The Myth of the Ineffective Teacher
Earlier this month a California appeals court overturned the 2014 ruling in Vergara v. California that would have largely eliminated teachers' tenure protections in the state. This appeal has upset education reformers who celebrated Judge Treu's original ruling. An excerpt from Daniel Weisberg's opinion piece on the74million.com summarizes these sentiments:
"Thousands of teachers in schools across California — a small percentage but still a huge number — are not up to the job. These grossly ineffective teachers are derailing their students’ academic futures. Poor and minority students are more likely than others to be assigned to one of these teachers. And all of this is happening because of state laws that make it practically impossible for schools to replace the relatively few teachers who shouldn’t be there."
It's not a myth that there are ineffective teachers---there certainly are. Nor is it a myth that poor and minority students are more likely to have ineffective teachers---they are. The myth is in the last sentence, that the existence of ineffective teachers and their assignments to schools and students results from tenure protections. It's the myth of ineffective teachers as permanently entrenched, perpetually under-performing check collectors. That idea, as well as the notion that replacing existing tenure laws with performance-based retention, is based on a number of not-so-obvious assumptions which each break down under further examination. I list those assumptions and conclude with findings from my own research.
1. "Ineffective teachers" will be back next year unless we replace them.
This is part of a more broad principle (often ignored in discussions of teacher retention) that any benefits to a retention/dismissal decision occur after that decision is made. If Mr. Farine's performance with the graduation class of 2018 is deemed unacceptable and he is replaced, it is the classes of 2019 and 2020 who stand to benefit from that decision; for the class of 2018 it is too late. But if Mr. Farine was going to quit before the next school year anyway, labeling him ineffective has no benefit to anyone--it doesn't change a thing. The classes of 2019 and 2020 would have had a different teacher anyway.
Research shows that teachers identified as ineffective by any measure---principal ratings, value-added, student surveys---already quit voluntarily at much higher rates than teachers higher in the performance distribution. This is even more true in the types of schools Vergara attempts to highlight, meaning that those low-income and minority students who are more likely to be assigned to an ineffective teacher are also more likely to be assigned to a teacher who won't be back next year. And, once again, if they're not coming back next year anyway, retention reform doesn't benefit anyone.
2. "Ineffective teachers" will be ineffective again next year.
Not only does Mr. Farine have to intend to return next year, we also have to assume that he would be ineffective next year, too. If he would have returned but performed well, the classes of 2019 and 2020 may suffer as a result of a dismissal decision. The assumption that teacher effectiveness is a static trait is essential to the excerpt above, but it's a problematic view. The two biggest factors making teacher effectiveness more dynamic are the returns to experience of early-career teachers and statistical noise in performance measures based on test scores. Both research and anecdote are consistent in saying that teachers improve dramatically as they climb the learning curve during those first few years on the job. Many of the teachers identified as "ineffective" by performance measures are first-year teachers who perform better the following years. If Mr. Farine is a first-year teacher with the class of 2018, the classes of 2019 and 2020 are likely to learn much more in his class the following years than the cohort before them. If he's replaced, there's a large likelihood that they'll, too, have a first-year teacher instead, and the reform designed to help them will have the opposite effect of contributing to an already problematic cycle of teacher churn.
3. "Ineffective teachers" have prior performance measures proving they're ineffective.
This is largely related to the points above, but separately highlights the fact that performance-based retention policy or tenure reform relies on prior measures of performance which are unavailable for many teachers, especially those in their first year on the job, or which did not show the teachers to be ineffective.
4. "Ineffective teachers" can easily be replaced with higher-performing replacements.
This assumption is also most problematic in the settings the Vergara plaintiffs attempt to highlight. Just as teacher attrition is higher in schools with high-minority and high-poverty student populations, recruitment of qualified candidates in these schools is much more difficult. Ironically, job security for teachers willing to work in these settings is one of the least-expensive benefits that can be offered to offset the job's less attractive features, and taking it away in all schools is likely to disproportionately harm recruitment and retention efforts in lowest-performing schools. It's certainly difficult to imagine that promising less would somehow make these jobs more attractive to effective teachers.
A forthcoming research article I've been working on examines each of these assumptions empirically using a longitudinal database of teacher performance in North Carolina. Here's what I find with "ineffective teachers." For this exercise, I define "ineffective" as those teachers falling in the bottom 5% in terms of contributions to student learning, and "adequate" as those at or above the 40th percentile.
Out of 100 ineffective teachers...
1) 25 are going to leave on their own; 75 will come back
2) 17 will be at least adequate the following year
3) 24 will fall under the same definition of "ineffective" again
4) Of those 24, just ten would be replaced by a teacher who is adequate
The big takeaway comes from focusing on #2 and #4 together: A performance-based retention policy is twice as likely to deny access to adequate instruction as it is to create it.
