Hamilton and Eggs
A couple of weeks ago the big new thing was “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job” from a group called The Hamilton Project, affiliated with The Brookings Institution. It’s not the easiest read in the world, partially because of paragraphs like this:
The dependent variable is the math score for person i in year t, Race/Eth is a vector of six racial/ethnic categories, ELD is a vector of five categories for English language development level, and Repeat is a dummy indicating whether the person is currently repeating a grade….The dependent variable is measured in “normal curve equivalents” (NCE). A normal curve equivalent is a linear function of test performance, which approximates the percentile for a normal distribution. If Z is a test score with mean zero and standard deviation of one, then the normal curve equivalent is calculated as NCE=50+21.06*Z. If Z is distributed normally, then NCE=1 at the first percentile of Z, NCE=99 at the ninety-ninth percentile and NCE=50 at the fiftieth percentile. One NCE point is used to approximate one percentile point.
To be fair, this is from the technical appendix. The trick is that their entire case on teacher quality rests on this formula making sense, and when you can’t understand the formula they use or the reasoning behind it the temptation is strong to ignore the entire work out of hand.
The report makes five recommendations on how to improve teaching. The first one is pretty interesting:
Recommendation 1: Reduce the barriers to entry into teaching for those without traditional teacher certification. The authors of the report, Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, show that there’s really no difference in the performance of students of teachers who are traditionally certified, alternatively certified, or uncertified. This flies in the face of the “highly qualified” provisions of NCLB, but so be it. The barriers that I’d like to see out of the way are the ones that I have to pass just to keep teaching.
I’m part of the first groups to go through on the new Residency/Professional certificate program. For Washington State teachers the system used to be that you’d start with your Initial teaching certificate, earn 45 credits (a Master’s, essentially), then need 15 credits or 150 clock hours every 5 years to keep your certificate valid. The teaching force must not have been very good, because they moved the system into a “Professional Growth Plan” option. Now, instead of getting your Master’s degree and being done with it, you have to critically analyze your practice against 8 strands of effective teaching, carry out an action research project, present to a board….it’s a much different and much more rigorous process.
The end effect, though, is that teachers in their first five years are being pushed into doing backflips to keep their certification instead of doing the real work that is necessary to keep a classroom up and running. It’s a great idea if you want to run new teachers out of the system, but it’s a lousy way to start your career.
The total cost of getting my Masters and Professional Certificate together was nearly $9000. This is money that I had to spend just to keep on teaching, and that’s certainly a barrier. Sure, I could have done the ProCert alone, but a) you’re still required to work with an “accredited university” b) there’s still an action research project required and c) you’re still paying for university credits.
My wife is on the old certificate program. She just paid $90 to get her license renewed, plus all the money on credits and transcripts. Mo’ money, Mo’ money, Mo’ money.
Anyhow, now that I’m a Professional (finally?), I can settle for the 150 clock hours/15 credit program to renew. Clock hours are cheap and easy, and that’s what I’ll do.
The other trick to this proposal is the idea of lowering barriers into teaching. The idea of Antonio Banderas showing up to teach ballroom dancing to inner-city kids is appealing, sure, and if someone with the passion and the ability wants to share that with kids we’d be crazy to get in the way. I trouble I see here is that there are people who are coming through the ed schools who have no business teaching. They’ve run the gamut, from 21 year olds who act like they have conduct disorder to 50-year old career changers with lousy personal hygiene and no temperament for children. I had a great conversation with a professor in the teacher education program at Eastern a couple of years ago and I asked her how some of these people were able to get through, even with obvious problems. Her answer? Fear of lawsuits. The university president would over-rule the department staff because of the cost involved in defending the school in court. The hope was always that the master teachers in the schools would say no, but even if these people failed their student teaching they’d usually get placed somewhere else and pass the second (or third) time through. Many of the teachers felt pressured by the field supervisors to pass, and the only recourse they felt they had was a lousy letter of recommendation in their placement file and frank phone conversations with anyone who asked about them.
It takes an awful lot more now to get into and through the ed program than it did when I went there. To get in you need a minimum score on the Praxis, to get out you have to pass a different test, and they’ve beefed up the classroom hours required. This is a good thing for the ed schools, I guess, but will making it easier for anyone who wants to enter teaching really improve the corps as a whole?
I guess what I'm really wondering is where the happy medium is, if any. We make it hard to get into the ed schools, but too easy to get out. You can't teach without your license, but keeping your license is another onerous chore in an already hard job. We respect what you do, but not enough to wave any fees along the way.
