Better Teachers, Better Schools

July 1, 1999

by Dale Ballou, Dominic J. Brewer, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Dan D. Goldhaber, Eugene W. Hickok, Marci Kanstoroom, Ph.D., Michael Kwiatkowski , Tyce Palmaffy, Michael Podgursky, Michael B. Poliakoff , Naomi Schaefer , J.E. Stone, Robert P. Strauss, Danielle Dunne Wilcox

According to this 250-page volume, proposed federal and state policies aimed at boosting teacher quality may well worsen the problem. Instead of adding even more regulation to the teacher training system, policymakers should open up the profession to well-educated individuals and should hold principals accountable for student learning.

Foreword

Practically everyone, it seems, is obsessed with teacher quality. There has long been evidence that U.S. schools don't have enough of the teachers they need and that our quality control mechanisms aren't working well enough. Indeed, the evidence keeps mounting. As this book headed to the printer, for example, the Education Trust released a sophisticated analysis of the state licensure tests that most prospective public-school teachers must pass to enter the profession. The verdict: pitifully weak tests with embarassingly low cutoff scores.

While there is near unanimity that raising the quality of the teaching force is a top priority and a necessary precondition for boosting student achievement, there is less certainty about how to accomplish this. The conventional wisdom holds that tighter regulation of entry is the only way to ensure that all children have qualified teachers. But that wisdom has not served us well; the hoops and hurdles that we make prospective teachers clear have failed to assure their subject matter knowledge, classroom prowess, or success in raising pupil achievement. Why, then, suppose that more hoops and hurdles will yield a different result? Does this not begin to resemble a classic definition of madness?

This book suggests a different way of thinking about this perplexing but important issue, a way of thinking that's grounded in common sense rather than piety and that relies on evidence rather than supposition or wishful thinking. The common sense approach that we propose to boosting teacher quality involves easing back on regulations that control entry, devolving personnel decisions to individual schools, and then holding those schools accountable for producing results as gauged by their pupils' academic achievement. If this "tight-loose" strategy sounds familiar, that's because it has become the dominant paradigm for reforming schools today. We think it warrants consideration for teachers, too.

Until now, policymakers seeking to raise the quality of their teaching force had only one place to turn for guidance: organizations of professional educators, the most prominent of which are the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future and its various affiliates. Upon turning there, however, policymakers found predictable advice: more regulation, greater uniformity, additional time in ed schools, stronger reliance on peer review, etc. Not only is much of this advice self-serving; much of it--as several reports in this volume reveal--is seriously flawed. Among the more troubling flaws is the heavy emphasis that these nostrums place on a particular education philosophy--commonly called progressivism or constructivism--that flies in the face of the academic standards that many states are simultaneously setting for their students and schools.

This book opens with the teacher quality "manifesto" that the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation released in April on behalf of several dozen governors, state education chiefs, prominent scholars and analysts, and veteran practitioners. The manifesto reviews the two approaches to boosting teacher quality and urges the common sense route: simplifying entry and hiring, welcoming diversity, allowing principals to employ the teachers they need, and gauging quality chiefly by student achievement.

The remainder of the volume is divided into three parts. The first set of reports brings statistical evidence and economic analysis to bear on the present regime of teacher certification. The next set explores how today's processes actually work on the ground--from the courses that prospective teachers must take to the criteria used by school districts in making hiring decisions. Finally, our authors analyze a quartet of proposed reforms, two of them beloved by the education profession and two that embody the common sense approach. Included here is (to our knowledge) the first independent analysis ever undertaken of the over-praised National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).

We supply no silver bullet for America's teacher quality problem, but the verdict is clear about the prospects for policies based on the conventional wisdom: they are destined to fail. To us, the alternative seems just as clear. Rather than further tightening of entry requirements, states are well advised to approach the problem by opening up the profession to well-educated individuals with varied backgrounds, providing new teachers with the support they need to succeed in the classroom, freeing school leaders to hire and compensate the people they need, and holding everybody accountable not for what their peers think of their performance but for whether their students actually learn.

Many people contributed to the preparation of this volume, which we are pleased to publish in conjunction with the Education Leaders Council, a small but plucky organization of state education policymakers whose commitment to reform often leads them to embrace promising alternatives to the conventional wisdom. Our thanks to ELC chairman Eugene Hickok, who is also Pennsylvania's crusading Secretary of Education (and a political scientist of no small repute), for authoring the preface that follows.

Dr. Marci Kanstoroom, this Foundation's director of research, shouldered primary responsibility for preparation of this volume: commissioning (or otherwise obtaining) all the essays and studies in it, tirelessly editing them for publication, and overseeing the many projects that fed into this one. She was ably assisted throughout by visiting research fellow Danielle Wilcox, who lent a hand with every aspect of the book while authoring the pathbreaking study of the NBPTS.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is not unique in focusing on teacher quality, and the work of several other organizations has contributed to the strength of this book. Two of the reports included here, J.E. Stone's insightful analysis of NCATE and his primer on value-added assessment, were commissioned by the Foundation Endowment of Alexandria, Virginia and released as policy briefs this spring. We are grateful to the Foundation Endowment for allowing us to include revised versions of the policy briefs in this volume. A longer version of the overview of alternative teacher certification by Michael Kwiatkowski was previously published by the Tom?s Rivera Policy Institute of Claremont, California, to which we are similarly indebted.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is a private foundation that supports research, publications, and action projects in elementary/secondary education reform at the national level and in the Dayton area. Further information can be obtained from our web site (www.edexcellence.net) or by writing us at 1627 K Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20006. (We can also be emailed through our web site.) This report is available in full on the Foundation's web site, and hard copies can be obtained by calling 1-888-TBF-7474 (single copies are free). The Foundation is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., President
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Washington, DC
July 1999

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Better Teachers, Better Schools

Contents

Foreword