"Thousands of teachers in schools across California — a small percentage but still a huge number — are not up to the job. These grossly ineffective teachers are derailing their students’ academic futures. Poor and minority students are more likely than others to be assigned to one of these teachers. And all of this is happening because of state laws that make it practically impossible for schools to replace the relatively few teachers who shouldn’t be there."
It's not a myth that there are ineffective teachers---there certainly are. Nor is it a myth that poor and minority students are more likely to have ineffective teachers---they are. The myth is in the last sentence, that the existence of ineffective teachers and their assignments to schools and students results from tenure protections. It's the myth of ineffective teachers as permanently entrenched, perpetually under-performing check collectors. That idea, as well as the notion that replacing existing tenure laws with performance-based retention, is based on a number of not-so-obvious assumptions which each break down under further examination. I list those assumptions and conclude with findings from my own research.
1. "Ineffective teachers" will be back next year unless we replace them.
This is part of a more broad principle (often ignored in discussions of teacher retention) that any benefits to a retention/dismissal decision occur after that decision is made. If Mr. Farine's performance with the graduation class of 2018 is deemed unacceptable and he is replaced, it is the classes of 2019 and 2020 who stand to benefit from that decision; for the class of 2018 it is too late. But if Mr. Farine was going to quit before the next school year anyway, labeling him ineffective has no benefit to anyone--it doesn't change a thing. The classes of 2019 and 2020 would have had a different teacher anyway.
Research shows that teachers identified as ineffective by any measure---principal ratings, value-added, student surveys---already quit voluntarily at much higher rates than teachers higher in the performance distribution. This is even more true in the types of schools Vergara attempts to highlight, meaning that those low-income and minority students who are more likely to be assigned to an ineffective teacher are also more likely to be assigned to a teacher who won't be back next year. And, once again, if they're not coming back next year anyway, retention reform doesn't benefit anyone.
2. "Ineffective teachers" will be ineffective again next year.
Not only does Mr. Farine have to intend to return next year, we also have to assume that he would be ineffective next year, too. If he would have returned but performed well, the classes of 2019 and 2020 may suffer as a result of a dismissal decision. The assumption that teacher effectiveness is a static trait is essential to the excerpt above, but it's a problematic view. The two biggest factors making teacher effectiveness more dynamic are the returns to experience of early-career teachers and statistical noise in performance measures based on test scores. Both research and anecdote are consistent in saying that teachers improve dramatically as they climb the learning curve during those first few years on the job. Many of the teachers identified as "ineffective" by performance measures are first-year teachers who perform better the following years. If Mr. Farine is a first-year teacher with the class of 2018, the classes of 2019 and 2020 are likely to learn much more in his class the following years than the cohort before them. If he's replaced, there's a large likelihood that they'll, too, have a first-year teacher instead, and the reform designed to help them will have the opposite effect of contributing to an already problematic cycle of teacher churn.
3. "Ineffective teachers" have prior performance measures proving they're ineffective.
This is largely related to the points above, but separately highlights the fact that performance-based retention policy or tenure reform relies on prior measures of performance which are unavailable for many teachers, especially those in their first year on the job, or which did not show the teachers to be ineffective.
4. "Ineffective teachers" can easily be replaced with higher-performing replacements.
This assumption is also most problematic in the settings the Vergara plaintiffs attempt to highlight. Just as teacher attrition is higher in schools with high-minority and high-poverty student populations, recruitment of qualified candidates in these schools is much more difficult. Ironically, job security for teachers willing to work in these settings is one of the least-expensive benefits that can be offered to offset the job's less attractive features, and taking it away in all schools is likely to disproportionately harm recruitment and retention efforts in lowest-performing schools. It's certainly difficult to imagine that promising less would somehow make these jobs more attractive to effective teachers.
A forthcoming research article I've been working on examines each of these assumptions empirically using a longitudinal database of teacher performance in North Carolina. Here's what I find with "ineffective teachers." For this exercise, I define "ineffective" as those teachers falling in the bottom 5% in terms of contributions to student learning, and "adequate" as those at or above the 40th percentile.
Out of 100 ineffective teachers...
1) 25 are going to leave on their own; 75 will come back
2) 17 will be at least adequate the following year
3) 24 will fall under the same definition of "ineffective" again
4) Of those 24, just ten would be replaced by a teacher who is adequate
The big takeaway comes from focusing on #2 and #4 together: A performance-based retention policy is twice as likely to deny access to adequate instruction as it is to create it.
posted by J. Edward Guthrie at
11:14 AM
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