Except at the very bottom of the teacher quality distribution where test-based evaluation could result in termination, individual incentives will have little impact on teachers who are aware they are less effective and who therefore expect they will have little chance of getting a bonus or teachers who are aware they are stronger and who therefore expect to get a bonus without additional effort. Studies in fields outside education have also documented that when incentive systems require employees to compete with one another for a fixed pot of monetary reward, collaboration declines and client outcomes suffer.
A commonplace objection to a group incentive system is that it permits free riding—teachers who share in rewards without contributing additional effort. If the main goal, however, is student welfare, group incentives are still preferred, even if some free-riding were to occur. Group incentives also avoid some of the problems of statistical instability we noted above: because a full school generates a larger sample of students than an individual classroom.
Yet group incentives, however preferable to individual incentives, retain other problems characteristic of individual incentives. A group incentive system can exacerbate this narrowing, if teachers press their colleagues to concentrate effort on those activities most likely to result in higher test scores and thus in group bonuses. Pressure to raise student test scores, to the exclusion of other important goals, can demoralize good teachers and, in some cases, provoke them to leave the profession entirely.
Recent survey data reveal that accountability pressures are associated with higher attrition and reduced morale, especially among teachers in high-need schools. Here, we reproduce two such stories, one from a St. Louis and another from a Los Angeles teacher:. No Child Left Behind has completely destroyed everything I ever worked for… We now have an enforced minute reading block.
Their vocabulary is nothing like it used to be. We used to do Shakespeare, and half the words were unknown, but they could figure it out from the context. They are now very focused on phonics of the words and the mechanics of the words, even the very bright kids are… Teachers feel isolated. It used to be different. There was more team teaching. Teachable moments to help the schools and children function are gone. But the kids need this kind of teaching, especially inner-city kids and especially at the elementary levels.
This meant that art, music, and even science and social studies were not a priority and were hardly ever taught. We were forced to spend ninety percent of the instructional time on reading and math. This made teaching boring for me and was a huge part of why I decided to leave the profession.
If these anecdotes reflect the feelings of good teachers, then analysis of student test scores may distinguish teachers who are more able to raise test scores, but encourage teachers who are truly more effective to leave the profession.
Used with caution, value-added modeling can add useful information to comprehensive analyses of student progress and can help support stronger inferences about the influences of teachers, schools, and programs on student growth.
We began by noting that some advocates of using student test scores for teacher evaluation believe that doing so will make it easier to dismiss ineffective teachers. The problem that advocates had hoped to solve will remain, and could perhaps be exacerbated.
There is simply no shortcut to the identification and removal of ineffective teachers. It must surely be done, but such actions will unlikely be successful if they are based on over-reliance on student test scores whose flaws can so easily provide the basis for successful challenges to any personnel action. Districts seeking to remove ineffective teachers must invest the time and resources in a comprehensive approach to evaluation that incorporates concrete steps for the improvement of teacher performance based on professional standards of instructional practice, and unambiguous evidence for dismissal, if improvements do not occur.
Thus, all the incentives to distort instruction will be preserved to avoid identification by the trigger, and other means of evaluation will enter the system only after it is too late to avoid these distortions. While those who evaluate teachers could take student test scores over time into account, they should be fully aware of their limitations, and such scores should be only one element among many considered in teacher profiles.
Based on the evidence we have reviewed above, we consider this unwise. If the quality, coverage, and design of standardized tests were to improve, some concerns would be addressed, but the serious problems of attribution and nonrandom assignment of students, as well as the practical problems described above, would still argue for serious limits on the use of test scores for teacher evaluation.
Although some advocates argue that admittedly flawed value-added measures are preferred to existing cumbersome measures for identifying, remediating, or dismissing ineffective teachers, this argument creates a false dichotomy.
It implies there are only two options for evaluating teachers—the ineffectual current system or the deeply flawed test-based system. Yet there are many alternatives that should be the subject of experiments. These experiments should all be fully evaluated. There is no perfect way to evaluate teachers.
