Gleanings
Good Teaching Matters...A Lot

Editor’s Note: In this issue, The OAH Magazine of History is pleased to introduce a new occasional feature. “Gleanings” will be a forum for thought-provoking material about history and teaching gathered from various educational publications. Our hope is to offer our readers multiple viewpoints and to help spread the word about innovative ideas and projects. In this inaugural column, Kati Haycock of The Education Trust takes a look at recent studies measuring the impact on students of good (and bad) teaching. A more detailed version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 1998 issue of Thinking K-16 (vol. 3, no. 2). For a copy of the unabridged article or to learn more about The Education Trust, contact Michelle Pointer, The Education Trust, 1725 K Street NW, Suite 200, Washington, D.C. 20006; (202) 293-0665; <mpointer@edtrust.org>.

Parents have always known that it matters which teachers their children get. That is why those with the time and skills to do so work very hard to assure that, by hook or by crook, their children are assigned to the best teachers. Professional educators typically reject these notions. When parents ask for their children to be assigned to a particular teacher, or to be moved out of the classroom of another, most principals counsel them not to worry. “Your child will learn what he or she needs to from any of our teachers.”

Recent research from Texas and Massachusetts proves parents have been right all along. They may not always know which teachers really are the best, but they are absolutely right in believing their children will learn much from some teachers and only a little from others. “The difference between a good and a bad teacher can be a full level of achievement in a single school year,” says Eric Hanushek, the University of Rochester economist notorious for macroanalyses suggesting that virtually nothing seems to make a difference (l).

Teacher Effects: Dallas

A variety of studies in Texas show significant differences in achievement between students taught by teachers of differing quality. Researchers in the Dallas Independent School District recently completed their first-ever study of teacher effects on the ability of students to perform on assessments. In sharing their findings, Robert Mendro, the district’s executive director of institutional research, said, “what surprised us the most was the size of the effect” (2).

For example, the average reading scores of a group of Dallas fourth graders who were consecutively assigned to three highly effective teachers rose from the fifty-ninth percentile in fourth grade to the seventy-sixth percentile by the conclusion of sixth grade. A similar (but slightly higher achieving) group of students was assigned three ineffective teachers and fell from the sixtieth percentile in fourth grade to the forty-second percentile by the end of sixth grade. A gap of this magnitude—more than thirty-five percentile points—for students who started off roughly the same is hugely significant.

Teacher Effects: Boston

The Boston Public Schools (BPS) are taking a serious look at factors that influence student learning, including the effectiveness of their teachers. A recently released study by Bain and Company conducted on behalf of the district shows the correlation between high school teachers and their students’ academic growth in math and reading.

The authors examined classrooms of BPS tenth-graders whose average scores were approximately the same and charted their progress throughout the year by teacher. The differences were dramatic. In reading, they found that although the gains of students with the top one-third of teachers were slightly below the national median for growth (5.6 on average, compared to 8.0), the students with teachers from the bottom third showed virtually no growth (0.3). Altogether, this means that one-third of BPS teachers are producing six times the learning seen in the bottom third. As one frustrated headmaster put it, “About one-third of my teachers should not be teaching.”

What Makes for Teacher Effectiveness?

Other researchers are now moving toward identifying qualities that make for an effective teacher. Their research helps us to get underneath the matter of teacher effectiveness. Preliminary findings suggest three characteristics that have a significant impact on effective teaching.

1. Strong Verbal and Math Skills. The first thing that is clear when examining the various studies is the critical importance of strong verbal and math skills. Harvard’s Ronald F. Ferguson has studied the relationship between student achievement and teacher performance on a basic literacy examination. Ferguson found that higher scoring teachers were more likely to produce significant gains in student achievement than their lower scoring counterparts (3).
2. Deep Content Knowledge. There is also considerable research showing how important teachers’ content knowledge is to their effectiveness with students, especially at the middle and high school levels. A recent study in Hawaii asked social studies teachers to rate their own level of understanding about various historical periods and teaching methods, then compared teacher expertise to student achievement. Not surprisingly, there was an almost perfect match: students performed best in the domains where teachers indicated the most expertise (4).
3. Teaching Skill? These combined results seem to beg the question: what about teaching knowledge and skills? The large-scale studies we have reviewed are not particularly helpful in identifying ways to quantify teaching expertise. Neither education courses completed, advanced education degrees, scores on professional knowledge sections of licensure exams nor years of experience seem to have a clear relationship to student achievement.

