creation of more challenging curriculum, the use of
ambitious assessments, the implementation of decentralized management, the invention
of new model schools and programs -- depends on highly-skilled teachers.
Reformers have learned that successful programs or curricula cannot
be transported from one school to another where teachers do not know how to use
them well. Raising graduation requirements has proved to be of little use where
there are not enough qualified teachers prepared to teach more advanced
subjects well. Mandates for more math
and science courses are badly implemented when there are chronic shortages of
teachers prepared to teach these subjects.
Course content is diluted and more students fail when teachers are not
adequately prepared for the new courses and students they must teach. In the
final analysis, there are no policies that can improve schools if the people in
them are not armed with the knowledge and skills they need.
Furthermore, teachers need even more sophisticated abilities to
teach the growing number of public school students who have fewer educational
resources at home, those who are new English language learners, and those who
have distinctive learning needs or difficulties. Clearly, meeting the expectation that all
students will learn to high standards will require a transformation in the ways
in which our education system attracts, prepares, supports, and develops expert
teachers who can teach in more powerful ways.
An aspect of this transformation is developing means to evaluate and
recognize teacher effectiveness throughout the career, for the purposes of
licensing, hiring, and granting tenure; for providing needed professional
development; and for recognizing expert teachers who can be recognized and
rewarded. A goal of such recognition is
to keep talented teachers in the profession and to identify those who can take
on roles as mentors, coaches, and teacher leaders who develop curriculum and
professional learning opportunities, who redesign schools, and who, in some
cases, become principals. Some
policymakers are also interested in tying compensation to judgments about
teacher effectiveness, either by differentiating wages or by linking such
judgments to additional responsibilities that carry additional stipends or
salary. An integrated approach connects
these goals with a professional development system into a career ladder.
In this paper, I draw on research in outlining the issues associated
with various approaches to ascertaining teacher effectiveness, and I suggest a
framework for policy systems that might prove productive in both identifying
and developing more effective
teachers and teaching. I draw a
distinction between effective teachers and effective teaching that is important
to consider if improvement in student learning is the ultimate goal.
Effective Teachers and
Teaching
It is important to distinguish between the related but distinct
ideas of teacher quality and teaching quality.
Teacher quality might be thought of as the bundle of personal
traits, skills, and understandings an individual brings to teaching, including
dispositions to behave in certain ways. The traits desired of a teacher may
vary depending on conceptions of and goals for education; thus, it might be
more productive to think of teacher qualities
that seem associated with what teachers are expected to be and do.
Research on teacher effectiveness, based on teacher ratings and
student achievement gains, has found the following qualities important:
- strong general intelligence and
verbal ability that help teachers organize and explain ideas, as well as
to observe and think diagnostically;
- strong content knowledge – up to a
threshold level that relates to what is to be taught;
- knowledge of how to teach others
in that area (content pedagogy), in particular how to use hands-on
learning techniques (e.g. lab work in science and manipulatives in
mathematics) and how to develop higher-order thinking skills.
- an understanding of learners and
their learning and development–
including how to assess and scaffold learning, how to support students who
have learning differences or difficulties, and how to support the learning
of language and content for those who are not already proficient in the
language of instruction.
- adaptive expertise that allow
teachers to make judgments about what is likely to work in a given context
in response to students’ needs.[1]
Although less directly studied, most educators would include this
list a set of dispositions to support learning for all students, to teach in a
fair and unbiased manner, to be willing and able to adapt instruction to help
students succeed, to strive to continue to learn and improve, and to be willing
and able to collaborate with other professionals and parents in the service of
individual students and the school as a whole.
These qualities, supported by research on teaching, are embodied in
the standards adopted by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
and, at the beginning teacher level, by the states involved in the Interstate
New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), operating under the
aegis of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). As they have been built into licensing and
preparation requirements over the last decade, they have provided a means to
develop a stronger foundation for effective teaching, making teacher
qualifications a stronger predictor of teacher effectiveness.
Teaching quality has to do with
strong instruction that enables a wide range of students to learn. Such instruction meets the demands of the
discipline, the goals of instruction, and the needs of students in a particular
context. Teaching quality is in part a
function of teacher quality – teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions –
but it is also strongly influenced by the context of instruction. Key to considerations of context are “fit”
and teaching conditions. A
“high-quality” teacher may not be able to offer high quality instruction in a
context where there is a mismatch in terms of the demands of the situation and
his or her knowledge and skills; for example, an able teacher asked to teach
subject matter for which s/he is not prepared may teach poorly; a teacher who
is prepared and effective at the high school level may be unable to teach small
children; and a teacher who is able to teach high-ability students or affluent
students well may be quite unable to teach students who struggle to learn or
who do not have the resources at home that the teacher is accustomed to
assuming are available. Thus, a
high-quality teacher in one circumstance may not be a high-quality teacher for
another.
A second major consideration in the quality of teaching has to do
with the conditions for instruction. If
high-quality teachers lack strong curriculum materials, necessary supplies and
equipment, reasonable class sizes, and the opportunity to plan with other
teachers to create both appropriate lessons and a coherent curriculum across
grades and subject areas, the quality of teaching students experience may be
suboptimal, even if the quality of teachers is high. Many conditions of teaching are out of the
control of teachers and depend on the administrative and policy systems in
which they work.
Strong teacher quality may heighten the probability of strong
teaching quality, but does not guarantee it. Initiatives to develop teaching quality must
consider not only how to identify, reward, and use teachers’ skills and
abilities but how to develop teaching contexts that enable good practice on the
part of teachers. Hiring knowledgeable
teachers but asking them to teach out of field, without high-quality curriculum
or materials, and in isolation from their colleagues diminishes teaching
quality and student learning. Thus, the
policies that construct the teaching context must be addressed along with the
qualities and roles of individual teachers.
Means for Identifying
Effective Teaching for Policy Purposes
In recent years, there has been
growing interest in moving beyond traditional measures of teacher
qualifications – for example, a score on a paper-and-pencil test or completion
of a preparation program before entry, or years of experience and degrees for
in-service teachers – to evaluate teachers’ actual performance and
effectiveness as the basis for making decisions about hiring, tenure,
licensing, compensation, and selection for leadership roles. The recent report of the No Child Left Behind
(NCLB) Commission called for moving beyond the designation of teachers as
“highly qualified” to an assessment of “highly effective” teachers based on
their students’ gains on state tests. Other
recent federal proposals (for example, the TEACH Act) have suggested incentive
pay to attract ‘effective’ teachers to high need schools and to pay them
additional stipends to serve as mentors or master teachers.