However, progress has been made over the last two decades in developing standards-based evaluations of teaching practice, and research has found that the use of such evaluations by some districts has not only provided more useful evidence about teaching practice, but has also been associated with student achievement gains and has helped teachers improve their practice and effectiveness.
Evaluation by competent supervisors and peers, employing such approaches, should form the foundation of teacher evaluation systems, with a supplemental role played by multiple measures of student learning gains that, where appropriate, should include test scores. In some districts, peer assistance and review programs—using standards-based evaluations that incorporate evidence of student learning, supported by expert teachers who can offer intensive assistance, and panels of administrators and teachers that oversee personnel decisions—have been successful in coaching teachers, identifying teachers for intervention, providing them assistance, and efficiently counseling out those who do not improve.
Given the range of measures currently available for teacher evaluation, and the need for research about their effective implementation and consequences, legislatures should avoid imposing mandated solutions to the complex problem of identifying more and less effective teachers.
School districts should be given freedom to experiment, and professional organizations should assume greater responsibility for developing standards of evaluation that districts can use. Such work, which must be performed by professional experts, should not be pre-empted by political institutions acting without evidence. As is the case in every profession that requires complex practice and judgments, precision and perfection in the evaluation of teachers will never be possible.
Evaluators may find it useful to take student test score information into account in their evaluations of teachers, provided such information is embedded in a more comprehensive approach. What is now necessary is a comprehensive system that gives teachers the guidance and feedback, supportive leadership, and working conditions to improve their performance, and that permits schools to remove persistently ineffective teachers without distorting the entire instructional program by imposing a flawed system of standardized quantification of teacher quality.
Dee and Jacob , p. Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder , pp. Jauhar ; Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder , pp. Darling-Hammond Baldi et al. For a further discussion, see Ravitch , Chapter 6. Rubin, Stuart, and Zanutto , p. McCaffrey et al. Braun , p. BOTA Braun, Chudowsky, and Koenig, , p.
Some policy makers seek to minimize these realities by citing teachers or schools who achieve exceptional results with disadvantaged students. Even where these accounts are true, they only demonstrate that more effective teachers and schools achieve better results, on average, with disadvantaged students than less effective teachers and schools achieve; they do not demonstrate that more effective teachers and schools achieve average results for disadvantaged students that are typical for advantaged students.
In rare cases, more complex controls are added to account for the influence of peers i. This taxonomy is suggested by Braun, Chudowsky, and Koenig , pp. Rothstein ; Newton et al. Krueger ; Mosteller ; Glass et al. For example, studies have found the effects of one-on-one or small group tutoring, generally conducted in pull-out sessions or after school by someone other than the classroom teacher, can be quite substantial. A meta-analysis Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik of 52 tutoring studies reported that tutored students outperformed their classroom controls by a substantial average effect size of.
Bloom noted that the average tutored student registered large gains of about 2 standard deviations above the average of a control class. Newton et al.
Poor measurement of the lowest achieving students has been exacerbated under NCLB by the policy of requiring alignment of tests to grade-level standards. If tests are too difficult, or if they are not aligned to the content students are actually learning, then they will not reflect actual learning gains.
Rothstein Schochet and Chiang Sass ; Lockwood et al. Braun Sass , citing Koedel and Betts ; McCaffrey et al. For similar findings, see Newton et al. Diamond and Cooper Koretz b, p. Downey, von Hippel, and Hughes Heller, Downey, and von Hippel, forthcoming. Alexander, Entwisle, and Olson Cooper et al. Although fall-to-spring testing ameliorates the vertical scaling problems, it does not eliminate them.
Just as many topics are not taught continuously from one grade to another, so are many topics not taught continuously from fall to spring. During the course of a year, students are expected to acquire new knowledge and skills, some of which build on those from the beginning of the year, and some of which do not. To get timely results, Colorado administers its standardized testing in March.
Florida gave its writing test last year in mid-February and its reading, mathematics, and science tests in mid-March. Illinois did its accountability testing this year at the beginning of March. Texas has scheduled its testing to begin next year on March 1.
