Researcher Q&A: Leading Educators

What is Leading Educators and what is it designed to do?

The Leading Educators Fellowship is a two-year intensive professional development program for promising teacher-leaders. Midcareer teachers who are in high-poverty schools and are already in leadership positions can apply to the fellowship.

Once selected, fellows receive training on leadership development, such as formal professional development sessions, one-on-one leadership coaching, and site visits to exemplary high-need schools. In addition, fellows elect mentee teachers within their schools to mentor on a regular basis. The many mentorship opportunities include coaching, observation of classroom practice with feedback, data analysis, co-teaching, and leading professional development sessions for mentee teachers.

What did you and your team set out to assess?

The goal of this evaluation was to examine whether the Leading Educators Fellowship was meeting the two goals it had set out to achieve: increasing student achievement and retaining talented educators in high-need schools.

We conducted these two analyses for both teachers who were fellows, as well as teachers who were mentees. We also wanted to examine whether fellows showed improvement in their leadership skills during the course of the two-year fellowship program.

Why is this work important?

This research is valuable in two ways. First, many U.S. programs aim to help teachers with professional development. However, there is little research evidence that such programs actually improve student achievement. Although we set out to discover whether there is a connection between Leading Educators and the performance of students in participating schools, we also sought to begin to fill in a research gap.

Second, the information we found would help us understand whether such programs and their mentorship programs are helping to retain teachers in schools that are difficult to staff. Principals are busier than ever before and are being asked to assess teachers in new ways. Perhaps training and use of teacher-leaders can relieve some of the burden on principals’ time of improving student outcomes.

What kinds of data did you use to collect this information? What kinds of methods?

We used four types of data to conduct the analysis:

1. information on application scores for successful and denied applicants
2. rosters of fellows matched to the teachers they mentored
3. scores on a rubric that the fellowship program developed to measure teacher leadership development
4. administrative data from the state on teacher characteristics, student–teacher links, student characteristics, and scores on standardized exams.

After combining the data sources, we used three complementary methods to examine the fellowship program's effect on student achievement and one method to examine the program’s effect on teacher retention. These methods differed slightly, but they share a common feature: They both compare the achievement scores of students of fellows and mentee teachers with students whose teachers were not involved in the program.

What did you find out? Did anything surprise you?

We found that Leading Educators is having a promising effect on student achievement. Specifically, the analysis showed us that the students of fellows in New Orleans are achieving more in math than those students in non-fellows' groups.

In general, the impact of mentee teachers was smaller than the impact of fellows, which was surprising. Because the samples for analysis were small, we could not conduct a rigorous analysis of the program’s impact on teacher retention.

What are your next steps in your ongoing assessment of the program?

We will be collecting additional data through the 2016–2017 school year and conducting additional analyses to determine whether the Leading Educators Fellowship program had long-term effects and whether fellows and mentees exposed to more years of the training had larger impacts on student achievement than fellows and mentees exposed to fewer years of training. We will also be conducting a more rigorous analysis of the program’s effect on teacher retention.

What is the impact of this work? How does it contribute to RAND's overall mission to improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis?

This is one of the first studies to show that teacher professional development can improve student outcomes. At least partly as a result of the report findings, the fellowship program is expanding to other cities and regions.