The dependent variable is the math score for person i in year t, Race/Eth is a vector of six racial/ethnic categories, ELD is a vector of five categories for English language development level, and Repeat is a dummy indicating whether the person is currently repeating a grade….The dependent variable is measured in “normal curve equivalents” (NCE). A normal curve equivalent is a linear function of test performance, which approximates the percentile for a normal distribution. If Z is a test score with mean zero and standard deviation of one, then the normal curve equivalent is calculated as NCE=50+21.06*Z. If Z is distributed normally, then NCE=1 at the first percentile of Z, NCE=99 at the ninety-ninth percentile and NCE=50 at the fiftieth percentile. One NCE point is used to approximate one percentile point.
To be fair, this is from the technical appendix. The trick is that their entire case on teacher quality rests on this formula making sense, and when you can’t understand the formula they use or the reasoning behind it the temptation is strong to ignore the entire work out of hand.
The report makes five recommendations on how to improve teaching. The first one is pretty interesting:
Recommendation 1: Reduce the barriers to entry into teaching for those without traditional teacher certification. The authors of the report, Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, show that there’s really no difference in the performance of students of teachers who are traditionally certified, alternatively certified, or uncertified. This flies in the face of the “highly qualified” provisions of NCLB, but so be it. The barriers that I’d like to see out of the way are the ones that I have to pass just to keep teaching.
I’m part of the first groups to go through on the new Residency/Professional certificate program. For Washington State teachers the system used to be that you’d start with your Initial teaching certificate, earn 45 credits (a Master’s, essentially), then need 15 credits or 150 clock hours every 5 years to keep your certificate valid. The teaching force must not have been very good, because they moved the system into a “Professional Growth Plan” option. Now, instead of getting your Master’s degree and being done with it, you have to critically analyze your practice against 8 strands of effective teaching, carry out an action research project, present to a board….it’s a much different and much more rigorous process.
The end effect, though, is that teachers in their first five years are being pushed into doing backflips to keep their certification instead of doing the real work that is necessary to keep a classroom up and running. It’s a great idea if you want to run new teachers out of the system, but it’s a lousy way to start your career.
The total cost of getting my Masters and Professional Certificate together was nearly $9000. This is money that I had to spend just to keep on teaching, and that’s certainly a barrier. Sure, I could have done the ProCert alone, but a) you’re still required to work with an “accredited university” b) there’s still an action research project required and c) you’re still paying for university credits.
My wife is on the old certificate program. She just paid $90 to get her license renewed, plus all the money on credits and transcripts. Mo’ money, Mo’ money, Mo’ money.
Anyhow, now that I’m a Professional (finally?), I can settle for the 150 clock hours/15 credit program to renew. Clock hours are cheap and easy, and that’s what I’ll do.
The other trick to this proposal is the idea of lowering barriers into teaching. The idea of Antonio Banderas showing up to teach ballroom dancing to inner-city kids is appealing, sure, and if someone with the passion and the ability wants to share that with kids we’d be crazy to get in the way. I trouble I see here is that there are people who are coming through the ed schools who have no business teaching. They’ve run the gamut, from 21 year olds who act like they have conduct disorder to 50-year old career changers with lousy personal hygiene and no temperament for children. I had a great conversation with a professor in the teacher education program at Eastern a couple of years ago and I asked her how some of these people were able to get through, even with obvious problems. Her answer? Fear of lawsuits. The university president would over-rule the department staff because of the cost involved in defending the school in court. The hope was always that the master teachers in the schools would say no, but even if these people failed their student teaching they’d usually get placed somewhere else and pass the second (or third) time through. Many of the teachers felt pressured by the field supervisors to pass, and the only recourse they felt they had was a lousy letter of recommendation in their placement file and frank phone conversations with anyone who asked about them.
It takes an awful lot more now to get into and through the ed program than it did when I went there. To get in you need a minimum score on the Praxis, to get out you have to pass a different test, and they’ve beefed up the classroom hours required. This is a good thing for the ed schools, I guess, but will making it easier for anyone who wants to enter teaching really improve the corps as a whole?
I guess what I'm really wondering is where the happy medium is, if any. We make it hard to get into the ed schools, but too easy to get out. You can't teach without your license, but keeping your license is another onerous chore in an already hard job. We respect what you do, but not enough to wave any fees along the way.
posted by Ryan at 3:18 PM
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