CTQ Board Chair Arthur E. Wise makes a compelling case for rethinking "the classroom" in a January 2012 Education Week op-ed. Barnett Berry, expanding on Wise's ideas, calls for a new type of Race to the Top framework. 

Working in five targeted communities, our New Millennium Initiative (NMI) seeks to advance student learning by encouraging teachers to play key roles in improving public schools. We are proud to elevate the voices of these teacher leaders, who advocate for bold but practical teaching policy reforms to benefit all students.

Restructuring the Teaching Profession
The current structure of the teaching profession often pushes accomplished and enterprising teachers out of classrooms, away from the students who most need them. Bay Area NMI teachers tackle this problem in their January 2012 report "Many Ways Up, No Reason to Move Out." The teachers suggest a new model that encourages effective teachers to use their expertise to solve our schools' most pressing problems, while continuing to work with students on a regular basis. They created this remarkable graphic to demonstrate how the profession could be restructured.

Measuring Learning, Supporting Teaching
As Illinois reforms its teacher evaluation system, Illinois NMI teachers have added their voices to the discussion. The team released a report titled “Measuring Learning, Supporting Teaching: Classroom Experts’ Recommendations for an Effective Evaluation System.” The document includes suggestions on how the state can best implement its Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA).

How Better Teacher and Student Assessment Can Power Up Learning
Washington NMI teachers draw upon their classroom experiences and more than a year of research in their report, How Better Teacher and Student Assessment Can Power Up Learning. They advocate for new measures of student learning and teaching quality—as well as systems that spread the expertise of effective teachers.

Making Teacher Evaluation Work for Students
The Denver NMI team's recent report, Making Teacher Evaluation Work for Students: Voices from the Classroom, offers research-driven, practical suggestions for all states and districts working to improve teaching and learning.

April 14, 2011

Dear Member of Congress:

Last December Congress enacted a provision, as part of the Continuing Resolution (Section 163 of H.R. 3082), which changed the statutory definition of a “highly qualified teacher” in No Child Left Behind. The provision sought to overturn a 9th Circuit Court decision (Renee v. Duncan) by codifying into NCLB, through the 2012-2013 school year, a regulation that had been struck down by the court. The regulation allows states to describe teachers as “highly qualified” when they are still in training – and, in many cases, just beginning training – in alternative route programs. Our concern with Section 163 (and with any federal policy that reinforces the unequal allocation of fully prepared and certified teachers to all students) is that it disproportionately impacts our most vulnerable opulations: low-income students and students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities who are most often assigned such underprepared teachers. Further, this provision disguises this disparate reality from parents and the public by labeling teachers-in-training as “highly qualified.” In January, we urged Congress to repeal this provision and develop a transparent definition of teacher quality, along with a set of policies that will allow the nation to put a fully-prepared and effective teacher in every classroom.

Since then, members of our coalition have met with numerous Congressional leaders and their staff, as well as representatives from the White House and the Department of Education, to discuss our concerns. In those meetings, many expressed an interest in continuing the conversation in the context of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization and requested specific recommendations from our coalition. To that end, please find attached a set of seven core principles that we believe should guide the ESEA and Title II Higher Education Act reauthorization processes as concerns teacher quality.

We look forward to working with you in the coming weeks and months to turn these principles into law so that our nation moves closer to achieving the goal of college and career readiness for all students.

Respectfully,

ACTION United
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
American Council on Education
American Association of People with Disabilities
American Association of State Colleges and Universities
American Council for School Social Work
Association of University Centers on Disabilities
ASPIRA Association
Autism National Committee
Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network
California Association for Bilingual Education
Californians for Justice
Californians Together
California Latino School Boards Association
Campaign for Quality Education
Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning
Center for Teaching Quality
Citizens for Effective Schools
Coalition for Educational Justice
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates
Disability Policy Collaboration, A Partnership of The Arc and UCP
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund Inc
Easter Seals
Education Law Center
FairTest, The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
First Focus Campaign for Children
Higher Education Consortium for Special Education
Inner City Struggle
Justice Matters
Knowledge Alliance
Latino Elected and Appointed Officials National Taskforce on Education
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Learning Disabilities Association of America
Legal Advocates for Children and Youth
Movement Strategy Center
NAACP
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc
National Association of School Psychologists
National Association of State Directors of Special Education
National Center for Learning Disabilities
National Council for Educating Black Children
National Council of Teachers of English
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
National Disability Rights Network
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Down Syndrome Society
National Education Association
National Latino Education Research and Policy Project
League of United Latin American Citizens
Parent-U-Turn
Parents for Unity
Public Advocates Inc.
Public Education Network
Public Education and Witness
Rural School and Community Trust
RYSE Center
School Social Work Association of America
Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children
Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education
United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries
Youth Together

Principles to Ensure Student Access to Fully Prepared and Effective Teachers Under ESEA and HEA Title II

 Research indicates that teacher quality is the most important school factor impacting student achievement. Yet, students in low-income and minority schools are far less likely to have access to well-prepared and effective teachers, as are students with disabilities and English learners. In many communities, students experience a revolving door of untrained and under-supported novice teachers who cannot sustain a highquality education.