Some state and local policymakers have sought to develop career
ladders or other compensation plans that take into account various measures of
teacher effectiveness for designating teachers for specific roles or
rewards. These have included measures
like National Board Certification and other performance-based evaluations,
indicators like master’s degrees and years of experience, and various measures
of student learning. In addition, a few
states have developed performance-based assessments for beginning teacher
licensing as a means of determining effectiveness before teachers receive
tenure or a professional license.
This paper reviews three categories of measures: 1) evidence of student learning, including
value-added student achievement test scores; 2) evidence of teacher
performance; and 3) evidence of teacher knowledge, skills, and practices
associated with student learning. Most
career ladder or performance-based compensation plans that have survived to
date use a combination of all of these measures, a point to which I return in
the final section.
I discuss what is known in each category regarding both the validity
of the measures and the influence of using certain measures or approaches on
the improvement of teaching practice.
The presumption underlying this discussion is that successful policies
will seek to develop systems that both assess
teacher effectiveness in valid ways and help to develop more effective teachers at both the individual and
collective levels.
Evidence of Student Learning
Interest in including evidence of student learning in evaluations of
teachers has been growing. After all, if
student learning is the primary goal of teaching, it appears straightforward
that it ought to be taken into account in determining a teachers’
competence. At the same time, the
literature includes many cautions about the problems of basing teacher
evaluations on student test scores. In
addition to the fact that curriculum-specific tests that would allow gain score
analyses are not typically available in many teaching areas, these include
concerns about overemphasis on teaching to the test at the expense of other
kinds of learning; problems of attributing student gains to specific teachers;
and disincentives for teachers to serve high-need students, for example, those
who do not yet speak English and those have special education needs (and whose
test scores therefore may not accurately reflect their learning). This could inadvertently
reinforce current practices in which inexperienced teachers are
disproportionately assigned to the neediest students or schools discourage
high-need students from entering or staying.
At the same time, some innovative career ladder and compensation
programs (for example, in Rochester, New York and Denver, Colorado) have found valid
ways to include evidence of student learning in teacher evaluations. These are discussed below.
The Use of Value-Added
Achievement Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers. Because of a
desire to recognize and reward teachers’ contributions to student learning, a
prominent proposal is to use value-added student achievement test scores
from state or district standardized tests as a key measure of teachers’
effectiveness. The value-added concept is important, as it reflects a desire to
acknowledge teachers’ contributions to students’ progress, taking into account
where students begin. Furthermore, value-added methods are proving valuable for research on the effectiveness of
specific populations teachers (for example, those who are National Board
Certified or those who have had particular preparation or professional
development experiences) and on the outcomes of various curriculum and teaching
interventions.
However, there are serious technical and educational challenges
associated with using this approach to understand individual teacher
effectiveness, and researchers agree that value-added modeling (VAM) is not appropriate
as a primary measure for evaluating individual teachers. Henry Braun of the
Educational Testing Service concluded in his review:
VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for
making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to
making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the kinds
of data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how
seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such
interpretations.[2]
The problems with
using value-added testing models to determine teacher effectiveness include:
- Teachers’ ratings are affected
by differences in the students who are assigned to them. Students are not
randomly assigned to teachers – and statistical models cannot fully adjust
for the fact that some teachers will have a disproportionate number of
students who may be exceptionally difficult to teach (students with poor
attendance, who are homeless, who have severe problems at home, etc.) and
whose scores on traditional tests are problematic to interpret (e.g. those
who have special education needs or who are English language
learners). This can create both misestimates
of teachers’ effectiveness and disincentives for them to want to teach the
students who have the greatest needs.
- VAM requires scaled tests,
which most states don’t use. Furthermore, many experts think such tests
are less useful than tests that are designed to measure specific
curriculum goals. In order to be scaled, tests must
evaluate content that is measured along a continuum from year to
year. This reduces their ability to
measure the breadth of curriculum content in a particular course or grade
level. As a result, most states
have been moving away from scaled tests and toward tests that measure
standards based on specific curriculum content, such as end-of-course
tests in high school that evaluate standards more comprehensively (e.g.
separate tests in algebra, geometry, algebra 2, and in biology, chemistry,
and physics). These curriculum-based tests are more useful for evaluating
instruction and guiding teaching, but do not allow value-added
modeling. Entire state systems of
assessment that have been developed over many years – such as the New York
State Regents system and systems in states like California, Washington,
Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Kentucky, and many more -- would have
to be dismantled to institute value-added modeling.
- VAM models do not produce
stable ratings of teachers. Teachers look very different in their
measured effectiveness when different statistical methods are used. Different teachers appear effective
depending on whether student characteristics are controlled, whether
school effects are controlled, and what kinds of students teachers teach
(for example, the proportion of special education students or English
language learners). In addition, a
given teacher may appear to have differential effectiveness from class to
class and from year to year, depending on these things and others. Braun
notes that ratings are most unstable at the upper and lower ends of the
scale, where many would like to use them to determine high or low levels
of effectiveness.
- Most teachers and many students
are not covered by relevant tests. Scaled annual tests with previous year
test results are not available in most states for teachers of science,
social studies, foreign language, music, art, physical education, special
education, vocational / technical education, and other electives in any
grades, or for teachers in grades k-3 and nearly all teachers in grades
9-12. Furthermore, because the
scores are unstable, experts recommend at least 3 years of data for a
given teacher to smooth out the variability. With many grades and subjects uncovered
by scaled tests, and with three years of data needed to get a reasonably
stable estimate for a teacher (thus excluding 1st and 2nd
year teachers), at best only about 30% of elementary teachers and 10% of
high school teachers would be covered by data bases in most states.
- Missing data threatens the
validity of results for individual teachers. Once teacher and student mobility are
factored in, the number of teachers who can be followed in these models is
reduced further. In low-income communities, especially, student mobility
rates are often extremely high, with a minority of students stable from
one year to the next. Although
researchers can make assumptions about score values for missing student
data for research purposes, these kinds of adjustments are not appropriate
for the purposes of making individual teacher judgments.