Even so, we suggest that educational leaders not get sidetracked: there is more than sufficient evidence about the importance of deep content knowledge and strong verbal skills to serve as a foundation for immediate action. If good teachers matter, we need to be sure that we are getting the best we can.

Inequities in Distribution

Our emerging understanding of the critical importance of good teachers has especially profound implications for poor and minority youngsters; for no matter how quality is defined, these students come up on the short end. While the teaching force in high-poverty and high-minority communities certainly includes some of the most dedicated and talented teachers in the country, these teachers are vastly outnumbered by under- and, indeed, unqualified colleagues.

These patterns are clear in national data tabulations on out-of-field teaching prepared by Dr. Richard Ingersoll of the University of Georgia. He found that minority and poor youngsters—the very youngsters who are most dependent on their teachers for content knowledge—are systematically taught by teachers with the least content knowledge.

The patterns look quite similar in Texas, where, according to researchers John Kain and Kraig Singleton, African American and Latino children are far more likely to be taught by teachers who scored poorly on the Texas Examination of Current Administrators and Teachers (TECAT). Indeed, as the percentage of non-white children in the school increases, the average teacher score declines (5). Finding the same patterns in his analysis, Ferguson wrote that “...attracting and retaining talented people with strong skills to teach in the districts where black students are heavily represented is part of the unfinished business of equalizing educational opportunity” (6).

Race More Than Class?

Contrary to the assumptions many people may make, inequities in the distribution of teacher expertise are not driven wholly by finances. If they were, we would expect that poor minority children would have teachers of about the same quality as poor white children. But such is not always the case.

In their analysis of Texas data, Kain and Singleton found disturbing differences. Poor white children appear to have a higher likelihood of having well qualified teachers than poor black children (7). In Virginia, students who attend predominantly minority secondary schools are more likely to be taught by underqualified teachers than students who attend high-poverty secondary schools. Studies show similar patterns from other states as well.

Assuring Qualified Teachers for All of Our Children

These findings have profound implications for states and communities striving to get larger numbers of their students to high standards of achievement. If education leaders want to accomplish this goal, we recommend they focus, first and foremost, on quality—quality in teacher preparation, recruitment, hiring, assignment, and ongoing professional development.

This goes doubly for schools and communities with concentrations of poor and minority children. Rather than continuing to accept the crumbs, these schools and communities must insist on the very best teachers for their children. In the hands of our best teachers, the effects of poverty and institutional racism melt away, allowing these students to soar to the same heights as young Americans from more advantaged homes. But if they remain in the hands of underqualified teachers, poor and minority students will continue to fulfill society’s limited expectations of them.

What, then, are the elements of a strategy to assure highly qualified teachers for all young Americans? We don’t yet have all the answers, but we know enough to start the conversations. Here are the more powerful ideas we have gleaned from our work with leading states and cities:

1. Standards for entry into the profession. Any discussion about raising entry standards for teachers should include an examination of how well the standards align with the K-12 content that candidates will have to teach, and the assessments used to find out if candidates can teach this content.

2. Accountability measures for colleges and universities that prepare teachers. In Texas, for example, colleges that have pass rates below 70 percent (soon to be 75 percent) on the state’s teacher licensure exam will lose the right to prepare teachers. To be sure that its intentions are understood, the legislature spells out precisely what it means: 70 percent of the white graduates, 70 percent of the Latino graduates, 70 percent of the black graduates and so on. Moreover, if aspiring math teachers, for example, cannot pass the exam, then the math department loses the franchise.

