Reformers have framed their narrative around the myth of “the bad teacher, without whom all children would make A’s in every subject every year. With this false narrative, they have promoted lengthy, tme-wasting evaluations to find and fire these academic frauds.
The narrative itself is the fraud. Like every profession, there are good and bad practitioners. Some teachers are excellent in some settings, not in others. We count on qualified administrators–not algorithms–to evaluate their staffs.
But now comes another reason to doubt the reformers’ narrative. A new study shows that the quality of teachers has been increasing over the past 15 years.
The abstract says:
“The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, a number of federal, state, and local teacher accountability policies have been implemented toward improving teacher quality over the objections of some who argue the policies will decrease quality. In this article, we analyze 25 years of data on the academic ability of teachers in New York State and document that since 1999 the academic ability of both individuals certified and those entering teaching has steadily increased. These gains are widespread and have resulted in a substantial narrowing of the differences in teacher academic ability between high- and low-poverty schools and between White and minority teachers. We interpret these gains as evidence that the status of teaching is improving.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
I don’t have access to read the whole study, but I’d need to know a whole lot more about what they define as “teacher quality” and how that’s measured before I celebrate this as a good thing. If my hunch that it means that all teachers are successfully raising test scores is correct, then that’s “credit” to NCLB/RttT which has made teachers’ jobs dependent on those scores, but that still doesn’t mean that raising scores is a good thing. Improving test scores is a whole different banana than properly educating students and focusing on the former necessarily leaves less time and energy for the latter, especially in poor and minority districts.
It refers to the “academic ability” of teachers, so I would assume the report is about things like the GPA, undergrad class rank, quality of undergrad institution, etc., of new teachers entering the profession.
Well, I suppose that would be marginally better than my supposition, but still nothing to cheer about. The quality of a teacher really comes from his/her ability to relate to and connect with his/her students, which is something entirely unrelated to his/her standing in college or the standing of the college itself. At the risk of being a broken record, being “smart” does not necessarily make one a good teacher.
That may be.
I think what Diane’s misunderstanding is that the report itself is probably being presented as evidence that NCLB has successfully increased the quality of teachers, and that predictions that NCLB’s accountability measures would make graduates less likely to want to become teachers have proved false.
Yes, I had that concern too.
To know if graduates are being dissuaded from becoming teachers, we would also have to interview people who considered teaching but did not enroll. But if looking at just academic measures, all that tells us is a possible trend of teacher graduates having higher grades. We have to interpret beyond that. Could be colleges are doing a better job preparing teachers, or could be grade inflation.
My first thought as well (though scores really haven’t back that up, right?).
I agree with Dienne. The measure used for quality is worth scrutiny. There is a fine line between gaming the system and cheating. The current teacher evaluation systems allow both. The problem the current systems aggravate is good teachers who play by the rules but take on challenging students are penalized. Poor teachers who game the system without being caught or have easier students are rewarded. Of course, good teachers play by the rules and are rewarded. Poor teachers play by the rules and are identified. Did I leave out good teachers who game the system but are identified as ineffective, anyways? In other words, the current systems of measuring teacher quality is about as accurate as rolling dice.
I had many very good teachers in pre-VAM days that would have been VAMed out today. I had poor teachers that were very popular and would have scored high on student/parent surveys, but I did not find out how far behind I was till college. The least popular teacher taught Composition and would have scored low on surveys, but I aced Composition in college. I was at a funeral the other day and saw her grave and thanked her. I wish I would have earlier.
MathVale: spot on.
As a cartoon I read many years ago put it re the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”
In other words, how are “success” and “failure” being defined? Who’s doing the defining? What sort of thinking and values and goals are explicitly and implicitly involved? And once you’ve made that clear: how do you measure “success” or “failure”? And indeed, can they be measured at all? And if not susceptible of being measured well, just how imprecise and inaccurate and misleading are those measurements?
Thank you for highlighting this.
😎
“The least popular teacher taught Composition and would have scored low on surveys, but I aced Composition in college.”
What did she do/not do that would have cost her on surveys? I suspect she was not of the school that took teaching to student interests to the extreme. Although I do not at all object to the movement to make learning relevant, I do wonder at the push to have teachers create a dog and pony show. We all know that all of life is not fun and that some things take incredible effort to accomplish and it is frequently particularly entertaining. The satisfaction comes in a job well done. I’m not sure that we don’t do our students a disservice if we avoid some of those tough choices in teaching because the students will object. I am, of course, thinking about age appropriate expectations.
