Teachers and Teaching

President Barack Obama has called for the greatest federal expansion of early childhood programs since the Department of Health and Human Services launched Head Start in 1965, including a proposal to provide high-quality preschool to every American child via a new federal-state partnership.

High-quality early childhood interventions can improve academic achievement, reduce crime and delinquency, and enhance future labor market success. Research has also shown that these programs can yield returns to society ranging from $2 to $17 for every dollar spent.

The operative phrase, however, is “high quality.” And for early childhood programs to be high quality, they must have qualified instructors. After all, teachers affect student achievement more than any other school-related factor.

Research indicates that teachers affect student achievement more than any other school-related factor. However, value-added modeling, which measures teacher performance based on student test results, has revealed a high degree of variation among teachers. Policymakers have responded with a strong focus on reducing variability as a way to improve teaching.

One expression of this policy focus has been the adoption of structured observation protocols for assessing how teachers provide lessons to their students. These protocols also offer the opportunity to provide teachers with valuable feedback on how their teaching practices could be improved. One such protocol, Classroom Assessment and Scoring System for Secondary Students (CLASS-S), defines ten dimensions of effective teaching that attempt to capture three areas of lesson delivery:

This commentary appeared in IFC's Handshake on January 16, 2013.

By 2050, we will be judging teaching success rather than teacher's success. This is an important shift that has already begun to occur. In the last few years, as countries around the world have developed new measures for evaluating teachers, it has become clear that teaching success is variable and not static. It can change depending on the conditions under which teaching occurs, the personal and professional circumstances of the teachers themselves, and with the kinds of supports provided for their teaching.

With this understanding of teaching, we are starting to break the long-held notions of “teaching as art” and “once a good teacher always a good teacher.” Research is starting to demonstrate that teaching, like all professions, is something that can be learned, continuously improved upon, and subject to the conditions under which it occurs. This shift in thinking will be an important ingredient for assuring teaching success in the future.

Measuring teacher effectiveness has long been a complex—and often divisive—issue in the education policy world. Nonetheless, valid measures of effectiveness remain necessary to help policymakers make informed decisions about compensation, tenure, retention, and professional development for educators.

Over the last few years, more than 30 states have dramatically reformed how they evaluate teachers and principals. Most of these new evaluation systems combine data on objective evidence of student learning (such as value-added modeling) with other measures, such as teacher observation ratings and student satisfaction surveys.

Some of the most urgent and contentious debates taking hold in states and school districts around the country revolve around the question of how to accurately measure a teacher's effectiveness. A new RAND Education website provides objective, nonpartisan insights that can help inform the discussion.

The Measuring Teacher Effectiveness website draws on RAND's expertise and extensive research to provide succinct, substantive information to teachers, administrators, policymakers, and parents on this important topic. For example:

This commentary appeared in The Chicago Tribune on September 11, 2012.

The Chicago Teachers Union strike erupted over classic issues: an extended day, a new evaluation system and hiring and firing. The union seeks pay raises tied to advanced degrees and years of service rather than merit. Yet, somewhat classically, neither the union nor Chicago Public Schools has put forth research evidence to support their stance.

Research could be helpful in untangling the dispute. Compelling evidence exists to indicate that extending academic learning time, especially for poorly performing students, results in improved student achievement. Research also suggests that to improve the quality of instruction, personnel decisions should consider evidence of teaching effectiveness — rather than relying exclusively on teachers' characteristics such as their academic degrees and how long they've taught.

To succeed in the 21st century, students need to be able to communicate, collaborate, and problem-solve with people beyond national boundaries. Director of RAND Education Darleen Opfer describes how teachers can teach 21st-century skills, using nine lessons from the science of learning.

Why don't incentives appear to be working in cases of teacher merit pay?

First, let's be clear that not all pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are the same. These programs differ greatly, from the choice of collective versus individual incentives, to the criteria by which incentives are awarded, to the inclusion of additional capacity-building elements, to the amount of the reward. Also, very few of these programs in the United States have been tested empirically. The research we've done at RAND and elsewhere in recent years has focused on programs incentivizing educator performance based primarily on the results from annual state tests of student performance. While limited, this research, along with theory, nevertheless suggests that several core factors may have contributed to the poor results found in recent P4P programs.