- Many desired learning outcomes are
not covered by the tests. Tests in the United States are generally
much narrower than assessments used in other high-achieving countries
(which feature a much wider variety of more ambitious written, oral, and
applied tasks), and scaled tests are narrower than some other kinds of
tests. For good or for ill, research
finds that high-stakes tests drive the curriculum to a substantial degree. Thus, it is important that measures used
to evaluate teacher effectiveness find ways to include the broad range of
outcomes valued in schools. Otherwise,
teachers evaluated by such tests will have no incentive to continue to
include untested areas such as writing, research, science investigations,
social studies, and the arts, or skills such as data collection, analysis,
and synthesis, or complex problem solving, which are generally untested.
- It is impossible to fully
separate out the influences of students’ other teachers, as well as school
conditions, on their apparent learning. Prior teachers have lasting effects, for
good or ill, on students’ later learning, and current teachers also
interact to produce students’ knowledge and skills. For example, the essay writing a student
learns through his history teacher may be credited to his English teacher,
even if she assigns no writing; the math he learns in his physics class
may be credited to his math teacher.
Specific skills and topics taught in one year may not be tested
until later years. A teacher who works
in a well-resourced school with specialist supports may appear to be more
effective than one whose students don’t receive these supports. A teacher who teachers large classes
without adequate textbooks or materials may appear to be less effective
than one who has a small class size and plentiful supplies. As Braun notes, “it is always possible
to produce estimates of what the model designates as teacher effects.
These estimates, however, capture the contributions of a number of
factors, those due to teachers being only one of them. So treating
estimated teacher effects as accurate indicators of teacher effectiveness
is problematic." To understand
the influences on student learning, more data about teachers’ practices
and context are needed.
Thus, while value-added models are useful for looking at groups of
teachers for research purposes – for example, to examine the results of preparation
or professional development programs or to look at student progress at the
school or district level – and they might provide one measure of teacher
effectiveness among several, they are problematic as the primary or sole
measure for making evaluation decisions for individual teachers. In the few systems where such measures are
used for personnel decisions such as performance pay, they are typically used
for the entire group of teachers in a school, rather than for individuals. Where they are used, they need to be
accompanied by an analysis of the teachers’ students and teaching context, and
an evaluation of the teachers’ practices.[3]
Using
Other Evidence of Student Learning. The fact that value-added models are not
ready to be used as the primary tool for evaluating individual teachers does
not mean that states or districts cannot recognize and reward excellent
teachers who produce strong student learning, or create incentives for them to
help other teachers and serve the neediest students. It is possible to use other measures of
student learning in evaluations of teaching, sometimes evidence that is
assembled by the teacher him or herself.
Such evidence can be drawn from classroom assessments and documentation,
including pre- and post-test measures of student learning in specific courses
or curriculum areas, evidence of student accomplishments in relation to
teaching activities, and analysis of standardized test results, where
appropriate. The evidence can be
assembled in a teaching portfolio by the teacher, demonstrating and explaining
the progress of students on a wide range of learning outcomes in ways that take
students’ starting points and characteristics into account.
In some schools, teachers use their own fall and spring classroom
assessments (or pre- and post-unit assessments) as a way of gauging student
progress. These measures can also be tailored for the learning goals of
specific students (for example, special education students or English language
learners.) As part of a portfolio of
evidence, these measures can document teacher effectiveness in achieving specific
curriculum goals. Measures of student learning in specific subject areas may be
scored writing samples or reading samples, mathematics assessments, assessments
of science or history knowledge, or even musical performances. These typically provide better measures of
classroom learning in a specific course or subject area because they are
curriculum-specific and can offer more authentic measures of student
learning. They are also more likely to
capture the effects of a particular teacher’s instruction and be available for
most or all students. A teacher might even document the
Westinghouse science competition awards she helped students win, or specific
break-throughs achieved by her special education students, with evidence of her
role in supporting these accomplishments.
In Denver’s Procomp
system,[4]
for example, teachers set two goals annually in collaboration with the
principal, and document student progress toward these goals using district,
school, or teacher-made assessments to show growth. In Rochester’s career ladder, evidence of
student learning, determined by the teacher, is assembled in the teachers’
portfolio. Arizona’s career ladder
program – which encourages local districts to design their own systems –
requires the use of various methods of student
assessment to ascertain teachers’ effectiveness. One study of the career ladder programs found
that, over time, participating teachers demonstrated an increased ability to
create locally-developed assessment tools to assess student learning gains in
their classrooms; to develop and evaluate pre- and post-tests; to define
measurable outcomes in “hard to quantify areas” like art, music, and physical
education; and to monitor student learning growth in their action plans. They also showed a greater awareness of the
importance of sound curriculum development, more alignment of curriculum with
district objectives, and increased focus on higher quality content, skills, and
instructional strategies.[5] Thus, the development and use of student learning
evidence seemed to be associated with improvements in practice. In all of these career ladder systems,
evidence of student learning is combined with evidence from standards-based
teaching evaluations conducted through classroom observation, and evidence of
teachers’ skills or practices, as described below.
Evidence of Teacher Performance
There is growing evidence that some well-designed performance-based
assessments of teaching detect aspects of teaching that are significantly
related to teacher effectiveness, as measured by student achievement
gains. These include standardized teacher performance assessments
like those used for National Board Certification and for beginning teacher
licensure in states like Connecticut and California, as well as standards-based teacher evaluation
systems used in some local districts.
The value of using such assessments is that they can both document
broader aspects of teacher effectiveness and can be used to help teachers
develop greater effectiveness, as participation in these assessments has been
found to support learning both for teachers who are being evaluated and
educators who are trained to serve as evaluators.
Teacher Performance
Assessments.
A standards-based approach to assessing teachers was initially developed
and made systematic through the work of the National Board for Professional
Teaching Standards, which developed standards for accomplished teaching in more
than 30 teaching areas defined by subject matter and developmental level of
students. The Board then developed an
assessment of accomplished teaching that assembles evidence of teachers’
practice and performance in a portfolio that includes videotapes of teaching,
accompanied by commentary, lesson plans, and evidence of student learning. These pieces of evidence are scored by
trained raters who are expert in the same teaching field, using rubrics that
define critical dimensions of teaching as the basis of the evaluation. Designed to identify experienced accomplished
teachers, a number of states and districts, including the ones noted earlier,
use National Board Certification as the basis for salary bonuses or other forms
of teacher recognition, such as selection as a mentor or lead teacher. California offers a $20,000 bonus, paid over
four years, to Board-certified teachers who teach in high-need schools, which
has helped to distribute these accomplished teachers more fairly to students
who need them.
