October 2013

Kentucky Teaching Conditions Data at the Forefront of Policy Change

By Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy and Ann Maddock, Senior Policy Advisor

New Teacher Center's three-year partnership with the state of Kentucky has borne tremendous fruit. It is a story about how a state's embrace of data and the voices of teachers have helped to shape a more supportive school climate and a more attractive teaching profession.

Kentucky's example demonstrates how educational data need not be used solely for accountability, but to inform and shape school and instructional improvement.

What sparked this work?

Kentucky SB1 (2009) established a new educational accountability system, beginning in 2011-2012. In 2010, 703 Kentucky Administrative Regulations 5:180E established in statute the power of the state Education Commissioner to establish the process and procedures for implementing school interventions and alternate management options for schools, districts and the state for persistently low-achieving schools. The same legislation established the use of a teaching conditions survey as part of the evaluation of persistently low-performing schools.

That's where our work, via TELL Kentucky, comes in. TELL stands for Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning. In the summer of 2010, the TELL Kentucky Coalition of Partners convened for the planning of 2011 statewide teaching conditions survey, administered by New Teacher Center.

How did it inform and shape school and instructional improvement?

Kentucky administered the TELL Kentucky survey for the first time in March 2011, and when 80% of all licensed educators statewide responded, they established the highest response rate from any first-time state. Two months later, when the Kentucky Board of Education (KBE) discussed the new regulation on School and District Accountability Recognition and Support, it voted to direct the KDE to include the use of the TELL data in the current development of the new accountability model for schools and districts. NTC supported the KDE throughout 2011-2013 as this work developed, as it required TELL Kentucky data to be used in annual school improvement plans and in the development of the new evaluation system for principals (requiring principals to demonstrate their use of TELL data annually).

In Summer 2011, as a result of the initial TELL findings, the KBE voted to address key topics identified by the survey of educators. These topics included Time (to collaborate, plan and provide instruction) and Instructional Practices (data and support available to help teachers improve instruction and student learning). The KBE also voted to develop state standards for teaching conditions. Over the next year, the TELL Kentucky Partners, working with NTC, presented the newly developed standards to the State Board of Education. In 2012, Kentucky became only the second state (with North Carolina) to adopt State Standards for Teaching Conditions. Kentucky's standards even include a rubric with which every school can use to measure its own improvement.

Further, the state's No Child Left Behind Waiver includes the use of TELL data in teacher and principal effectiveness measures, school improvement plans, and district improvement plans. The Waiver states that the KDE will provide differentiated levels of support based upon the identified needs of the district. These services may include training for local school-based decision making councils, equitable distribution of staff, school improvement through enhanced teaching and learning working conditions, and comprehensive recruitment and retention strategies.

What are the results so far?

In Spring 2013, the second iteration of the TELL Kentucky Survey resulted in a record-breaking 87% response rate, and over 90% of schools met or exceeded the 50% minimum threshold for use of their own data in school improvement plans. Survey data exhibited tremendous increases in the two, targeted areas of focus for KDE: (1) Time and (2) Instructional Practices and Support.

In August 2013, the KBE reviewed the latest TELL data on three additional areas of the survey that demonstrated need: (1) New Teacher Support, (2) Managing Student Conduct and (3) Community Engagement and Support. Plans are currently underway to address these issues through Spring 2014. This includes work by the Education Professional Standards Board to strengthen Kentucky's teacher induction policies by addressing key issues brought forth in the 2013 TELL data. There also is discussion of trying to extend the Kentucky Teacher Internship Program to second-year teachers.

Finally, last month, for the second time, the state recognized the Winner's Circle Schools: Ten schools that exemplify excellent teaching conditions and student success. Another 40 schools were selected for Honorable Mention.

What's the takeaway?

The power of Kentucky's example and NTC's Teaching and Learning Conditions initiative is that the process is collaborative, involves all key stakeholders, and results in useable data (through high response rates) at the state, district and school levels. Most importantly, there is a collective will to use this data to improve educator effectiveness and outcomes for all students.

Does your state administer a teaching conditions survey? Learn more about NTC's Teaching and Learning Conditions Initiative and the TELL Survey.

Read our prior September 2011 feature on Kentucky, too.

NTC News

NTC Recognized by the Business Roundtable

On October 3, 2013, the Business Roundtable recognized New Teacher Center as an outstanding program that has demonstrated strong potential for helping prepare U.S. students for college and career. The Business Roundtable is an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies. With this recognition, it aims to address STEM education, teacher quality, early reading and Common Core implementation. A panel of experts judged the applications based on the organizations' proven effectiveness and capacity to expand. The criteria included required evidence of successful replication, alignment to Common Core Standards and evidence of results over time. Other recognized programs were ST Math, Success for All, the National Math and Science Initiative's UTeach program, and NISL's Executive Development Program for School Leaders.

Read the story here.

Policy News

The Future of Teacher Induction in California

CTC NTC's Liam Goldrick (Director of Policy) and Wendy Baron (Chief Academic Officer) provided testimony to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) at its September meeting about ways to heighten the quality and provision of induction support to beginning educators. NTC recommendations focused on high-quality mentoring practices, extending induction support to all beginning teachers (including alternate-route teachers and long-term substitutes), evaluating programs across the impact spectrum, and basing credentialing on competency versus program completion.

