Teacher Quality and Preparation

Nearly every state is overhauling its teacher evaluation system, implementing new teacher observation tools and incorporating measures of student achievement. Why?

More than 20 states now require measures of student achievement to carry significant weight in teachers’ effectiveness ratings – even in the earliest grades, in which children do not participate in state standardized testing. As a result, states and school districts are struggling to find sound methods to measure young students’ learning.

As a sneak peek to her policy paper to be released this week, we talked late last week with senior policy analyst Laura Bornfreund about how schools are experimenting with rating teachers' effectiveness in the PreK-3rd grades.

What is the best way to use data to measure teacher impact on student learning? States and school districts are attempting to navigate these uncharted waters. As of 2012, 20 states and DC require evidence of student learning to play a role in evaluating teacher performance. As a result, better information on student learning is in high demand, and no grade level is immune. Historically, most states have required standardized testing only in grades three through eight.

According to recent budget documents from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Head Start program has surpassed a statutory requirement that half of Head Start teachers have bachelor’s degrees in early childhood by September 30, 2013. In fact, according to the Department, 62 percent of teachers had earned the degree by fiscal year 2012.

Much of the discussion around the President’s 2014 education budget has centered on proposed initiatives for universal pre-K and a $1 billion Race to the Top competition for college affordability and completion.

Compared to these bold new proposals, K-12 education seems to have drawn the short straw. The U.S. Department of Education could see some new or expanded programming for K-12  – additional money for the Promise Neighborhoods program, a new competitive grant competition for high school redesign, and an expanded School Turnaround Grants program – but nothing like what it has outlined for very young and adult learners.

The lack of banner initiatives for K-12 belies the attention that the Department has paid to the issue of teacher professionalism and evaluation over the past year. In fact, the dearth of new proposals may actually underscore the importance of changes to a reintroduced $5 billion proposal to transform the teaching profession – a proposal that was fleshed out today as the Blueprint for RESPECT (Recognizing Education Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching).

We would be remiss not to mention that issues of teacher evaluation and accountability have stirred a lot of public attention this year. September’s Chicago teacher strike and a recent federal lawsuit by Florida teachers on use of student scores for untested subjects have made teacher evaluation and dismissal practices a subject of national debate. Bill Gates’ Washington Post op-ed earlier this month advocated for the use of multiple measures for evaluation (including student surveys and observations by veteran teachers), as well as policies that increase collaboration rather than competition amongst teachers. Accountability measures are here to stay, but  Gates argues that the focus should shift towards how to use them in a way that increases the number of effective teachers.

In last year’s budget, the administration proposed using $5 billion from the failed American Jobs Act for a competitive grant program to “reshape the teaching profession.” The initiative as originally conceived was accountability-heavy; it suggested that state or district reforms could include making teacher training programs “more selective and accountable” and “ensuring that compensation is tied to performance.” Other possibilities included reforming tenure to “raise the bar, protect good teachers, and promote accountability” and strengthening teacher autonomy “in exchange for greater accountability.”

While not enacted, the American Jobs Act proposal did launch the RESPECT project, the Department’s attempt to engage in a national conversation on the teaching profession. This project facilitated conversations on the teaching profession across the nation and provided districts and teachers with a way of submitting feedback to the Department. Over the last two years, the Department has held 360 roundtables with 5,700 educators and solicited feedback from national teacher organizations, like the National Education Association.

Given the administration’s focus on effective teaching and school leadership, we weren’t surprised when this part of the American Jobs Act initiative returned in the 2014 budget request as $5 billion in mandatory funding to underwrite the RESPECT Project. But we were surprised by some changes to the proposal. Perhaps as a result of the conversations started by its namesake, the language used in the current budget proposal is strikingly transformed from the 2013 request.

After a year of conversations with teachers, the Department is now thinking – or at least speaking – differently. See for yourself below: “accountability” and “tenure” have been replaced, literally, by “shared leadership and responsibility for student outcomes.” Compensation system reforms are now designed to “attract and retain top talent.” Reforms could include creating “conditions in schools that support effective teaching, including by providing teachers greater autonomy… and time for collaboration.”

The system reforms envisioned in the two versions of the proposal are largely the same, but the 2014 RESPECT version is couched in the language of talent development and teacher support, rather than accountability and consequences. Those in the Department may have recognized that implementing evaluation systems doesn’t have to mean identifying winners and losers in teaching careers. Rather, these new systems can spur the development of a profession that relies on collaboration, data, and talent development to increase student achievement.

The strong shift in budget justification language, in addition to the release of the Blueprint today, signal a credible change in the way that the Department is addressing the issue of teacher quality and retention. Regardless of whether the RESPECT project is funded, it will be fascinating to see how this new direction influences other competitive grant programs, like the Teacher Incentive Fund, and whether it can ultimately facilitate changes to strengthen the teacher profession.