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
“In this article, we analyze 25 years of data on the academic ability of teachers in New York State and document that since 1999 the academic ability of both individuals certified and those entering teaching has steadily increased. “
The blog starts with
“Reformers have framed their narrative around the myth of “the bad teacher, without whom all children would make A’s in every subject every year. With this false narrative, they have promoted lengthy, tme-wasting evaluations to find and fire these academic frauds.”
Please tell me where is this statement (myth) and which reformers perpetuate this myth? Or does this myth originate here and now?
I know only in Lake Woe Begone all women are beautiful and all children are above average. Where is this fantasy land where all children would make A’s? Is it Lake Woe Begone and if so do we have to be concerned?
Diane has been blogging for about two and a half years now and she has posted numerous articles and pundits blaming teachers for nearly everything up to and including the death of Eric Garner. Please pay attention and do a little back-reading before posting.
The bad teacher myth is the underpinning of the rank and yank “accountability” measures. Money is allocated to testing and teacher elimination, including removing due process to implement fire-at-will systems. Very little money is allocated to professional development. It is all punish, not improve. And based on terribly flawed measurement systems, at that.
As far as fantasy, remember that NCLB required 100% proficiency for 100% of students. Something not even found in Lake Wobegon.
You are obvioulsy new here, and still don’t know much about who the author is and who her audiences are. Do little background research please before you make grumbling and whining about the problems we are adressing here. Thank you.
See? NCLB WORKED!
I think defining “teacher quality” based on “academic performance” (which I assume to mean things like SAT scores and GPAs) is extremely troubling for many of the same reasons I reject these measures for students and schools. Some of the best teachers I’ve known were poor test-takers themselves and did not get the best grades. I actually think many students responded well to that type of teacher-they identified with them.
To me, this study reaks of the usual sexist, racist, and classist assumptions that plague so much of education. The teaching profession has historically been considered “low status” because it was made up of women, minorities, and people from all class backgrounds-not because of the SAT scores of the teachers. I suspect that the uptick in “teacher quality” also coincided with a demographic shift to a whiter, more middle class teaching force, like we saw in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans.
I wrote about this a while ago: http://mskatiesramblings.blogspot.com/2012/12/now-ed-prep-is-problem-change.html arguing that we need to look at great “teachING, not teachERS.”
As educators, we must have holistic views of all people and not get sucked into the typical neoliberal rhetoric. Remember, it was people considered “the smartest in the world” who caused the financial collapse of 2008, and who continue the neoliberal assault on our schools, our cities, and our world today.
As usual, nailed it.
Nicely said, Katie!
The Masters of the Universe will play this to their advantage or ignore it, which ever suits their fancy. They create their own reality that has nothing to do with facts, I just wish more voters would figure this out.
This is a link to what appears to be a final but perhaps not fully formatted copy of the study: http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/who-enters-teaching-encouraging-evidence-status-teaching-improving
“The abilities of teachers have received far greater scrutiny since the late 1990s, the result of increased emphasis on student achievement in federal, state, and local policy and greater recognition of the key role of teachers (Figlio & Loeb, 2011). Many states have increased teacher licensure requirements intending to prevent the least qualified individuals from entering the profession. The federal government as part of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has required that school districts
receiving Title I funds ensure that all teachers of any core academic subjects meet the Highly Qualified Teacher (HQT) provision starting with academic year 2006-07. To be highly qualified, a teacher must hold a bachelor’s degree, be fully state-certified, and demonstrate competency in the core subject(s) taught by earning a major or equivalent in the subject or passing a subject-matter test (Loeb & Miller, 2009). In addition to increasing teacher quality overall, many of these policies also seek a more equitable distribution of teacher quality such that it is no longer the case that teachers in some schools, especially difficult-to-staff high-poverty schools, are lower quality (as defined by these policies) than teachers in other schools.”
Diane, I will give you credit for having consistently championed the importance of improving teacher quality (with the unspoken caveat, of course, that the changes apply only to new teachers). But it is pretty clear to me even after a quick scan of the study that the authors are arguing that the improvement in NYS teacher quality is a direct result of what you would define as corporate education reform—NCLB, top-down mandates from the NYS Board of Regents, etc. Alternative certification pathways such as the New York City Teaching Fellows program, a joint venture of the DOE and The New Teacher Project (Michelle Rhee’s outfit) are shown to have had a major impact on incoming teacher quality, e.g.
To paraphrase your earlier comment about Macke Raymond, I’m guessing that your followers didn’t wake up today expecting you’d praise some key components of NCLB.
My career as a school librarian has included teaching situations throughout the Western New York school systems where I have met some fantastic teachers. However, the teachers who have dedicated their lives to work with the inner city youth in Buffalo, New York are truly amazing. The skills necessary to deal with the problems inherent in impoverished children transcends a typical college education and often relies on an open heart. Their selfless giving towards their students, many of whose needs extend above and beyond the classroom, is inspiring.
