We Should Focus on Teacher Quality

Teacher quality is the Holy Grail of education reform. Among education professionals at all levels, there’s widespread agreement that student achievement is more closely aligned with teacher quality than with any other factor, including poverty, the presence of other stressors in the environment, such as gang violence, and even learning disabilities. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek publishes research that helps to narrow down “teacher effectiveness.” When this quality is quantified, Hanushek finds that students who have the most effective teachers (with effectiveness in the 90th percentile) learn on average 1.5 years’ worth of material in a single school year. But students who are taught by teachers whose effectiveness rates in the 10th percentile learn only one-half year’s worth of material in one school year. “No other attribute of schools comes close to having this much influence on student achievement,” Hanushek claims.

One of the most significant obstacles to a goal of providing high-quality teachers in every classroom is the common belief that exceptional teachers are uniquely gifted. This belief not only provides a convenient excuse for state legislatures to reject measures to reward the best-performing teachers with merit bonuses, but it also fuels stagnation and a defeatist attitude on both sides of the education reform debate. If the best teachers are preternaturally gifted, why in the world would they ever be willing to work in a traditional public school? Why would talented individuals actually choose to teach in the inner city; why would they actually remain in a challenging job that required intense work with poverty-stricken, traumatized youth? Because it’s nonsensical to think that the low or, at best, modest salaries offered to the huge majority of American K-12 teachers would attract real talent, the assumption seems to run, we should continue to provide equal pay to the low-performing teachers who are willing to take these lousy jobs.

In her book The Good School, Peg Tyre examines the opposite side of the “teacher as superman” myth: the “widget effect,” which she describes as “Teachers can be treated as interchangeable widgets’” (Tyre 181). Tyre says that notions of teacher equality lead to this mindset; if all teachers are “uniformly good,” school administrators can be “detached from what happens in the classroom” and can focus on other things (180-81). If all teachers are equal, administrators are no longer required to perform observations or to evaluate teachers to identify their individual strengths and weaknesses and help them hone their classroom skills. Quality professional development (PD) for teachers is no longer a priority (181). And individual teachers with superior skills are not allowed to confront  teachers in lower grades who are sending them ill-prepared students. (182).

Teachers’ unions reflexively protect all teachers, denying that some are doing a better job than others (182), and this behavior, too, is related to the “widget effect.” If students’ test scores are low and aren’t improving, the widget myth passes the buck along to the parents, to societal factors, such as poverty, or even to the students. You can read about how the buck is passed in accounts of numerous school-reform efforts.

Advocates for identifying and rewarding teacher quality do not subscribe to the view that great teachers are merely innately talented. Nor do they buy any of the attempts by schools or by teachers’ unions to blame other factors for students’ lack of achievement. They dismiss all of the following common excuses as merely attempts by administrators and other bureaucrats to avoid accountability (another politically charged word): “these students just won’t learn/they’re disruptive”; “they live in poverty, and we can’t fix that”; “their neighborhood is too dangerous for them to attend school regularly”; “they probably have a learning disability, but the school isn’t allowed to diagnose disabilities”; “their parents don’t make them do their homework.” Education reformers have argued both that this self-defeating mindset is nonsense; that “any child can learn,” as the saying goes; and that great teachers have been trained, not bred.

Tyre provides a good overview of the commonly accepted research into teacher quality and notes that the advantages that children derive from top-tier educators have been quantified at a granular level, with results that have been frequently replicated (184).  She writes that in William L. Sanders’s meticulous statistical research,

“even top students assigned to an ineffective teacher or even a so-so one did not keep pace with the students in the good teacher’s class. Low-achieving students suffered the most. And those effects—both the positive and the negative—were long-lasting. Two years later, the researchers could still discern the effects of a good teacher on the students. The damage a bad teacher did to a child’s trajectory was also evident two years down the line.”

Although Tyre doesn’t discuss it, some of Sanders’s research used the TVAAS (Tennessee Value-Added Assessment) database to gauge the effects of teacher quality on student academic growth. He and co-author Sandra P. Horn concluded in a 1998 paper that “Research conducted utilizing data from the TVAAS database has shown that race, socioeconomic level, class size, and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of student academic growth. Rather, the effectiveness of the teacher is the major determinant of student academic progress.”

Yet it’s unfair to punish low-performing teachers if you have not first offered them opportunities to improve. At a time when many public school systems’ budgets for professional development have been slashed, relying on punitive measures to improve teacher quality is not only an unjust, but ineffective method of creating a quality education workforce.

It’s therefore encouraging to note that recent school-reform efforts have attempted to quantify what works in teacher training. Charter operators and other school reformers have reported some very significant successes in efforts to make an effective teacher much more effective, and to bring a sub-par teacher up to effectiveness, after undergoing targeted, evidence-based training in a professional setting. Frederick M. Hess, writing in The National Review, provides one example of effective teacher development: The Equity Project (TEP) in New York City. Hess praises TEP for its students’ impressive academic gains: “Compared with similar students in New York City public schools, TEP students who attended from grade five to eight gained 1.4 years of math during each of the four years they spent at the school.” He notes that the majority of TEP students are low-income and Hispanic, and that the same percentage of TEP students qualify for special-ed services as in the city’s traditional public schools.

Hess is convinced that the reason for the exceptional gains is teacher quality: “TEP carefully selects its educators, pays them well, and then asks them to meet high expectations and to handle modestly larger classes.” Although his main argument is that “bureaucratic bloat” takes away the taxpayer-supported funds that should be available to pay teachers like well-educated professionals, he ends up arguing for vastly increased salaries for teachers in exchange for a commitment to slightly larger classes, ongoing professional development, and unspecified “outsize professional responsibilities.”

Surely most teachers would dearly love to be asked to shoulder “professional responsibilities” if it meant being treated—and compensated—like professionals.