While poring over the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request, we noticed several subtle, but critical, shifts in the way that the administration addresses teacher preparation grants and regulations.

Just as in the fiscal year 2013 budget request, the administration is proposing to phase out the current TEACH Grants program in favor of a $190 million Presidential Teaching Fellows program. What follows is our attempt to read the tea leaves in the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed budget.

TEACH grants, started in 2008, provide $4,000 a year to eligible undergraduate or graduate students who agree to teach a high-needs subject in a high-needs school for at least four years within the first eight years after they graduate. In the 2013 budget, the Department projected that a large number of grant recipients – perhaps as high as 75% – will not fulfill the service requirement and instead will see the grants converted to Unsubsidized Stafford loans. The 2014 budget justification does not cite this figure, indicating only that a “significant” number of recipients will not fulfill the requirements, and that the Department anticipates about $17 million in revenues from converted grants.

In last year’s Presidential Teaching Fellows proposal, the administration would have provided formula grants to states to improve teacher preparation program performance and finance scholarships of up to $10,000 for students in the last year of an effective education program. Scholarship recipients would commit to teaching a high-needs subject in a high-needs school for at least three years out of six following graduation.

This year’s budget request includes the same framework for granting scholarships, but the provisions for improving teacher preparation programs have been softened. Previously, the Department would have required states to “withdraw approval of programs persistently identified as low-performing,” noting that 38 states and D.C. have not yet identified any low-performing or at-risk teacher training programs. Programs would be given technical assistance to improve before having their approval revoked after a given number of years.

Now, funding is contingent on states’ willingness to “hold teacher preparation programs accountable for results, including withdrawal of approval for programs persistently identified as low-performing” – a subtle difference, but an important one. Rather than revoking approval, states would be required to “establish and enforce a timeline for withdrawing financial support” from schools and alternative preparation programs that have received technical assistance but have not improved in a given number of years. And rather than focus on the closure of schools that produce ineffective teachers, the 2014 budget proposal also has new language that encourages states to “facilitate the broad adoption of practices employed by [high-quality] programs” to broaden the share of teachers prepared using high-performing methods.

This language shift may be the result of the stream of conversations around teacher preparation program accountability that occurred after the last budget release. At the end of February in 2012, ED released a draft set of federal regulations to join the TEACH grant eligibility to teacher preparation reporting under Title II of the Higher Education Act. Submitted for consideration under a negotiated rulemaking process, the regulations would have classified teacher-prep programs in four categories – high-performing, satisfactory, low-performing, or at-risk – based on new indicators including student learning outcomes, employment levels, and satisfaction surveys from recent graduates and schools that hire them. Students attending schools rated in the bottom two categories would not be eligible for federally-funded TEACH grants.

The negotiated rulemaking process fizzled out without a consensus  in April, so ED has been left to write regulations governing teacher preparation programs and TEACH grants on its own. These new rules were initially expected by last fall but thus far are still in progress. In the wake of this slow-down, those on the inside are not optimistic that significant regulations will move forward this year.

Nonetheless, in February the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) released a draft set of accreditation standards for teacher preparation schools that provides for increased use of outcome-based measures. The standards have spurred feedback, particularly from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), which objects to the creation of a “gold standard” designation for top programs and provisions for the use and interpretation of outcome data.

It remains to be seen whether the revised language in the 2014 budget will move the conversation around teacher preparation towards a feasible outcome for all stakeholders. In the meantime, a few states, including Louisiana and Tennessee, have already implemented systems for tracking student outcomes for graduates of teacher preparation programs. Furthermore, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has partnered with U.S. News & World Report to release a ranking of quality of teacher training programs in 2013. Even if the Department ends up dragging its feet, it’s clear that the push to hold teacher preparation programs accountable for their graduates’ achievements will go on.

The release of the President’s fiscal year 2014 budget provides a clearer picture of the quality standards states would have to meet to receive funds under the Obama administration’s “Preschool for All” proposal. The most notable benchmarks are pre-K teachers with bachelor's degrees and salaries for pre-K teachers that are comparable to K-12 teachers’ wages.

What knowledge and skills do teachers of young children, from preschool through third grade, need to best serve their students? Through a new, 18-month study of the pre-K-3^rd teaching force, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services are working with the National Academy of Sciences, to answer this big question.

Debates on preschool can sometimes devolve into misinformed squabbles over whether children can benefit and by how much. But a debate hosted last Thursday at the Fordham Institute was a refreshing exception. For 90 minutes, speakers and the audience reckoned with several important policy questions, especially on the extent to which the federal government should get involved to improve quality and access for families. The one thing missing was a serious conversation about how to build a strong, professional workforce of pre-K teachers.