A number of recent studies
have found that the National Board Certification assessment process
identifies teachers who are more effective in raising student achievement than
others who have not achieved certification.[6] Perhaps equally important,
many studies have found that teachers’ participation in the National Board
process supports their professional learning and stimulates changes in their
practice. Teachers note that the process of analyzing their own and their
students' work in light of standards enhances their abilities to assess student
learning and to evaluate the effects of their own actions, while causing them
to adopt new practices that are called for in the standards and assessments.[7]
Teachers report significant improvements in their performance in each
area assessed -- planning, designing, and delivering instruction, managing the classroom,
diagnosing and evaluating student learning, using subject matter knowledge, and
participating in a learning community -- and observational studies have
documented that these changes do indeed occur.[8]
National
Board participants often say that they have learned more about teaching from
their participation in the assessments than they have learned from any other
previous professional development experience.[9]
David Haynes’ statement is
typical of many:
Completing the portfolio for the Early Adolescence/Generalist
Certification was, quite simply, the single most powerful professional
development experience of my career. Never before have I thought so deeply
about what I do with children, and why I do it. I looked critically at my
practice, judging it against a set of high and rigorous standards. Often in
daily work, I found myself rethinking my goals, correcting my course, moving in
new directions. I am not the same teacher as I was before the assessment, and
my experience seems to be typical.[10]
Following on the work of the National Board, a consortium of more
than 30 states, working under the auspices of CCSSO, created the INTASC
standards for beginning teacher licensing.
Most states have now adopted these into their licensing systems. In some states, teacher performance assessments for new teachers, modeled
after the National Board assessments, are being used either in teacher
education, as a basis for the initial licensing recommendation (CA, OR), or in
the teacher induction period, as a basis for moving from a probationary to a
professional license (CT).
These assessments require teachers to document their plans and
teaching for a unit of instruction, videotape and critique lessons, and collect
and evaluate evidence of student learning.
Like the National Board assessments, beginning teachers’ ratings on the
Connecticut BEST assessment have been found to significantly predict their
students’ value-added achievement on state tests.[11] A study of predictive validity is currently underway
for the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT).
These assessments have also been found to help teachers improve
their practice. Connecticut's process of
implementing INTASC-based portfolios for beginning teacher licensing involves
virtually all educators in the state in the assessment process, either as
beginning teachers taking the assessment or as school-based mentors who work
with beginners, as assessors who are trained to score the portfolios, or as
expert teachers who convene regional support seminars to help candidates learn
about the standards. Educators
throughout the system develop similar knowledge about teaching and learn how principles
of good instruction are applied in classrooms. These processes can have far-reaching
effects. By the year 2010, an estimated 80%
of elementary teachers, and nearly as many secondary teachers, will have
participated in the new assessment system as candidates, support providers, or
assessors.[12]
A beginning teacher who participated in the assessment described the
power of the process, which requires planning and teaching a unit, and
reflecting daily on the day’s lesson to consider how it met the needs of each
student and what should be changed in the next day’s plans. He noted: “Although I was the reflective type
anyway, it made me go a step further. I
would have to say, okay, this is how I'm going to do it differently. It made more of an impact on my teaching and
was more beneficial to me than just one lesson in which you state what you're
going to do.... The process makes you
think about your teaching and reflect on your teaching. And I think that's necessary to become an
effective teacher.”
The same learning effects are recorded in research on the similar
PACT assessment used in California teacher education programs. The assessment requires student teachers or
interns to plan and teach a week-long unit of instruction mapped to the state
standards; to reflect daily on the lesson they’ve just taught and revise plans
for the next day; to analyze and provide commentaries of videotapes of
themselves teaching; to collect and analyze evidence of student learning; to
reflect on what worked, what didn’t and why; and to project what they would do
differently in a future set of lessons.
Candidates must show how they take into account students’ prior
knowledge and experiences in their planning.
Adaptations for English language learners and for special needs students
must be incorporated into plans and instruction. Analyses of student outcomes are part of the
evaluation of teaching.
Faculty and supervisors score these portfolios using standardized
rubrics in moderated sessions following training, with an audit procedure to
calibrate standards. Faculties use the
PACT results to revise their curriculum.
In addition, both the novice teachers and the scoring participants
describe benefits for teacher education and for learning to teach from the
assessment and scoring processes. For
example:
For me the most
valuable thing was the sequencing of the lessons, teaching the lesson, and
evaluating what the kids were getting, what the kids weren’t getting, and
having that be reflected in my next lesson...the
‘teach-assess-teach-assess-teach-assess’ process. And so you’re constantly changing – you may
have a plan or a framework that you have together, but knowing that that’s
flexible and that it has to be flexible, based on what the children learn that
day. -- Prospective teacher
This [scoring]
experience…has forced me to revisit the question of what really matters in the assessment of teachers,
which – in turn – means revisiting the question of what really matters in the preparation of teachers.
-- Teacher education faculty member
[The scoring
process] forces you to be clear about “good teaching;” what it looks like,
sounds like. It enables you to look at
your own practice critically, with new eyes.
-- Cooperating teacher
As an induction
program coordinator, I have a much clearer picture of what credential holders
will bring to us and of what they’ll be required to do. We can build on this.
-- Induction program coordinator
When assessments both predict teacher effectiveness and support
individual and institutional learning, they can help to create an engine for
stimulating greater teacher effectiveness in the system as a whole. The
TEACH Act contains a provision to develop a nationally available beginning
teacher performance assessment, based on these models, which could provide a
useful measure of effectiveness for new teachers and could leverage stronger
accountability and improvement in teacher education.
Standards-Based
Evaluations of Teaching. Similarly,
standards-based teacher evaluations used by some districts have been found to
be significantly related to student achievement gains for teachers and to help
teachers improve their practice and effectiveness.[13] Like the teacher performance assessments
described above, these systems for observing teachers’ classroom practice are
based on professional teaching standards grounded in research on teaching and
learning. They use systematic
observation protocols to examine teaching along a number of dimensions. All of the career ladder plans noted earlier
use such evaluations as part of their systems and many use the same or similar
rubrics for observing teaching. The
Denver compensation system, which uses such an evaluation system as one of its
components, describes the features of its system as including: well-developed rubrics articulating different
levels of teacher performance; inter-rater reliability; a fall-to-spring
evaluation cycle; and a peer and self-evaluation component.
