Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Over at Slate, business professor Ray Fisman tries to tackle the question of teacher tenure with a slightly different twist, asking “Why are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?” (H/T Joanne Jacobs) To dig deeper is to find it truly a perplexing question—and an increasingly frustrating one for education reformers the more we learn just how crucial teacher quality is to student outcomes.

Fisman notes the successful turnaround of New York City’s PS 49 is in large part attributed by its leader to “getting rid of incompetent teachers.” But Fisman also highlights research that shows large school systems don’t improve their teaching hires based on selectivity. In other words, overall instructional quality is unchanged whether a school district hires 50, 100, or 200 teachers from a specified pool of applicants. Could it the wrong criteria are being used to decide who should be employed in our classrooms?

In a 2005 Progressive Policy Institute report, Andrew Leigh and Sara Mead observe that standard practice is out of line with what has been shown to matter more:

In other words, current research suggests that, absent any other information about the individuals involved, we would be wiser to bet on the teaching success of an individual with strong verbal and intellectual skills, or high test scores and no teacher training, than we would be to bet on the success of someone with mediocre skills and full teaching certification. Clearly, at the individual level, other personal factors are critical, but working with limited information,

research provides the strongest evidence for the importance of teachers’ intellectual and verbal

skills.

It appears that PS 49 has been a lot closer to making this correct wager than the New York City public schools at large has been. Meanwhile, Fisman suggests an even more reliable indicator for identifying a quality teacher:

What economists have found is that only one thing tells us how much a teacher will boost his students’ test scores next year: the amount he raised test scores in previous years. A good teacher this year will very likely be a good teacher next year. Unfortunately, when making hiring decisions, principals rarely have that information at their fingertips. Most hiring decisions are made before applicants have a teaching record.

Of course, the stakes are high when making a teacher hire with limited information. The investment of tenure makes it difficult and costly to remove a poor performer from the classroom. (Sure, Colorado’s tenure process isn’t as burdensome and overwhelming as New York City’s, but it is still a major obstacle to successful education reform.)

What about the 3-year probationary period that Colorado law allows before teachers automatically earn tenure? As an Independence Institute report highlighted, the state’s largest school district had a policy in place that effectively nullified the probationary period. (It since has started to be phased out of practice.)

How well other Colorado school districts make use of the probationary period to weed out ineffective instructors is an area ripe for closer study, one that cannot be ignored simply due to political sensitivities. Teacher tenure is an important piece of the important teacher quality puzzle, even as we also look for ways to reduce regulatory barriers that keep the brightest and best from teaching in our schools. There’s every reason to take a closer look at how Colorado appropriates teacher tenure.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Teacher unions, Teaching and learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.