To promote and support the creation of a stable supply of qualified, effective educators for all communities, we put forward the following principles for ESEA and HEA Title II reauthorization.

FULLY PREPARED AND EFFECTIVE TEACHERS FOR ALL STUDENTS

1. All students are entitled to teachers who are qualified (fully prepared and fully certified), as well as effective. The requirement that qualified teachers should be assigned to all students – and that states and districts make progress to ensuring that all of their teachers are qualified -- should be continued. To meet the “qualified” standard, teachers must have completed a full preparation program and have met full state certification standards in the field they teach.

2. Teachers in training, if assigned as teacher of record, must be accurately identified, equitably distributed, and adequately supervised. Where fully prepared teachers are not available, teacher trainees may be hired. In these cases, parents must be informed that their child’s teacher has not completed preparation and has not yet fully met state certification standards, and states and districts must report on the distribution of such teachers, by teaching field and school, and be required to distribute these teachers equitably. In addition, districts must ensure that such teachers and their students are closely overseen by a fully qualified and experienced Supervising Teacher who coaches and observes regularly in the classroom, reviews and signs off on lesson plans and assessment practices, tracks the progress of students, and ensures that the needs of all students, including students with disabilities and English learners, are being adequately met. The Supervising Teacher must be identified to parents and provided with release time and training to serve in this role.

3. Teacher effectiveness should be evaluated based on valid measures of teacher performance. For Entering teachers (whose classroom performance cannot be fully evaluated for some time), we recommend that, in addition to full preparation, effectiveness be evaluated by passing a robust, fieldspecific teacher performance assessment that validly and reliably measures whether a teacher can successfully teach diverse students in the classroom.  Experienced teachers should be evaluated by trained assessors on the basis of professional teaching standards, their joint efforts to improve learning within the school, and appropriate and multi-faceted evidence of their contributions to student learning. The results of these multi-faceted evaluations should be used to guide professional development and personnel decisions: Teachers who do not meet standards of effectiveness should be offered the support necessary to improve, and those who do not improve should be removed.

4. Any determinations made about the status of an individual teacher (e.g. qualified, effective) should be based on that individual teacher’s demonstrated skill, knowledge and ability. An individual’s status should not be based on the preparation program or pathway he/she is enrolled in or previously attended.

EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF PREPARED AND EFFECTIVE TEACHERS

5. ESEA comparability provisions should be strengthened and enforced in order to ensure equitable resources and equally qualified teachers across schools serving different populations of students. ESEA should strengthen and enforce comparability requirements to ensure that poor and minority students, and students with disabilities, do not experience disproportionate numbers of uncertified, inexperienced, or out-of-field teachers. In addition, teachers identified as “trainees” (i.e., less than fully prepared teachers) or “not effective” should not be disproportionately concentrated in poor and minority schools.

POLICIES TO DEVELOP EFFECTIVE TEACHING

6. Preparation programs should be held to common, high standards. Credentialing programs should provide general and special education teachers with the content and pedagogical knowledge, skills and expertise needed to support learning for all students. Traditional and alternative route certification programs should be held accountable for both program quality and multiple indicators of graduates’ ability to teach successfully. Programs that do not meet standards should have an opportunity to improve, and if no improvement is shown over a reasonable period of time, they should be closed.

7. Investments should be made in proven methods to recruit, prepare, develop and retain fully prepared and effective teachers in shortage fields and hard to staff schools.

a. Expand and redesign the TEACH grants program so that it offers larger, more easily accessed grants to individuals preparing to enter teaching who will stay in high-need fields and locations for at least 4 years.

b. Use the Public Interest component of the Direct Student Loan program as a recruitment and retention tool by underwriting the first three years of loan payments for individuals who prepare for and enter teaching in Title I schools.

c. Fully fund the Teacher Quality Partnership grants under Title II of HEA (authorized at $300 million annually) that support teacher residency programs and partnership school initiatives.

d. Increase investments in personnel preparation for special education and related service providers under IDEA, and for teachers of English learners under Title III of ESEA.

e. Invest in Grow-Your-Own programs, especially in high need communities, as well as teacher education programs in Minority-Serving Institutions that will prepare a strong pipeline of teachers and leaders in minority, low-income and rural communities.

f. Increase investments in high-quality professional development for all educators under Title II of ESEA, and ensure that educators have opportunities to learn to teach diverse students well.

g. Focus school turnaround efforts and teacher incentives on conditions that influence teacher retention and effectiveness: productive working conditions, effective instructional leadership, job-embedded professional development, mentoring, coaching, and time for collaboration.

h. Invest in the preparation and retention of expert principals and offer stipends for National Board Certified Teachers and those who take on master or mentor teaching roles in high-need schools.

