Flexibility Is Key in
Administration's Call for Teacher Equity Plans
This summer, Education Secretary Arne Duncan
announced a strategy to ensure that low-income and minority students have equal
access to strong teachers: by April of next year, states must submit equity
plans explaining how they'll promote such access. To assist, the U.S.
Department of Education (ED) will report on differences in teacher
qualifications between high-poverty and low-poverty schools in each state, such
as teachers' years of experience and whether they are highly qualified (that
is, whether they hold a major or license) in the fields they teach.
Unfortunately, the strategy focuses on the wrong metrics for evaluating strong
teachers, and, without a thoughtful refocusing, is not likely to lead to big
improvements for at-risk students.
The move aims to better enforce an equal-access
provision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has been in place
since the law's 2001 reauthorization, known as “No Child Left Behind.” But like
the provision, the administration's new strategy is based on a dated
understanding of teacher quality. Thirteen years of research have clarified
that metrics like teacher experience and licensure reveal little about
teachers' impact on student learning. The focus should be on disadvantaged
students' access to effective teachers—that is, teachers who
consistently improve their students' outcomes and ability to play a positive
role in their own lives and communities.
It has been known for decades that teachers'
experience levels and licensure rates were lower in high-poverty schools. This
knowledge challenged the notion of public schooling as a level playing field
for student opportunity and advancement. But the surprise from recent research
on teacher impact on student test scores—commonly known as “value-added”—is that
effective teachers (even after adjusting for the background characteristics of
students and classroom peers) may be distributed more equally than policymakers
would have thought.
Furthermore, teachers who do more than average to
raise student scores on state standardized tests are usually the same teachers
who raise student performance on measures of deeper thinking and, indeed,
improve their life outcomes such as greater college attendance and lifetime
earnings and lower rates of teen pregnancy.
In an ongoing study of teacher quality reforms that
we are conducting with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in four
metropolitan areas, RAND and the American Institutes for Research are finding
that teachers with many disadvantaged students have value-added estimates that
are often as high as or higher than teachers with few disadvantaged students.
However, there is no single, overriding pattern: disadvantaged students' access
to stronger teachers appears to vary by subject (mathematics or reading), by
school year, and by district.
This finding is somewhat consistent with several
other recent studies, including a large ED-funded study of 29 school districts.
That study found that disadvantaged students had slightly lower access to good
teaching on average, but the average difference was small, and the relative
access of disadvantaged students to good teaching varied markedly among
districts.
Moreover, the sources of unequal access appear more
complicated than common wisdom suggests, i.e., that more-experienced, stronger
teachers choose better working conditions in more-advantaged schools and
districts. For example, access to good teaching appears to vary even within
schools. Most studies of the distribution of teacher value-added show more
variation in teacher effectiveness within any given school than between
different schools in a district. And our work for the Gates Foundation suggests
that, at least in the districts in the study, disadvantaged students' access to
top teachers may be most limited within their own schools. It's not
clear what drives this pattern—it could be academic tracking, parent lobbying,
preferential treatment of top teachers, or other dynamics. But it is clear that
policy efforts to move top teachers to low-income schools will not address
inequities within schools, and that within-school equity considerations should
not be ignored in discussions of equal access to effective teaching.
Despite the compelling goal of leveling the
educational playing field, ED's new plan to measure differences in teacher
qualifications between high-poverty and low-poverty schools is unlikely to shed
much light on access to high-value-added teachers or on access to effective
teachers within a given school. In other words, the greater reporting
requirements may not actually yield greater transparency about students' access
to effective teaching.
What is promising about the department's
proposal is the flexibility it gives states to identify where equity problems
lie and make plans tailored to the challenges they face. As states make these
plans, they should remember that different distribution patterns call for
different policy solutions. If inequities are most pronounced within schools,
then school leaders may need to ensure that disadvantaged students are able to
enroll in advanced classes, and that classes that serve many disadvantaged
students are staffed with strong teachers. If inequities are most pronounced
between schools within the same district, this may call for district-level
incentive programs to encourage strong teachers—and school leaders—to work in
disadvantaged schools. If inequities are most pronounced between districts or
between geographic regions within a state, this may call for state efforts to
build a stronger teaching workforce in underserved areas though new teacher
preparation, recruitment, or incentive efforts.
Another promising aspect of the flexibility of the
department's proposal is that states presumably have the option of adding a
value-added measure of effectiveness to the list of teacher qualifications when
they create profiles of the distribution of quality teaching within schools,
between schools and between districts. With this additional information,
profiles will give advocates the insight they need to monitor access to high-quality
teaching. Although not all states have systems that allow them to calculate
value-added for all teachers of core academic subjects, the goal of expanding
access to great teaching should increase the pressure to create these systems.
Ultimately, improving the classroom experiences of
disadvantaged students requires more than scrutinizing the experience levels
and licensure rates of their teachers, and more, even, than assessing small
differences in the value-added estimates among teachers. It requires
understanding the dynamics that lead to inequity and ensuring that the policy
solutions fit the problem. If thoughtfully developed, states' equity plans
could take a promising step in that direction.
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