And anyone who implies differently is either ignorant, delusional, or self-absorbed.
Ellen T Klock
Perhaps I should add evil? Evil as when your pursuit of “happiness” purposely ruins the “happiness” of others.
There is a certain trap in these kinds of notions of teacher quality, however. Reformers have been working steadily to make it harder to become a teacher via traditional routes. One such method has been to increase the required undergraduate GPA of traditional route candidates for certification.
Then our students in university based teacher education do, in fact, rise overall in class rankings during their undergraduate education. This means they have higher GPAs and get more As and Bs.
Then NCTQ comes along and tells policy makers that education schools are a joke because too many of our students get good grades — ergo, we must be “too easy”.
Nothing will be good enough because every new piece of data will be used for exactly the same purpose — creative destruction of our educational commons.
And as a side note: If being a really good student is what it takes to be a really good teacher, well, then I think university professoriates would have better reputations as educators.
“And as a side note: If being a really good student is what it takes to be a really good teacher, well, then I think university professoriates would have better reputations as educators.”
Amen! I had some so-so teachers growing up (not very many), but I didn’t personally have a dud for a teacher until I got to university.
Cyn – professors are not trained teachers, they are basically researchers interested in publishing their work. And just because someone is an expert in a particular subject, doesn’t mean they can explain it to others.
Just another example that teachers are skilled professionals trained to do a specific job. (vs a job that anyone off the street can do with minimal instruction).
Ellen T Klock
And Daniel, that’s what they did with the cut scores in NYS. As soon as the kids started doing better, they raised the bar to another level so the poor students (and teachers) who had worked so hard were back at square one (in fact many were pushed back to start). For example the scores of my grand daughter:
Grade 3 – 3
Grade 4 – 2
Grade 5 – 1
Grade 6 – opted out (so I guess that’s a 0)
This example seems to prove that the public schools were making her “stupider” instead of “smarter”. (And this was at a top ranked suburban school – the parents are livid).
Ellen T Klock
A ready to copy and paste Tweet that leads back to this Post:
Study reveals the Quality of Teachers is Improving
The gains are widespread
#EdBlogNet
http://wp.me/p2odLa-9bp via @DianeRavitch
While I agree that nonacademic skills and aptitudes and personality traits are critical, perhaps even more important aspects of great teachers, one would think that improvements in the academic profile of teachers (GPA and SAT are not perfect but certainly pretty good ones), we could all agree, IS a good thing for the profession, and for the kids. Historically, teachers have come from the bottom half to the bottom third of students in terms of academic qualities (it does not matter when one measures this – at the point of entrance to university, ar at graduation), and education programs have been widely found to be academic “refuges” (college students who do not cut it in other areas of study migrate to education programs, who typically have the easiest entrance requirements and the lowest academic standards). We should also note that this is NOT the case in other countries. In Finland, for example, teachers come from the top third of the university classes and competition for teacher training positions intense. Of course, the real issue in the study Diane mentions is not that it has happened, but why.
Deteriorating middle class job markets elsewhere is one possible explanation. The effects of NCLB and other reformy stuff is also a possibility. Stricter teacher ed admissions requirements, increases in the student teaching internship, other measures to increase the rigour of teachered programs may also be involved. Extraneous changing demographics still another. Teasing away causal relationships is no easy task, and a lot of things have been changing in education, and in America, and in NYC (where the greatest effects appears to be occurring in terms of teacher quality). Regardless of the causes, improving the talent pool of ANY profession is a good thing, and it certainly is a good thing for our students to be taught by academically stronger teachers. And we should all be celebrating it, assuming the study was carefully done and controlled properly (I’ve not read the technical paper yet)
Good to see NCLB had some positive impacts.
The teachers job: graduate 99.99% of our students in the upper 99% of the class.
I wish our politicians would operate with that kind of efficiency. At last count Congress had about a single digit approval rating
AND
they gripe about teachers???
We see so much negativity out of the very wealthy and powerful including the Gates and Walton Foundations, Jeb and a whole herd of Hedgfunders. As we know, their motives are hardly pure.
As a teacher, I often feel very hopeless, but then I get angry.
What I think, is that it is time for us, public school teacher, to find business leaders that are products of our public schools to speak out and support us. We need some powerful voices.
Great! I’ve been an educator for 18 years only to discover, through data and studies, that I am considered substandard. Well Nelly, go fetch the cow up the hill because the one in the barn is not Grade *A. What a B.O.B.S.