By Valerie Strauss
This letter was just sent to President Obama by more than 50 organizations -- including education, civil rights, disability, student, parent, and community groups -- about legislation in Congress that would allow teachers still in training to be considered “highly qualified” so they can meet a standard set in the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Dear Mr. President:
As organizations concerned with promoting educational quality and equity, particularly for students who have traditionally been least well served by our educational system, we are deeply committed to the development of well-prepared, experienced, and effective teachers for all communities, and to ensuring that every student has a fully prepared and effective teacher.

On behalf of the nation’s 50 million elementary and secondary students, we write to you with a sense of urgency about a critical issue that threatens the welfare of many of them.

We are deeply concerned about a provision inserted in H.R. 3082, the Continuing Resolution for government funding passed in December, which undermined the federal definition of a “highly qualified teacher” in the No Child Left Behind Act by allowing states to label teachers as “highly qualified” when they are still in training – and, in many cases, just beginning training – in alternative route programs.

This provision – inserted in the law without notice to concerned public stakeholders and without public debate – codifies a Bush-era regulation that was challenged by parents of low-income students of color in court because their children were disproportionately taught by such under-prepared teachers and because the regulation removed the obligation of states and districts to disclose and rectify the inequity.

The provision seeks to reverse the recent federal appeals court ruling these parents obtained, which held that the regulation patently violated NCLB’s unambiguous requirement that only fully prepared teachers be deemed “highly qualified” and that, as such, teachers still in-training must be publicly disclosed and not concentrated in low-income, high-minority schools.

Our concern with this provision (and with any federal policy that reinforces the unequal allocation of fully trained and certified teachers to all students) is that it disproportionately impacts our most vulnerable populations: low-income students and students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities who are most often assigned such underprepared teachers.

Further, this provision hides this disparate reality from parents and the public by disingenuously labeling teachers-in-training as “highly qualified” and hindering advocacy for better prepared teachers.

Research confirms what logic and experience dictate: that teachers-in training are significantly less effective in supporting student achievement than those who are fully trained when they enter teaching, and that the negative effects are particularly pronounced for students whose success depends most acutely on fully-trained professionals.
We believe that students with the greatest needs should have the best-prepared and most effective teachers to support their success, and that pursuit of that goal should be the purpose of federal policy.

In the coming weeks, we will propose specific actions to the Administration and the Congress that can achieve this goal, including repeal of this provision and development of a transparent definition of teacher quality, along with a set of policies that will allow the nation to put a well-prepared and effective teacher in every classroom. We will work tirelessly and in concert to see that policy is enacted that will support high-quality teaching for every child.

Respectfully,
Action United
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
Alliance for Multilingual Multicultural Education
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
American Association of State Colleges and Universities
American Federation of Teachers
ASPIRA Association
Association of University Centers on Disabilities
Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network
California Association for Bilingual Education
California Latino School Boards Association
Californians for Justice
Californians Together
Campaign for Fiscal Equity
Campaign for Quality Education
Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning
Center for Teaching Quality
Citizens for Effective Schools
Coalition for Educational Justice
Council for Exceptional Children
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
Easter Seals
ELC, Education Law Center
FairTest, The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Higher Education Consortium for Special Education
Justice Matters
Latino Elected and Appointed Officials National Taskforce on Education
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Learning Disabilities Association of America
Los Angeles Educational Partnership
Movement Strategy Center
NAACP
National Alliance of Black School Educators
National Center for Learning Disabilities
National Council for Educating Black Children
National Council of Teachers of English
National Disability Rights Network
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Down Syndrome Society
National Education Association
National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project
National League of United Latin American Citizens
Parent-U-Turn
Parents for Unity
Philadelphia Education Fund
Public Advocates Inc.
Public Education Network
Rural School and Community Trust
RYSE Center
School Social Work Association of America
Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children
Texas Association for Chicanos and Higher Education
United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries
Youth Together
cc: Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education

Teachers should be assessed on how well their students learn.   But a simple use of student achievement data (and value-added or growth models) often leads to unreliable conclusions as to who is effective and who is ineffective. CTQ recently explored the topic at a presentation in Vail, CO

Defining and measuring teaching effectiveness has proven to be a daunting task recently. Student learning is one of the most important skills a teacher should be assessed for.

However, as a recent News Tribune editorial points out, pay for performance models are ‘no quick fix for education', Read more. The editorial goes on to say that our schools’ goals should be in attracting and retaining the most talented people to the profession by treating teachers like ‘professionals’ who are compensated for their skill-level rather than years served or years of education.

CTQ President Barnett Berry explored these issues at a recent TED Talks presentation at the opening ceremony of an education event for the Eagle County
Schools in Vail, Colorado.
 
Click here to see the presentation.