A New Deal For Teaching
It’s tough luck for today’s presidential candidates but a lot of education ideas are spoken for or discredited. Standards and accountability? President Clinton and President Bush did that. Just spending more money? Didn’t work. Vouchers and tax credits? Adam Smith isn’t going to fix our schools for us. Instead, it’s the thornier issues that policymakers must tackle today. But look on the bright side, candidates! Here’s a chance to really demonstrate leadership, fortitude, and a willingness to take on hard issues.
The question of human capital — teachers and school leaders — in public education is exactly the kind of politically and substantively complicated issue that policymakers must tackle today. It’s not a cliche. In education, people are almost everything and every reform will fail without attention to human capital. Research shows that teacher effectiveness is the most important in-school variable affecting how much students learn. In fact, outstanding teachers can largely overcome today’s achievement gaps while ineffective ones hopelessly exacerbate it.
Yet despite the centrality of people to education, current strategies for teacher recruitment, training, evaluation, and compensation are largely divorced from the goals of effectiveness and equity and are misaligned with what we know works. It’s not hyperbole to say that as a systemic matter we do almost nothing right in terms of how teachers are treated throughout their careers. Sure, politicians repeatedly profess their respect for teachers but our public policies fundamentally disrespect them and the work they do. More generally, no enterprise, public or private, can thrive over time without paying close attention to how it recruits, trains, and retains its very best people. Considering that the majority of the $500 billion spent annually on American public education goes to people, it is unacceptable that we have a system that does not manage human capital more effectively.
Historically public education did not have to pay much attention to human capital because of a largely captive labor market. Professional opportunities for women and minorities were limited and teaching was an attractive option. But, thankfully, times have changed and numerous professional doors are now open for previously excluded groups. But that means public schools must complete for talent as never before. (Today though, they’re not, and are mostly doing the same things we’ve done for more than a generation.) The result, as research clearly shows, is that people with the traits associated with effective teaching are disproportionately drawn away from education while those without those traits are disproportionately drawn in.
The federal government spends approximately $3 billion annually on teacher quality. Most of this funding is spent on low-impact, low-leverage activities such as class-size reduction and often ineffective professional development programs. By revamping and augmenting this funding the federal government could put forward a New Deal for Teaching that invests in states that seek to substantially overhaul their approaches to recruiting, training, inducting, mentoring, evaluating, and compensating teachers. For instance, federal investments could support charter colleges of education that train teachers based on research-based best practices or in actual schools working with real teachers rather than distant universities, better strategies for mentoring and inducting new teachers, more consistent and effective evaluations for teachers, or new compensation schemes that raise teacher pay by rewarding special skills, knowledge, and outstanding performance. These and other human capital reforms are good for students because they promote teacher quality. But they’re good for teachers, too. Talented people want to be in an environment where talent is expected, respected, and rewarded.
Rather than today’s approach, where states receive federal dollars for teacher quality regardless of the effectiveness of what they do, the federal government should take the posture of an investor by supporting promising practices and innovation in partnership with states that are undertaking genuine reform. Traditionally, federal education dollars have served as a catalyst for state reforms. It’s time for Washington to again play that role and prod the states to get serious about human capital. And it’s a perfect opportunity for the presidential candidates to show leadership and independence on a hard issue.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
While I agree with the premise of your article, the nuts and bolts of doing some of those things are incredibly difficult. You state, “federal investments could support . . . new compensation schemes that raise teacher pay by rewarding special skills, knowledge, and outstanding performance.” Most people I know support that premise. However, how do you fairly and accurately measure teacher effectiveness? As someone who has done work in this area as both a researcher and a consultant to a district developing a new compensation system, I can tell you that: (1) most states and districts do not collect the types of data that would allow them to do any analysis on effectiveness using student outcomes; (2) creating such data systems is very expensive; (3) most tests used by states do not have the psychometric properties to adequately measure teacher effectiveness using test scores; (4) most teachers are not assigned to teach students for which there are any measures of student outcomes, much less valid and reliable ones; and, (5) there is a fairly limited number of researchers that can undertake any type of value-added analysis and do it well enough that it would withstand legal and peer scrutiny.
Again, I agree with your suggestions. I am just pointing out that it will take a monumental investment of time, money, and willpower to change these systems even if there is no political oppostion.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
After all this training, teachers will still be at the bottom of the professional hierarchy, their opinions no more important to the actual goals of the organization that employs them then they are now.
Why would that situation change? Because they’ve got more education? Teachers have been getting EdD’s for a couple of decades and while that may net them a pay bump the bump comes courtesy of the union.
Teacher quality is important to parents, and by extension, the kids. To everyone else in public education the quality of education, and by extension the quality of teachers, is just one concern among a number of concerns and not necessarily the most important concern. If you want teachers to matter then education has to matter.
That’s why NCLB has stirred up such a hornet’s nest. To people outside the teaching profession there’s nothing remotely remarkable about accountability and performance measurement. Salesmen have quotas, factory managers have quality, quantity and profit goals, car companies have J.D. Powers and bands have the Top Twenty.
Everyone has a measuring stick except public education.
If you don’t measure it, you don’t value it and you don’t value the skills that go into “it”. Until NCLB, state-level accountability measures were largely a joke. Nothing was being measured even though there were spasmodic attempts to “do” something about public education. NCLB begins the process of changing all that by creating a measuring tool and attaching consequences for failure to measure up.
The certainty of undesirable consequences elevates the value of people who can help you avoid them, teachers in this case.