In a study of three districts using standards-based evaluation
systems, researchers found positive correlations between teachers’ ratings and
their students’ gain scores on standardized tests (Milanowski, Kimball, &
White, 2004). In
the schools and districts studied, assessments of teachers are based on
well-articulated standards of practice evaluated through evidence including
observations of teaching along with teacher interviews and, sometimes,
artifacts such as lesson plans, assignments, and samples of student work.
The Teacher Advancement Program offers one well-developed example of
a highly-structured teacher evaluation system that was developed based on the standards
of the National Board and INTASC and the assessment rubrics developed in
Connecticut and Rochester (NY), among others.[14] In the TAP system of “instructionally-focused
accountability,” each teacher is evaluated four to six times a year by master /
mentor teachers or principals who are trained and certified evaluators using a
system that examines designing and planning instruction, the learning
environment, classroom instruction, and teacher responsibilities. The training is a rigorous four-day process,
and trainers must be certified based on their ability to evaluate teaching
accurately and reliably. Teachers also
study the rubric and its implications for teaching and learning, look at and
evaluate videotaped teaching episodes using the rubric, and engage in practice
evaluations. After each observation, the
evaluator and teacher meet to discuss the findings and to make a plan for
ongoing growth. Like other
well-developed career ladder systems, TAP provides ongoing professional
development, mentoring, and classroom support to help teachers meet these
standards. Teachers in TAP schools
report that this system, along with the intensive professional development
offered, is substantially responsible for improvements in their practice and
the gains in student achievement that have occurred in many TAP schools.[15]
The set of studies on standards-based teacher evaluation suggest
that the more teachers’ classroom activities and behaviors are enabled to
reflect professional standards of practice, the more effective they are in
supporting student learning – a finding that would appear to suggest the
desirability of focusing on such professional standards in the preparation,
professional development, and evaluation of teachers. These kinds of results led Hassell (2002) to conclude in his
review of teacher pay systems that tying teachers’ advancement and compensation
to their knowledge and skills and using evaluation systems that help develop
those skills, as these systems do, may ultimately produce more positive change
in practice than evaluating teachers based primarily on student test scores.
Evidence
About Teachers’ Knowledge, Skills, and Practices
For a variety of reasons, it can be important to document and reward
in a teacher evaluation and compensation system aspects of teachers’ knowledge
and skills -- as well as their practices – that are associated with student
learning. Schools need a mix of
knowledge, skills, and abilities among their faculties to inform curriculum
decisions and to meet the needs of their students. For example, aside from the knowledge of
content and pedagogy teachers generally acquire in their certification area,
specialized knowledge about the teaching of English language learners or the
teaching of special education students may be highly desirable in many school
contexts. Knowledge of the home
languages students speak is also essential for communicating with parents as
well as students. Proficiency in using
specific educational techniques, such as Reading Recovery or Cognitively Guided
Instruction in mathematics, may be important in certain contexts.
The two-fold rationale for knowledge and skills-based compensation
is that there should be incentives for teachers to continue to develop their
abilities in ways that are important for student success, and there should be
encouragement for teachers to use practices that have been found to be
effective. As schools seek to offer a
more coherent approach to instruction, encouragement for shared practices among
teachers is also important. The kinds of
knowledge, skills, and practices to be documented and recognized should be
those known to be associated with greater individual and organizational
effectiveness. As Odden and colleagues
note:
Knowledge- and skills-based compensation systems provide a mechanism
to link pay to the knowledge and skills (and by extension, performance) desired
of teachers….The concept of knowledge- and skills-based pay in education was
adapted from the private sector, where it was developed to encourage workers to
acquire new, more complex, or employer-specific skills. Knowledge- and skills-based pay was also
intended to reinforce an organizational culture that values employee growth and
development and to create a clear career path linked to increasing professional
competence.[16]
Evidence that particular kinds of
knowledge and skills impact student achievement can guide decisions about what
should be documented and recognized. For
example, there is evidence that a masters degrees in the field to be taught (e.g.
mathematics or mathematics education) is associated with greater effectiveness,[17] as is training in how to work with diverse
student populations (training in cultural diversity, teaching limited English
proficient students, and teaching students with special needs).[18] In addition, some specific practices, such as
the use of formative assessment to provide feedback to students and opportunities
for them to revise their work, have been found in many dozens of studies to
have large effect sizes on student learning gains.[19] Teachers who teach students specific
meta-cognitive strategies for reading, writing, and mathematical problem
solving have been found produce increased student learning of complex skills.[20] And so on.
In some systems, teachers receive recognition for demonstrating that
they have implemented particular new practices like these associated with
school-wide or district-wide goals, such as the use of common literacy
practices across classrooms, or the use of formative assessments in planning
and modifying instruction, or the implementation of a new system of writing
instruction. Where possible, these practices are documented along with evidence
of how the changes have affected student participation and learning. The rationale for using these measures of
effective teaching practices is that they support teacher development and
school-wide change initiatives, and are related to improvements in the
conditions for student learning.
Odden and colleagues offer several examples of knowledge- and
skills-based evaluation and compensation plans.[21] For example, Coventry, Rhode Island provides
stipends for National Board Certification and for teachers to develop their
skills in authentic pedagogy, self-reflection, differentiated instruction, and family
and community involvement – all of which are strategies that have been linked
through research to student achievement.
Douglas County, Colorado offers compensation for completing blocks of
courses associated with district-goals, such as assessment or teaching diverse
learners. Vaughan Learning Center, a
charter school in Los Angeles, California, offers compensation for relevant
degrees and certification, as well as for specific knowledge and skills
relevant to the school’s mission, such as literacy training, training for
teaching English as a second language, special education inclusion, and
technology.
Teacher proficiencies can be documented through systematic
collection of evidence about planning
and instruction, work with parents and students, and contributions to the
school. This can be accomplished both
through observations of practice, documentation of training or proficiencies,
and a portfolio of teacher evidence about practices both in and beyond the classroom. In addition to specific teaching practices, a
teacher might document how she increased student attendance or homework
completion through regular parent conferences and calls home and show evidence
of changes in these student outcomes, as well as other outcomes associated with
them, such as improved grades, graduation, and college-going. Odden and colleagues note that a teacher
portfolio in such a system “may include artifacts such as scholarly papers in
the content area written by the teacher, new curricular the teacher has
developed, logs of parental involvement, samples of tests and assignments,
lesson plans, and essays reflecting on the teacher’s practice.”[22]
Implications for Policy
Efforts to recognize teacher competence and effectiveness as the
basis for personnel decisions are not new in the policy arena, but recent
initiatives have provided some potential break-throughs. Efforts to institute versions of merit pay or
career ladders in education have faltered many times before – in the 1920s, the
1950s, and most recently in the 1980s, when 47 states introduced versions of
merit pay or career ladders, all of which had failed by the early 1990s.[23] The reasons for failure have included faulty
evaluation systems, concerns about bias and discrimination, pitfalls of
strategies that rewarded individual teachers while undermining collaborative
organizational efforts, dysfunctional incentives that caused unintended
negative side-effects for serving all children, and lack of public will to
continue increased compensation.
