Do teacher tests keep talented people out of the classroom?
A study to appear in October by MIT economist Joshua Angrist and University of Chicago business school professor Jonathan Guryan apparently says yes, according to this article. That’s a counter-intuitive finding, of course; many reformers (ourselves included) have argued forever that tough teacher tests will deter poorly educated people from becoming teachers while attracting talented individuals. But maybe not. Here’s how the scholars explain it:
First, they note, applicants whose educational backgrounds qualify them to teach are also likely qualified to work in other fields. When they weigh their job options, they calculate the cost in time, effort and money of the mandated tests as salary reductions.
“Higher quality applicants, as measured by outside earnings potential, are more likely to pass the test,” Angrist says, but they’re also more likely to want wages that will repay their efforts to take the tests. In addition, they’re consumers; they can look for jobs at companies that don’t require costly licensing tests.
Second, the discouragement effect, as economists call it, serves as a barrier to applicants broadly, Angrist notes. People who might be great teachers may choose not to study or pay for certification for myriad reasons, a loss for U.S. students in public schools.
I asked my podcast buddy, AEI’s Rick Hess, about his thoughts on the study. Though it’s not yet available for viewing, that didn’t dissuade him from weighing in. (He could be a blogger!)
It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where this makes sense. We know people tend to steer away from obstacles unless those are attached to a strong brand (e.g., Marine Corps, Teach For America) and when they don’t have a lot of precise information on the obstacles, they may just assume they’re a headache and steer clear. Since it’s the most high-quality folks who have most avenues open to them, even modest obstacles may be enough for them to look elsewhere.
Beyond that, they may presume either that tests are: (a) going to be embarrassingly easy and that they don’t want to waste their time on a silly profession with minimum competency tests or (b) that the tests are going to be challenging and that they don’t want to waste their time and money on an exam that they’re afraid they won’t pass. (Remember, studies from psychology tend to suggest that it’s the people towards the upper end of the achievement distribution who are often less sure of themselves than those lower down.)
All of this suggests that we still need what we’ve needed for a long time, which is much more good fieldwork (e.g. surveys, analyses, interviews) which helps us understand why people do or don’t enter teaching and how much of that is the product of factors which we can manipulate.
Note Hess’s last point—the call for more research. I suppose he still is a scholar, and not a blogger, at heart. But Rick, thanks for the assist!
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June 5th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I can believe it. My experience with the MTELs went something like this:
1) Have a lot of trouble figuring out what I needed to take, where, when, etc. (the Massachusetts Department of Education web site is not exactly helpful, and I wasn’t in an ed program, having majored in something else somewhere else)
2) Shell out several hundred dollars to register (not a lot of money relative to earnings potential in the field, but a lot of money from the perspective of a recent college graduate)
3) Take an embarrassingly easy test on general English literacy skills, and an astonishingly difficult Latin test (I do not think the subject tests in general are bad — pass rates vary wildly, but my friends who have taken the math test were not perturbed — but the Latin test is famed for its difficulty — and I had just finished an MA in classics)
4) Wait and wait and wait and wait. My test results took about six months to come back, during which period, as an unlicensed teacher, I was automatically at the bottom of the lists at all the public schools — they could interview me, but they couldn’t hire me without jumping through a lot of hoops, even though they were having a terrible time finding qualified candidates.
5) Teach at a private school, because they could get their act together and extend me an offer prior to August.
6) Decide it was totally not worth my while to upgrade my provisional cert to a permanent one, because it was too hard to figure out what the requirements were for doing that, and it sounded like it would be expensive, boring, and time-consuming (ie, I would have to take ed classes), as well as possibly insulting (I think I would have to have had supervised teaching experience, despite the fact I was already teaching).
Had I ended up at a public school, I would eventually have had to jump through those hoops, but at least I would have had people to explain them to me.
I was left with the strong feeling that the system is set up to exclude anyone who doesn’t fit its preconceptions of who a teacher should be, to wit, someone who had planned to teach from at least the age of 18 and never deviated from that path, majoring in education, not working in other fields, etc. It is not friendly to anyone who is changing careers or otherwise coloring outside the lines.
June 6th, 2008 at 9:30 am
I am very curious as to how they came to this conclusion that the test is the barrier that keeps potentially great teachers from teaching. I can honestly say that after seeing 6,000 people start our program and less than 40% actually complete, that our test is absolutely necessary. This is because many of those potential teachers “whose educational backgrounds qualify them to teach” cannot compose a coherent essay and don’t have the most basic knowledge of their subject matter.
I wholeheartedly agree that a test with a passing rate of 95-99% is a useless waste of time and money. If every university had a minimum standard for graduation that meant that every teacher would have outstanding writing skills and subject matter mastery, we would be the first to push for the elimination of teacher testing. But we are nowhere near those kinds of results. The essays we see from college graduates are nothing short of dismal.
The McKinsey study of the best school systems in the world found that selectivity of teachers was a key driver of their success. We have to select the best teachers with tests that truly measure ability to very rigorous standards, like the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence exams, in order to compete in the world market