It is a well-accepted tenet of education research at this point that teacher quality is the biggest school-based factor in student achievement, but how much is teacher quality associated with education background and certification status? This is the question that new research from the Bush Institute seeks to answer.
One report in particular stands out: Teacher Effectiveness Research and the Evolution of U.S. Teacher Policy by Dan Goldhaber, Director, National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, and Vice President, American Institutes for Research.
This chapter describes the import of teachers for student achievement, and the extent to which the variation in teacher effectiveness is associated with the credentials that have traditionally been used to determine their employment eligibility and compensation. It goes on to discuss the prospects for policies designed to act on the differences that exist between teachers, and concludes with thoughts on possible pathways for improving teacher quality.
Goldhaber concludes:
The benefits of increasing the quality of the teacher workforce are profound, but things get murkier when it comes to delineating a clear path toward this objective. The difficulty is two-fold. First, teacher effectiveness is not well-predicted by the teacher credentials—licensure, degree and experience levels—that are now utilized for high-stakes purposes. Second, there is little evidence that in-service professional development leads to changes in teacher practices that result in significant improvements in student achievement. It is possible that PD might be more effective under a different incentive system. Changing who is in the profession is likely to either be slow (through attrition) or politically challenging.
There are three possible options for changing the policies governing employment and compensation in public schools. First, some have argued that technology will disrupt the current system (Christensen et al 2008) and could lead to different teacher career paths and an extended reach of highly effective teachers (Hess, 2009 & Rhim et al, 2007). Second, increases in educational resources, which flow down to impact individual teachers, clearly help to ease the political opposition to changing governance structures. Third, policymakers may simply reach the point where they decide that teacher policies need to change to make K-12 education more productive, even in the absence of additional resources. In particular, the evidence is pretty clear that investments in teacher quality (if we can figure out how to target this elusive trait) are far more cost effective than investments in more teachers (and lowered class size). In terms of the way teachers are currently compensated, eliminating the master’s pay premium looks like low-hanging fruit for reform.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.bushcenter.org/sites/default/files/gwbi-teacher-effectiveness-research.pdf