Universities, together with their nearby school districts, could take the lead from such state-level actions: decide on what intending teachers need to know in their subjects and hold academic departments accountable for getting them there before they graduate.

3. Professional development for existing teachers. Teacher effectiveness is not forever fixed. Through careful development, teachers can build their effectiveness over time. However, it is important to move beyond the three-hour workshops about isolated topics. These strategies must be ongoing, on-site, and focused on the content students need to learn.

4. Assurance that poor and minority children have teachers that are at least as qualified as the ones teaching other students. Actually, if we had our druthers, we would push for a policy requiring that, for the next two decades or so, these students should systematically be assigned our best teachers. Achieving either goal, though, would require careful attention to the following:

• Who we are preparing to teach—where they come from and where they want to teach;
• Interdistrict differences in salaries;
• The practice of assigning beginning teachers to schools with concentrations of poor children;
• District policies rewarding senior teachers with the “right” to transfer to “easier” schools;
• Practices within schools, where teachers fight over who has to teach whom, and where the senior, better educated teachers wind up with the most advanced children; and
• The absence of clear incentives and prevalence of disincentives for teachers to work with poor and minority children.

5. “Parent Right to Know” policies. Parents deserve to know when their children are being taught science by history majors or history by physical education grads. When parents know where the needs are greatest, they can become partners in local efforts to secure an adequate number of well-qualified teachers for all students.

6. Recruitment and rewards to attract the best into teaching. We worry that, instead of seeking out the very best, too many teacher preparation programs simply make do with what walks in the door. Many leaders in teacher preparation programs say that they are doing the best they can—that low salaries and lower prestige make it impossible to attract able candidates, especially minorities, to the teaching profession and higher standards will make it worse. We remain unconvinced. If these claims are correct, then why does Teach for America, which has much higher standards than most education schools, routinely attract far more qualified graduates than it can place. And why, among Teach for America’s way-above-average corps members, are there more than twice as many minorities as there are in education schools (8)?

These experiences tell us we can produce the highly qualified teachers that we need by combining:

• High entry standards;
• Rich incentives like generous scholarships and loan forgiveness for highly able professionals who want to teach in high-poverty schools;
• Accountability systems rewarding departments and campuses for the numbers of their top students that enter teaching; and
• Non-traditional, yet still rigorous, routes into the profession.

These are just some of the pieces of a solution to the vexing problem of assuring we have teachers to match our goals. Solving this problem requires concerted action from policymakers, leaders in both K-12 and higher education, teacher unions, and parents. No single party can win the battle; all must be involved and at the table if we are to craft sound policies that will succeed.

But we must also understand that we cannot wait until every piece of this puzzle is in hand. Our inability to answer every question about teacher effectiveness right now shouldn’t make us reluctant to use the devices we do have to begin to lure in the best, screen others out, and intensively develop the rest. And it certainly should not deter us from doing what it takes to assure that poor and minority youngsters get at least their fair share of effective, well-prepared teachers.

Endnotes

1. Eric A. Hanushek,”The Trade-Off Between Child Quantity and Quality,” Journal of Political Economy (1992).

2. Jeff Archer, “Students’ Fortune Rests With Assigned Teacher,” Education Week (18 February 1998).

3. Ronald E. Ferguson, Evidence That Schools Can Narrow the Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1997), 32.

4. Eva L. Baker, “Report on the Content Area Performance Assessments (CAPA): A Collaboration Among Hawaii Dept. of Education, the Center for Research on Evaluation Standards and Student Testing, and the Teachers and Children of Hawaii,” 1996, 17. Available from Eva L. Baker at UCLA.

5. John F. Kain and Kraig Singleton, “Equality of Educational Opportunity Revisited,” New England Economic Review (May/June 1996): 109.

6. Ferguson, “The Black-White Test Score Gap,” 30.

7. Kain and Singleton, “Equality,” 109.

8. Teach for America, 1997 Annual Report (New York: 1997).

Kati Haycock is the director of The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based group devoted to promoting high academic achievement for all students in kindergarten through college.