The initiatives detailed in this paper demonstrate that systems can provide recognition for demonstrated knowledge, skill, and expertise that move the mission of
the school forward and reward excellent teachers for continuing to teach, without abandoning many of the
important objectives of the current salary schedule -- equitable treatment, incentives
for further learning, and objective means for determining pay. Promising beginnings have been made in some
states and local districts that have developed new approaches to examining
teacher performance and building career ladders. These approaches use multiple measures of
performance, typically considering three kinds of evidence in combination with
one another:
- Teachers’ performance on
teaching assessments measuring standards known to be associated with student
learning (including national assessments, such as National Board
Certification, and locally-managed standards-based teacher evaluations);
·
Evaluation of teaching
practices that are associated with desired student outcomes and achievement
of school goals, through systematic collection of evidence about teacher
planning and instruction, work with parents and students, and school
contributions; and
·
Contributions to growth in
student learning (from classroom assessments and documentation as well as
standardized tests, when appropriate).
All three of these strategies are used in the Denver, CO Procomp
system of teacher compensation based on knowledge, skills, and performance;
Rochester’s Career in Teaching program; and Minnesota’s Alternative
Professional Pay System,[24] which were developed in
collaboration with local or state teachers associations. Beyond recognizing teachers with new roles or
compensation, these systems demonstrate that rewarding teachers for deep knowledge of subjects, additional knowledge in
meeting special kinds of student and school needs, and high levels of
performance measured against professional teaching standards can encourage
teachers to continue to learn needed skills and enhance the expertise available
within schools.
State and Local Initiatives
The work that has been done over the
last decade to develop and assess teaching standards and to build new models of
evaluation and recognition in school districts holds promise for creating more
systematic means for developing teacher and teaching quality. Policies for identifying and supporting
teacher and teaching effectiveness can be considered for both the beginning of
the teaching career -- for licensing, hiring, and tenure decisions -- and for
later stages of teacher development – for compensation and advancement
decisions.
Identifying and
Developing Beginning Teacher Effectiveness. It is important to be able to make licensing
decisions based on greater evidence of teacher competence than merely completing
a set of courses or surviving a certain length of time in the classroom. Since the 1980s, the desire for greater
confidence in licensing decisions has led to the introduction of teacher
licensing tests in nearly all states. However, these tests – generally
multiple-choice tests of basic skills and subject matter – are not strongly
predictive of teachers’ abilities to effectively teach children. Furthermore, in many cases these tests
evaluate teacher knowledge before they
enter or complete teacher education, and hence are an inadequate tool for
teacher education accountability. Even
paper-and-pencil tests of teaching knowledge, used in a few states, provide
little evidence of what teachers can actually do in the classroom.
In the coming years, states will be able to benefit from the
development of teaching performance assessments that evaluate teachers’
practices related to student learning and have been found to be predictive of
teachers’ effectiveness. States now have
the possibility of beginning to examine teacher performance as a basis for
granting the initial probationary or later professional license, building on
the work that has been done by some states and universities to build reliable
and valid assessments that predict teacher effectiveness. Their work demonstrates that on-the-job
performance assessments of beginning teachers can be used during teacher
education (at the end of an internship or student teaching) as the basis for a
licensure recommendation. Systematically
scored portfolios including direct evidence of teaching have been developed
with state encouragement or requirement by universities in Vermont, Maine,
Wisconsin, Oregon, and California.
Oregon’s teacher Work Sampling System provides pre- and post-test
evidence of teachers’ contributions to student learning, constructed by
teachers themselves. California’s teacher performance assessment, described
earlier, which also includes evidence of student learning in relation to a unit
of teaching, will be a funded, statewide requirement by 2008.
Some states have also used performance assessments of first or
second year teachers (during their probationary period) as the basis for
granting a professional license (usually acquired in the 3rd year of
practice) and, by implication, setting a clear bar for the tenure
decision. Connecticut’s system is most
highly developed and reliably scored, but initiatives have also been undertaken
in North Carolina and California as part of state induction programs.
All of these initiatives have been based on the beginning teacher
licensing standards developed by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and
Support Consortium (INTASC), sponsored by the Council of Chief State School
Officers. An effort by this consortium
to fine-tune and pilot this work more broadly could give momentum to an effort
to better evaluate teacher competence and effectiveness at the beginning of the
teaching career.
States can also encourage and support localities in developing
stronger evaluation of beginning teachers in the early years prior to tenure,
tied to effective mentoring from highly accomplished veterans that will help
novices meet the standards. Most states
now require an induction program of some sort and many also provide some level
of funding. However, the activities that
are to occur during the induction process and the type of teaching to be
developed are often not specified, so programs are frequently less powerful
than they could be.
Connecticut wraps its required mentoring of beginning teachers around
the teacher performance assessment so that the standards of performance are
clear. High-quality local standards-based evaluations, like those described
earlier, can also be used for this purpose.
Organizing mentoring around clear standards of practice that have been
tied to teacher effectiveness focuses the mentor’s and novice’s efforts on what
matters most for teaching success. Of
course, this strategy also requires highly-skilled mentors who are themselves
effective teachers. This leads to the
question of how to identify and select such leaders.
Identifying and
Developing Teacher Effectiveness Throughout the Career. If teachers are better supported
and selected for tenure in the early years of the career, the prospects for
developing a highly effective teacher corps will be much enhanced. As we have noted, progress has been made in
developing career development systems that can recognize excellent teaching and
both reward it and tap the knowledge of such teachers on behalf of broader
school improvements. These initiatives
generally have several features in common.
