Chatanooga’s lowest-performing elementary schools improved significantly with funding from a local foundation. How did they do it? Education Sector’s Elena Silva credits improving the quality of teaching for the success of the Benwood Initiative.
School district officials reconstituted the faculties of the Benwood schools, requiring teachers to reapply for their jobs and hiring replacements for those who didn’t make the cut. Community officials established financial incentives to attract new talent, including free graduate school tuition, mortgage loans, and performance bonuses.
The role of new and better teachers has been overstated, Silva writes. Most teachers were rehired; few teachers received bonuses. What really changed was the effectiveness of the existing teaching force.
Benwood’s success has had at least as much to do with a second, equally important teacher-reform strategy: helping teachers improve the quality of their instruction. A new analysis of “value-added” teacher effectiveness data conducted for this report indicates that over a period of six years, existing teachers in the eight Benwood elementary schools improved steadily.
Teachers in Benwood schools went from much less effective than the district average to more effective, thanks to mentoring programs, “additional staff to support curriculum and instruction” and “stronger and more collaborative leadership at the school level.”
“Most of the teachers were rehired.”
Hmm. I wonder why the rehired teachers were suddenly more effective.
The public school advocates here are fond of saying that they can’t succeed because of the “inputs”. Did those change?
Perhaps the fact that some teachers weren’t rehired helped the ones that were rehired understand that effective teaching was a good idea.
Andy may be onto something, but I’d also suspect that the school became a lot more focus on which outcomes they wanted to see.
I doubt that the teachers were choosing ineffective teaching just because they enjoyed being ineffective. I suspect they became more effective because they were encouraged to use specific methods that were tied to the results the school wanted to see, as opposed to having to elect which of the many education fads they should embrace which rarely have any payoff, particularly if you are measuring learning with standardized tests.
I also wouldn’t underestimate the influence of knowing that the entire school is behind a certain kind of instruction and that administrators are obligated to support it.
I think they’re may be a tendency to assume that ineffectiveness is an offshoot of laziness, and in some cases it may be, but it’s also likely to be the product of working very hard at the wrong things. Unfortunately, in teaching the wrong things are likely to be the very things that you were taught to value in your education classes or even in your continuing education classes.
It’s also probably worth noting that the system used to measure teacher effectiveness was Tennessee Value Added Assessment, which I’ve held out before as one of the best. It already includes a way to control for the “inputs” that Andy mentions.
I apologize for the they’re for there and focus for focused errors in my post. There may be other. Someday, I’ll learn to proofread. I apologize.
Did you see the part of the actual report that mentioned requiring assistance principals to spend 50% of their time monitoring and supporting instruction? If they actually mean being out in the classrooms and then following up face to face with teachers, that alone is huge revolution. Imagine that those charged with running a school were given enough time to actually observe and manage employees. And imagine that employees got better when this occurred. Who could have guessed?
Perhaps someone will check into how the teachers union responded to the proposed changes before they were put into place. Did they (1) ask for them, (2) do nothing, or (3) fight them?
I don’t think that teachers are lazy. I think that they work to the incentives, which typically have nothing to do with educating kids. They also support that system.
I think that teachers who were paid to educate kids would do so. Interestingly enough, the public school advocates who post here disagree.
Somehow this makes me a bad person.
> It already includes a way to control for the “inputs” that Andy mentions.
I was referring to the public school advocates who claim that they can’t succeed because the students are horrible.
I don’t understand how measuring how bad students are eliminates that excuse, if it’s actually valid. At best, such a measurement should tell us when teachers are bound to fail (if the PSAs are correct).
I think there are some places where the behavior of the kids and the culture of the school do make it nearly impossible for teachers to succeed. I don’t think that’s a public school advocate myth.
I’m not sure if I understood your overall point, Andy, but the way I understand it, in Tennessee Value Added Assessment of teachers, the teacher’s score comes from comparing the learning gains made by his or her kids this year against the previous learning gains of those same students.
So it’s not really a question of measuring how bad they are, but how far the teacher got them compared to the kids’ previous years and to the district average. And sure, a teacher could look at the previous scores and say, “hey these kids are bound to fail,” but if he or she is smart, what he or she really thinks is “wow, an average learning gain of .4; if I can get them to .6, I can probably get a bonus.” It’s a good example of creating incentives for the right outcomes without penalizing teachers for the inputs they can’t control (or at least penalizing them less for stuff like school culture; it’s not that likely that the kids had a better learning environment last year.)
The downside of measuring average growth is that the kids might never really get anywhere relative to other schools and other students (it’d be great that a kid advanced from a 3rd grade level to a 5th grade level, but if the kid is in 7th grade. . .), but apparently in the case of the schools linked, they were able increase performance in a meaningful way and the “reason” that they did so was an increase in TVAAS scores.
I think TVAA just came along at the wrong time. It was ready for general use by other states too late to be promoted and incorporated into states’ NCLB plans, and now the educational bureaucrats are overwhelmed by the data they do have, so they can’t imagine using more even if the additional system was likely to effect positive learning changes.
> I think there are some places where the behavior of the kids and the culture of the school do make it nearly impossible for teachers to succeed. I don’t think that’s a public school advocate myth.
There’s a huge difference between “some” and “most” or “all”.
Whenever I suggest that we pay teachers for the difference they make, the PSAs scream that that isn’t fair because kids who fail are doomed to fail by factors outside the school.
That wasn’t true in this case. I wonder how many other cases it isn’t true.
And, where it is true, why should we spend any money trying? If certain kids are doomed to fail, as the PSAs insist, why bother?
BTW - The PSAs will actually give lip-service to paying for results right up to the point where you insist on measuring. At that point, they claim that what they do can’t be measured or some particular scheme is flawed. Wrt the last, I always ask them to propose a measurement scheme. That’s often when they start namecalling.
Well, TVAA addresses the external factors so perhaps you should start trying to sell it particularly. I know that I’ve responded with it when you’ve posed that question to me.
Surely, you don’t think that all children are equally as easy to educate? Once you acknowledge that they probably aren’t, you should be able to see why PSAs, as you call them, are wary of systems that might reward solely on outcomes. If you start proposing a system that controls for many of the factors beyond the teachers’ control, I suspect you’ll get different reactions.
Some kids are more likely to fail than others. I don’t know that I’d say doomed to fail, but it’s certainly more likely that some will fail than others. You don’t have to worry about what would be the case if that weren’t true. It still is. But you can try to design a system of merit pay that controls for that as much as can be controlled for.
If you read the whole article though, Andy, I think you’ll see that what the schools did required more resources rather than fewer. If you described the reform effort and everything that it included, and asked most PSAs if under those circumstances, their districts could succeed as well, I think most would agree that they too could be successful.