This formulation of the distinction has been suggested by Koretz a. McMurrer ; McMurrer GAO , p. For a discussion of curriculum sampling in tests, see Koretz a, especially Chapter 2. Medina This argument has recently been developed in Hemphill and Nauer et al. Hirsch ; Hirsch and Pondiscio For discussion of these practices, see Ravitch There is a well-known decline in relative test scores for low-income and minority students that begins at or just after the fourth grade, when more complex inferential skills and deeper background knowledge begin to play a somewhat larger, though still small role in standardized tests.
Children who are enabled to do well by drilling the mechanics of decoding and simple, literal interpretation often do more poorly on tests in middle school and high school because they have neither the background knowledge nor the interpretive skills for the tasks they later confront. As the grade levels increase, gaming the exams by test prep becomes harder, though not impossible, if instruction begins to provide solid background knowledge in content areas and inferential skills. This is why accounts of large gains from test prep drill mostly concern elementary schools.
Bryk and Schneider ; Neal , pp. Jackson and Bruegmann Goddard, Goddard, and Tschannen-Moran Incentives could also operate in the opposite direction.
See, for example, Lazear Feng, Figlio, and Sass ; Finnigan and Gross Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder , Milanowski, Kimball, and White See for example, Bond et al. Darling-Hammond ; Van Lier See for example, Solomon et al.
Ahn, Tom. Alexander, Karl L. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson. Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap. Ameri can Sociological Review, Green, and Deborah Herget. NCES — Department of Education. Washington, DC. See also: PISA on line. Bloom, Benjamin S. The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring.
Educational Researcher , 13 6 : 4— Bond, Lloyd, et al. Tracy Smith, Wanda K. Baker, and John A. Greensboro, N. Department of Education on the Race to the Top Fund. Braun Henry. Princeton, N. Bryk, Anthony S. Trust in Schools. A Core Resource for Improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Teacher salary information is also available, but is presented only for regular full-time teachers in public schools. The average base salary for full-time public school teachers in —18 can be compared to average salaries in previous years using constant —19 dollars.
During the s and early s, public school enrollment decreased while the number of teachers generally increased. After a period of relative stability from the late s through the mids, the ratio declined from The average class size was These numbers are based on sample survey data and could differ from those based on other sample surveys or universe surveys. Department of Labor, adjusted to a school-year basis. The authors of a study of 99 student teachers in Newcastle noted —- and subsequent researchers concurred — that without significant input during training, teachers would struggle.
When questioned about the terms specified in the national curriculum, including adjective, conjunction and determiner, the teachers only got about half of the questions right. Teaching-support staff fared even worse. Why should we care about whether our teachers are well equipped to teach grammar? In the first instance, we should because they have to. It is crucial that teachers have the knowledge and confidence to support pupils through statutory subjects , on which, in non-pandemic times at least, they will be formally tested.
This is because knowledge about concepts such as active and passive voice may allow for more precise and productive conversations between teachers and students about textual effects and possibilities. And it may enable students to shape their prose more consciously. It can also help them learn new languages. If learners already have a conscious awareness of linguistic features such as tenses, that helps them to recognise and discuss what is the same or different in another tongue.
And though more research is needed , some scholars have even suggested that grammar teaching may improve general thinking skills. Many publishers have stepped into the gap left by the government and have produced support materials to help student teachers master the grammatical terms the curriculum specifies. Notice: This is only a preliminary collection of relevant material The data and research currently presented here is a preliminary collection or relevant material. Teacher Quantity.
Click to open interactive version. About one third of all teachers in the world are primary-school teachers. Teacher Quality. You can find more data on teacher training, across different education levels, in the following maps: Share of teachers in pre-primary education who are trained Share of teachers in primary education who are trained Share of teachers in secondary education who are trained Share of teachers in lower secondary education who are trained Share of teachers in upper secondary education who are trained.
The way education systems select, recruit, train and deploy teachers matters. As the following chart shows, teacher absenteeism is an important problem in many countries. In practical terms, teacher absenteeism translates into lost teaching time. Salaries of teachers. How does teacher quality affect student performance? Impacts of teacher entry and exit on test scores — Chetty et al. Wordpress Edit Page. Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone.
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