All require teacher participation and buy-in to be implemented. Typically, evaluations occur at several junctures as teachers move from their initial license, through a period as a novice or resident teacher under the supervision of a mentor, to designation as professional teacher after successfully
passing an assessment of teaching skills. Tenure
is a major step tied to a serious decision made after rigorous evaluation of
performance in the first several years of teaching, incorporating administrator
and peer review by expert colleagues. Lead teacher status – which triggers additional compensation and access to
differentiated roles -- may be determined by advanced certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards and other evidence of performance
through standards-based evaluation systems.
Such systems both encourage and measure effective teaching, and can be
combined with other evidence of desirable teacher practices and student
learning to identify accomplished teachers.
Where this has been done, it has proved critically important to
design evaluation systems that provide a comprehensive picture of what teachers
do and with what results, to be sure that evaluations are conducted reliably
and validly by skilled assessors, and to be confident that evidence about
student learning is carefully interpreted and properly attributed to the
teacher.
Beyond the features of the evaluation systems, there are important
lessons about the features of the policy systems in which they operate. For example, the system should be designed to
operate so that teachers are not penalized for teaching the students who have
the greatest educational needs. This
requires sensitivity to student and classroom characteristics in the evaluation
system. Furthermore, incentives should operate to support collegiality by
recognizing all the teachers who reach specific criteria, rather than pitting
teachers against each other in a situation in which one teacher’s gain is
another’s loss.
The challenges to be overcome in designing productive systems for recognizing
and rewarding teacher effectiveness were vividly illustrated by the testimony
of an expert veteran teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts last year – a
district being asked to put in place a system of merit pay based on value-added
student achievement test scores.
Springfield is a severely under-resourced district serving a predominantly
minority, low-income student population.
Fiscal woes had prevented salary increases for three years, and about
half of the 2600 teachers in the district had left over this time. Nearly 25% of the teaching force was
uncertified and inexperienced.
Susan Saunders, a Springfield native with more than 20 years of
experience, was one of the local heroes who had stayed and worked tirelessly to
assist the revolving door of beginning teachers, who shared the few updated
textbooks with these teachers, and who took on the highest need special
education students (comprising more than half of her class of 32
students). When asked how she would feel
about working in this new system of test-based merit pay, Saunders said the
introduction of the system would force a teacher like herself either to leave
or change her approach entirely – to keep the best materials for herself, stop
taking on the special education students, and stop helping the other teachers
in her building (since one teacher’s greater success would come at the expense
of another teacher’s rating).
The Springfield system was not adopted because an arbitrator deemed
the technical validity of the proposed system inadequate to carry the weight of
personnel decision making. This example
suggests how important it is to exercise care in developing systems of rewards
for teachers so they do not create incentives that would discourage teachers
from working collaboratively with each other and taking on the most challenging
students. Since any measures used are
likely to drive instruction, it is also critically important that the
assessments used to evaluate student learning cover the broad goals of learning
that are valued and are valid for the students whose results would be
considered.
State encouragements for local career ladders and innovative
compensation systems, like those in Minnesota and Arizona, can be designed to
ensure that several important features are in place. These would include:
- Teacher collaboration and buy-in
in developing the system;
- Recognition and encouragement of
collegial contributions to overall school success and clear criteria for
accomplishment that all eligible teachers can achieve, rather than a quota
system that pits teachers against each other;
- Valid evidence of teacher
effectiveness based on multiple measures, including
-- standards-based evaluation of practice, such as National Board
Certification, a valid state teacher performance assessment; or local
evaluations of teacher performance;
-- evidence of practice based on multiple classroom observations and
examination of other classroom evidence (e.g. lesson plans, student assignments
and work samples) by multiple evaluators using a standards-based evaluation
instrument that examines planning, instruction, the learning environment, and
student assessment.
-- evidence of learning of the teacher’s students on valid
assessments that appropriately evaluate the curriculum the teacher
teaches;
- Consideration of the needs of the
students the teacher serves and valid and appropriate assessment of all
students included in the analysis, including students with special
learning needs and new English language learners,
- Ongoing, high-quality professional
learning opportunities to enable teachers to learn to meet the
standards.
The
Federal Role
Given the challenges to be surmounted in designing and implementing
new systems for identifying and recognizing teacher effectiveness, the federal
role should be a supportive rather than a directive one. There are many things to be learned about how
to measure teacher effectiveness in ways that are accurate and valid, that
create knowledge and incentives for strong collegial work and for teaching all
students well. Only a few dozen
districts have been able to launch career ladders that have worked and lasted
for more than a few years. Any effort to
stimulate more productive work in this area should initially provide incentives
to state and local initiatives that can garner support and develop models with
potential for scale-up.
There are three areas where federal support could be particularly
helpful:
1) To develop and
measure beginning teacher effectiveness, fund research and development to make
available a beginning teacher performance assessment, along with support for beginning teacher mentoring. Initial teacher competence and effectiveness could be better ascertained, and preparation
and mentoring could be strengthened, if they were guided by a high-quality,
nationally-available teacher performance assessment, which measures actual teaching skill in the content areas, and
which can guide teacher learning and help to develop sophisticated practice as
part of licensing and ongoing career advancement.
. The Interstate New Teacher
Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), sponsored by the Council of Chief
State School Officers, has already created teacher licensing standards adopted
by most states and has piloted performance assessments tied to the standards;
several states, including Connecticut and California, have incorporated such
performance assessments in the licensing process. As proposed in the TEACH Act, federal support
to a consortium of states in concert with appropriate professional associations
could further refine and pilot these assessments to provide a useful tool for
accountability and improvement that would also facilitate teacher mobility
across states by supporting license reciprocity.
Ideally, such a tool would be accompanied by a federally-funded
incentive to states and districts to create strong mentoring programs for all
beginning teachers. A matching grant
program could ensure support for every new teacher in the nation through
investments in state and district mentoring programs. Based on the funding model used in
California’s Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program, for example, a
federal allocation of $4000 for each beginning teacher, matched by states and/or
local districts, could fund mentoring for every novice teacher (about 125,000
annually) [25] for an investment of $500 million a year. If even half of the early career teachers who
currently leave teaching were to be retained, the nation would save at least
$600 million a year in replacement costs while gaining more competent teachers.
2) Provide incentive
funds for states and localities to develop systems that recognize and tap
teacher expertise, and to reward accomplished teachers who take leadership
roles in high-need schools. The
federal government could encourage districts to develop systems that recognize
effective teachers and create career ladders that tap their skills through a
competitive grants program. To build
teacher effectiveness, such initiatives would incorporate beginning teacher
mentoring as well as stages in the career enabling a broader range of roles for
expert teachers. They would be
accompanied by performance-based teacher evaluation systems that provide
information about teacher effectiveness through standards-based teacher
evaluations well as systematic collection of evidence about teachers’ practices
and student learning. Such systems should include evidence of high-quality professional
learning opportunities and school designs that provide time for teachers to
work and learn together during the school day.
