Changing the meaning of ‘highly qualified’

US education policy should reduce its emphasis on the entering characteristics of teachers and insist instead that teacher quality be determined by the fruits of teachers’ work: Student outcomes. Under the headline “From Qualifications to Results: Promoting Teacher Effectiveness Through Federal Policy” (28 January 2009), Robin Chait presents the case for stressing alternative ways of promoting teacher effectiveness.

Federal law should stop focusing on “quality,” as measured by front-end qualifications, and start focusing on “effectiveness,” as measured by whether teachers have actually helped students learn. Research now shows that most qualifications only weakly predict whether teachers will succeed in the classroom, and one of the best predictors of future performance is past performance. This means that increasing the share of teachers who are high performers will be a straighter path to improving student achievement than focusing on credentials.

According to Ms. Chait’s report, educational policy needs emphasize (a) collecting and using high-quality data about teacher effects, (b) employing those data in promulgating policies, and (c) creating and sustaining political emphasis on teacher effectiveness. Describing a detailed policy proposal, Ms. Chait explained that such a focus will require investments in these reforms:

1. The infrastructure (data, assessment, and evaluation systems) needed to evaluate teachers and their ability to improve student performance
2. A state and district grant program to incentivize reforms that focus on teacher effectiveness
3. An alternative certification grant program to expand the pool of talented teachers, particularly for high-poverty schools
4. A pilot state grant program to explore a pathway toward teacher certification that focuses on teacher effectiveness

This is one of the many proposals that are being pushed in Washington (DC, US) as the new US government begins addressing educational issues. It come from the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed by John Podesta, who is former chief of staff to President William Clinton and is currently on the faculty at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Although my day job is in the preparation of teachers (what the Center for American Progress report calls a focus on “front-end qualifications”), I have increasing sympathy with the idea that we need to develop mechanisms for recognizing and rewarding practicing professionals whose effectiveness we can document. I’m not ready to abandon pre-service teacher preparation, but the pay-for-performance idea is gaining traction with me.

To be sure, educators would need ways to weight measures of effectiveness by, for example, the characteristics of students being taught (it’s a lot easier, I suspect, to get big gains when teaching gifted students from wealthy suburbs than struggling students from inner-city schools) and the constraints placed on teachers by local administrators (e.g., superintendents who discontinue use of effective curricula in favor of junky ones that fit with passionately held philosophies about freedom, natural development, and such). But given the wealth of data being collected across the country, it should be possible to do so, and to make increasingly more refined judgments as more data become available.

There’s no time like to present to get started. I don’t know whether the proposals described by Ms. Chait will provide a precise roadmap, but they are a good initial approximation. Let’s start and sustain the discussion.

Link to the Web page introducing the report or directly download it.