By Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy
Last week I visited San Antonio, Texas for two conferences hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers. The State Consortium on Educator Effectiveness (SCEE) and the Network for Transforming Teacher Preparation (NTEP) both bring state teams together to work on strategies related to preparing and developing excellent educators. Such unglamorous, but critical, work reminds me that sometimes a quiet, collaborative pursuit is preferable to the often oversimplified, divisive public dialogue that can divide those of us working in education policy and create a gulf between policymakers and educational practitioners.
The NTEP team from the state of Connecticut reminded attendees of the important goal of "first, do no harm." Eventual success might first require a more careful and deliberate approach to policy design and implementation. In other words, "slow and steady wins the race." It also necessitates listening to educators. They must be at the table and engaged, ensuring that those working in schools and classrooms are provided with the information and resources they need to succeed under these new policies and systems.
In states and districts where educators have not felt included and especially where they believe they haven't been provided the support to meet these new demands associated with educator evaluation, equilibrium is still being sought.
But there's an even more inherent problem at play in some current policy trends. It is the focus of reforms about teachers rather than about teaching. We have seen this play out amidst state activity and federal incentives around educator evaluation. Typically, much more effort has been expended on the individual teacher ratings component of evaluation than on the structures within those systems focused on providing individualized feedback on teaching.
The latest policy at risk of falling into this trap is equitable teacher distribution. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education signaled its intention to ratchet up the enforcement of equitable distribution requirements within the No Child Left Behind Act. (This week, Education Week reported that the federal strategy had yet to be released.)
Organizations like The Education Trust have chronicled the tendency for students from low-income and minority backgrounds to have less access to highly qualified and highly effective teachers -- both across as well as within schools. Such inequities are a concern because of the evidence on the impact of teaching on student learning.
But policy has a tendency to oversimplify issues and to offer narrow solutions to complex problems. And some policymakers and educational economists have framed the solution to this issue as a matter of simply moving teachers around, or by offering monetary incentives for them to move. In effect, their solution is to redirect "highly effective" teachers to high-need schools, assuming that such teachers will achieve similar success in schools often quite different from their own. This assumption disregards that reality that these schools may suffer from high staff turnover and leadership churn, lack collaborative cultures, and serve higher percentages of students with disabilities and English language learners. Such a stance builds upon the error in our current education policy trajectory that I mentioned earlier: The individualization of teaching excellence.
A recent Center on American Progress report provides a more nuanced take on the many factors that go into creating these inequities in teacher distribution -- and the multi-faceted policies that will be required to overcome it. The report identifies poor working conditions that shape schools where teachers don't want to work as a reason for inequitable access. But sadly, it does not identify the
assessment of such conditions as a key state policy lever or recommendation. Many states that have worked with NTC to conduct TELL Surveys of teaching and learning conditions recognize that: (1) such state-, district- and school-level teaching conditions data are critical to understanding issues that shape school context and culture, and (2) such conditions impact overall teacher effectiveness and teachers' ability to learn and grow.
With respect to equitable teacher distribution, the solutions must recognize that teaching is a collective -- not simply an individual -- endeavor and responsibility. Success, too, is dependent upon the presence of supportive teaching conditions, such as school leadership, collaboration with peers and on-the-job professional learning opportunities. Let's not keep forgetting that.