Realigning the Teacher Quality Continuum

1. Realigning the Teacher Quality Continuum Strategic Management of Human Capital | July 21, 2008

2. The New Teacher Project’s View A quality education is a civil right. The achievement gap is evidence of our failure to deliver on the promise of an equal education for all. Effective teachers are the remedy.

3. The Problem: A Misaligned Teacher Quality System Market driven by what providers want to offer, not what schools or teachers need. Archaic slotting procedures impede creation of effective teams. No differentiation or sorting among teachers, regardless of performance. Dollars concentrated at senior end of career. Little/no HC training for principals, lack of high-level leadership to manage human capital. Not targeted to high-need schools or subject areas. HR dysfunction deters applicants. Hiring Compensation Training Leadership A quality teacher in every classroom Recruitment Selection Evaluation Budgeting Minimum requirements, little consideration for quality. No post-hire selection rigor, such as tenure decisions. Systems fail to identify teachers on a spectrum of performance, making it difficult to develop high performers or remediate or remove low performers. Little concern for impact of timing on teacher hiring. The foundational systems and institutions that are responsible for generating and maintaining quality teachers are almost universally unaligned with the goal of a quality teacher in every classroom.

4. The Solution: Realigning the teacher quality continuum to the prime objective of a great teacher in every classroom. • Underlying priority must be the closing of the achievement gap. • School districts and policy makers have made sporadic efforts to realign specific pieces of the continuum but most efforts have been modest and limited. • Success requires a comprehensive approach that includes: • Leadership: Change requires rallying stakeholders around the goal of maximizing teacher quality and effectiveness. • Coordination: Most districts lack a chief strategist for their most important function – developing and maintaining quality human capital. • Political will: Realignment requires engagement with hot-button issues and entrenched interests. • Data: Necessary in order to identify needs, measure progress, and allocate time and resources. A quality teacher in every classroom Evaluation Budgeting Training Recruitment Selection Hiring Leadership Compensation

5. Our Response: Increasing the concentration of highly effective teachers in high-need schools. • Championing a comprehensive approach to human capital management in high-need school districts. • Identifying gaps, obstacles and misalignment in the pathways into teaching, and advocating for corrections. • Pursuing programmatic innovations that are focused on supporting high-need schools. • Engaging proactively in research that assesses teacher effectiveness. • Exploring dramatically different ways of managing and maximizing teacher quality. • Advancing a positive vision of the teaching profession centered on quality and effectiveness. “We envision a future in which the institutions, policies and systems that are chiefly responsible for putting a quality teacher into every classroom are tightly aligned to just that objective.”

6. NYC Teaching Fellows (NYCTF): Dramatically increasing the supply of qualified teachers for high-need schools.

7. Goals Move up the hiring timeline for 40 of Baltimore’s lowest performing schools Increase the number of teacher-hiring opportunities available to principals Implement at least 3 strategies to positively impact the hiring timeline/process Implement at least 1 additional strategy to increase principal accountability for hiring of high-quality teachers Build principal capacity to hire teachers effectively Baltimore Model Staffing Initiative (BMSI): Enhancing school staffing to improve school performance. Outcomes • All vacancies identified one week before school were filled by the first day of school • While the District opened with over 58 vacancies, the MSI enabled these 40 low-performing schools to open with zero vacancies. • BMSI schools hired 290 teachers, including: • 41.5 special education • 29 English • 25 math • 26 science • “I appreciate the role that BMSI played as an advocate for what I needed in my school when dealing with HR. This type of advocacy is still a very necessary step in the red tape of the district systems.” --BMSI principal

8. Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program (LPTP): An effective and affordable approach to teacher training and certification. Overview • Began operations in 2001 - first non-university provider of certification in Louisiana • Approved to offer 15 different certifications to beginning teachers • Serves 3 alternate route programs and 8 districts, including the Recovery School District and charter schools • Highly affordable: $3,500 per participant (teachers pay $2,300 after subsidies) • “Stayed open” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, continuing to train and certify teachers • 600 teachers certified as of January 2008 • 275 additional teachers will be certified by September 2008 A 2007 value-add study of Louisiana’s teacher preparation programs found that math teachers certified through LPTP were more effective at raising student achievement than new math teachers from other programs AND experienced math teachers.

9.      Policy reform in Milwaukee: Improving school staffing policies for teachers and principals. Vacancies will be identified earlier High-need schools can hire early, even if they do not receive voluntary transfer applications Milwaukee can hire teachers in shortage subject areas as early as its competitors New rules will significantly decrease incompatibility transfers More placements in Milwaukee will be based on mutual consent and fewer will be assigned by HR In all, the new contract advances the hiring timeline for new teachers by four months.

10. School districts need: • Data systems to capture and store far more information about teacher performance • Evaluation systems that reliably and precisely sort teachers into performance categories and that have real, systematic development uses • New generation of human capital strategists in leadership positions • Human capital departments that transcend HR’s traditional role of processing transactions • Effective political voices that can articulate the need for change • Accountable talent pipelines tailored to local needs • School environments that talented people would choose to work in • School leaders who are capable human capital managers • Modernized standards for teacher performance • Partnerships with labor built on recognition of shared interest in teacher quality • Credible, humane processes for transitioning weak teachers out of the profession

11. Questions? For more information, please visit TNTP’s website: www.tntp.org