The recent adoption of the Local Control Funding Formula effectively ends California's two-decades-long state investment in new teacher support and development. While individual teachers are still required to receive induction support to advance to a professional teaching credential, employing school districts are no longer required to operate programs to serve new teachers. As chronicled in a SRI study, this has resulted in some shuttered programs and inequity for new teachers: participation caps, reduction in program quality, and candidates funding their own induction support out of pocket. NTC supports maintaining the linkage between credentialing and induction, but believes that employing districts and the state have a duty to provide and fund such support.

Listen to this portion of the CTC meeting for more information.

Hawaii Teacher Mentoring Program Blossoms

Civil Beat, a Hawaii-based news service, recently published a story about the Hawaii Mentoring Program. The Program is part of the Hawaii Department of Education's statewide initiative to decrease turnover and improve retention efforts and was developed in partnership with New Teacher Center. It consists of 35 full-time mentors and over 500 mentors who are classroom teachers or school staff. Mentors meet one-on-one with first- and second-year teachers for about an hour each week to discuss classroom observations and other concerns the new teachers may have. Third-year teachers meet with their mentors regularly but with less frequency. The Program went into effect last school year and is helping create consistency across the state. Prior to the program, beginning teachers were not required to work with mentors, regional administrators were in charge of their own mentoring programs creating a hodgepodge of efforts, and many new teachers did not benefit from mentoring support.

Good Reads

Strengthening the Teacher Workforce

The Carnegie Foundation released a white paper, A Human Capital Framework for a Strong Teacher Workforce. It argues that building a strong teacher workforce requires a careful orchestration of four human capital systems:

Acquire - get the right teacher in the right positions on time;
Develop - support the professional growth in school-based learning communities;
Sustain - nurture, reward, challenge high-performing teachers; and
Evaluate - make evidence-based personnel decisions.

For the development part of the system, the paper makes a particularly strong argument for the need to socialize new teachers in their school community. It suggests that to create a stronger teacher workforce, the system needs to ensure supportive coaching/mentoring for new teachers and provide individualized professional development opportunities in response to demonstrated need.

The Global Social Standing of Teachers

Earlier this month, the Varkey GEMS Foundation launched the Global Teacher Status Index - hoping to provide insight into public perceptions about teachers. The organization collected half a million data points from 21 countries where participants shared their views on issues including: how teachers are respected in relation to other professions, whether parents would encourage their children to become teachers, what they think teachers should be paid, the degree of trust in the education system, level of trust on teachers to deliver a good education, and more.

The study found:

On average, teachers ranked 7th out of 14 professions, indicating a mid-point respect for the teaching profession across the 21 countries. While there was no consensus on a comparable profession for teaching, two thirds of the countries judged social workers as the most similar in social status.
Ninety-five percent of participants reported that teachers should be paid a wage in excess of the wage they think teachers are paid.
Participants gave a rating of 6.3 out of 10 regarding their degree of trust on teachers to deliver a good education. They gave a rating of 5.6 out of 10 regarding their education system, indicating a higher degree of trust of teachers than on the education system.

More findings are available in the report, 2013 Global Teacher Status Index. Read the Huffington Post story here.

Returns to Teaching Experience

A recent post on Eduwonk.com reflects upon the "return to experience" in the teaching force. This term refers to the speed in which effectiveness increases and when it plateaus. In teaching, effectiveness increases most in the first few years. The author questions if this pattern is due to the inherent returns to experience in teaching and suggests that this would have implications such as:

A need to focus on initial selection of teacher candidates.
Changing compensation formulas so that initial teacher salaries are increased.
Increasing the investment in professional development and support up-front on early-career teachers.
Making tenure meaningful.
Giving veteran teachers more opportunities for professional growth.

Five Structures to Transform the Profession

The National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) released its first white paper - Re-Imagining Teaching: Five Structures to Transform the Profession - in early October. The report outlines five structures that would help improve the teaching profession: (1) actionable feedback, (2) a career continuum, (3) distributed leadership, (4) collaboration, and (5) guiding principles. These structures could particularly benefit early-career teachers:

Actionable feedback - New teachers are often left on their own to figure out the complexities of teaching. Novice teachers would particularly benefit from feedback that guides their instruction and development and veteran teachers trained in quality mentoring can be well equipped to provide practical actionable feedback.
Career continuum - NTC promotes the use of expert veteran teachers to serve as mentors for novice teachers. This is one form of career continuum that can help retain expert teachers while providing quality support for and increasing retention rates of novice teachers.
Distributed leadership - Allowing veteran teachers to serve as mentors helps distribute leadership within the school. In some districts, such as Montgomery County, Hillsborough County and Pleasanton Unified School District (see NTC case studies), these mentors also contribute to teacher evaluation and ongoing development.
Collaboration - New teachers could greatly benefit from opportunities to collaborate with more experienced teachers.
Guiding Principles - New teachers could benefit from one set of clear expectations to guide their practice.

NTC Policy News is a monthly publication by the New Teacher Center. It is produced with funding support from the Joyce Foundation. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the Joyce Foundation invests in initiatives to improve public education and works to close the achievement gap by improving the quality of teachers in schools that serve low-income and minority children.