They should also be designed to build collaborative incentives and to
recognize and support teachers who teach the highest-need students.
A federal initiative could include additional incentives for the
design of innovative approaches to attract and keep accomplished teachers in
priority low-income schools, through compensation for accomplishment and for
additional responsibilities, such as mentoring and coaching. For example, $500
million would provide $10,000 in additional compensation for 50,000 teachers
annually, to be allocated to expert teachers in high-need schools through
state- or locally-designed incentive systems.
(Matched by state and local contributions, this program would provide
incentives to attract 100,000 accomplished teachers to high-poverty
schools.)
Teacher expertise
could be recognized through such mechanisms as National Board Certification,
state or local standards-based evaluations, and carefully assembled evidence of
contributions to student learning.
Incentives might also be structured to encourage such highly effective
teachers, as part of a group of teachers, to take on redesigning and reconstituting
failing schools so that they become more effective.
3)
Support research on value-added modeling and other means for examining student
learning growth. Given the interest in using student learning data in
evaluations of teachers, and the challenges of doing so, it would be productive
for the federal government to fund an impartial group of experts, through the
National Academy of Sciences or the National Academy of Education, to examine
the data systems and methodologies needed to use student learning data
appropriately in systems that assess teaching.
Conclusion
Initiatives to measure and recognize
teacher effectiveness appear to be timely, as the press for improved student
achievement is joined to an awareness of the importance of teachers in
contributing to student learning. Such
initiatives will have the greatest pay-off if they are embedded in systems that
also develop greater teacher
competence through mentoring and coaching around the standards and through
roles for teachers to help their colleagues and their schools improve. Initiatives will have a greater likelihood of
survival and success if they also build confidence in the validity of the
measures and create incentives for teachers to work with colleagues and teach
the neediest students. Federal, state,
and local partnerships to create increasingly valid measures of teacher
effectiveness and to support the development of innovative systems for
recognizing and using expert teachers can make a substantial difference in the
recruitment and retention of teachers to the places they are most needed and,
ultimately, in the learning of students.
Endnotes
[1] For a summary of
studies, see L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers should Learn and
Be Able to Do. San Francisco Wilson Seattle : Center for the
Study of Teaching and Policy, University
of Washington
[2]
Henry Braun, Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A Primer on
Value-Added Models (Princeton ,
NJ
[3]
The Teacher Advancement Program, for example, uses standards-based evaluations
of teaching practice as the primary means of developing teacher ratings for
continuation and compensation, supplemented with information from school-wide
gains and individual gains in student learning.
[4] For
more detail about the Denver Procomp system, see http://denverprocomp.org.
[5]
Richard Packard & Mary Dereshiwsky (1991).
Final quantitative assessment of
the Arizona Flagstaff : Northern Arizona University
[6]
See for example, Bond, L., Smith, T., Baker, W., & Hattie, J. (2000). The
certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards:
A construct and consequential validity study (Greensboro , NC Alexandria ,
VA Seattle , WA
[7] Steven Athanases
(1994). Teachers’ reports of the effects of preparing portfolios of literacy
instruction. Elementary School Journal,
94(4), 421-439.
[8]
Edward Chittenden, & J. Jones (1997,
April). An observational study of National
Board candidates as they progress through the certification process. Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research
Association, Chicago , IL New
Orleans , LA Chicago ,
IL San
Francisco , CA
[9] Haynes, D.
(1995). One teacher's experience with National Board assessment. Educational
Leadership, 52 (8): 58-60; Bradley, A. (1994, April 20). Pioneers in
professionalism. Education Week, 13: 18-21; Areglado, N. (1999, Winter). I became convinced: How a
certification program revitalized an educator. National Staff Development Council, 35-37; Buday, M., & Kelly,
J. (1996). National Board certification and the teaching professions commitment
to quality assurance. Phi Delta Kappan,
78(3), 215-219.
[10] Haynes, p. 60.
[11] Wilson Connecticut Berkeley ,
CA : University
of California at Berkeley
[12] Pecheone, R. &
Stansbury, K. (1996). Connecting teacher
assessment and school reform. Elementary School Journal, 97, pp. 163-177
(p. 174).
[13] Milanowski, A.T., Kimball, S.M., White, B.
(2004). The relationship between
standards-based teacher evaluation scores and student achievement. University of Wisconsin-Madison: Consortium
for Policy Research in Education.
[14] The teacher responsibility rubrics were designed
based on several teacher accountability systems currently in use, including the
Rochester (New York )
Career in Teaching Program, Douglas County (Colorado ) Teacher's
Performance Pay Plan, Vaughn Next Century
Charter School
(Los Angeles , CA )
Performance Pay Plan, and Rolla (Missouri
[15]
Lewis Solomon, J. Todd White, Donna Cohen & Deborah Woo (2007). The
effectiveness of the Teacher Advancement Program. National Institute for Excellence in Teaching,
2007
[16]
Allan Odden, Carolyn Kelley, Herbert Heneman, and Anthony Milanowski (2001,
November). Enhancing teacher quality
through knowledge- and skills-based pay. CPRE Policy Briefs, R-34. Philadelphia :
Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania
[17] Goldhaber, D.D.,
& Brewer, D.J. (1997). Evaluating the effect of teacher degree level on
educational performance. In W.J. Fowler
(Ed.), Developments in School Finance,
1996 (pp.197-210). Washington , DC : National Center for Education Statistics , U.S.
[18] Wenglinsky, H. (2002). The link between teacher
classroom practices and student academic performance. Education Policy
Analysis Archives, 10(12).
[19] Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and
classroom learning. Assessment and Education: Principles, policy and practice, 5(1),
7-75.
[20]
See Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005, for example.
[21]
Odden et al., 2001.
[22]
Odden et al., 2001, p. 4.
[23] Darling-Hammond, L., and Berry Santa Monica ,
CA
[24] For more detail about Denver Minnesota
[25] About
250,000 teachers are hired each year, but typically only 40-60% of them are new
to teaching. The others are experienced
teachers changing schools or returning teachers who are re-entering the labor
force.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.