From the Editor
House Reauthorization Bills, Other Resources
Anne Wujcik — Friday, January 13, 2012
On Jan 6, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), Chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, released the final two pieces of House's ESEA reauthorization package. These last two bills are a Republican effort, finalized and released after talks with Democrats on the Committee broke down. Two major studies related to teacher evaluation have also been released, one from the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project and the second from the National Bureau of Economic Research study on the long-term effects of high value-added teachers. Education Week released the 16th edition of it's annual Quality Counts report, focused on the nation's international standing in education, and lessons to be drawn from high-performing countries. And more information is also surfacing about states' implementation of the Common Core State Standards.
The House of Representatives has taken a piecemeal approach to its NCLB reauthorization effort. Three bills have passed out of Committee - a charter school update that had strong bipartisan support, a bill that eliminated 40 smaller programs that were deemed redundant and a funding flexibility bill. The two new bills, the Student Success Act and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act address the final elements of reform. The bills have some similarities with the Senate's reauthorization draft, but there are also big differences. The House abandons AYP, eliminates the tutoring and school choice requirements of NCLB, maintains the testing regime (though it eliminates science as a tested subject) and the requirements to disaggregate test results, and scraps NCLB's highly qualified teacher requirement. Like the Senate bill it gives local school districts significant control over how they go about designing and implementing their accountability and school improvement systems. The House bill eliminates School Improvement Grants and makes no demands that districts target the bottom 5% of schools. It also includes significant flexibility in the way funds can be spent, maintains separate funding streams for the Migrant Education, Neglected and Delinquent, English Language Acquisition, Rural Education, and Indian Education programs, but merging these programs into Title I and allowing states and districts to use formula funds received under those programs for activities authorized in any of the other programs.
For teachers, the House calls on districts to build teacher and principal evaluation systems that use student achievement data as a significant part of the evaluation, that use multiple measures to assess performance and that include more than two rating categories. These systems are expected to be used to evaluations to inform personnel decisions. The House also capped the amount of Title II funding that could be spent by districts on class-size reduction at 10%.
There is a lot here that could be negotiated into a reasonable set of reauthorization proposals, if anyone in Congress could remember what compromise and negotiation means. The same is true of the Senate bill, but given the lack of bipartisan support for these bills in the House Committee, the Senate has signaled that it is unlikely to consider the House bill. Secretary Duncan sees it as backing away from accountability and advocates for disadvantaged children, IDEA supporters and others will likely agree with this view. It still seems unlikely that any reauthorizations will see any action this year.
The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project report, Watching Teachers Work Using Observation Tools to Promote Effective, is interesting, arguing for improving early education up through the third grade (PreK-3rd) by actually watching teachers in action using innovative observation tools in combination with evaluation and training programs. Based on in-depth interviews at several leading sites around the country already using observation tools, the report describes how strong teaching can be fostered in PreK-3rd programs. The report also describes how objective observation could be used to improve teaching across the full education spectrum, PreK-12th grade. A key here, of course, is that to be effective, observers have to be well-trained and multiple observations must be used. If that happens, the report argues that, "Valid and reliable observation tools can allow for measurements that are far less subjective than many of the checklists and rubrics currently used by supervisors as they pop in and out of classrooms."
The National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood, addresses two basic questions related to evaluating teachers based on their impacts on students' test scores, commonly termed the "value-added" (VA) approach. First, does VA accurately measure teachers' impacts on scores or does it unfairly penalize teachers who may systematically be assigned lower achieving students? Second, do high VA teachers improve their students' long-term outcomes or are they simply better at teaching to the test? Researchers tracked one million children from a large urban school district from 4th grade to adulthood. They evaluated the accuracy of standard VA measures using several methods, including natural experiments that arise from changes in teaching staff. They found that when a high VA teacher joined a school, test scores rose immediately in the grade taught by that teacher; when a high VA teacher left, test scores fell. Test scores changed only in the subject taught by that teacher, and the size of the change in scores matched what the researchers predicted based on the teacher's VA. These results established that VA accurately captures teachers' impacts on students' academic achievement.
Researchers also analyzed whether high VA teachers also improve students' long-term outcomes, finding that students assigned to higher VA teachers were more successful in many dimensions. They were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They were also less likely to have children as teenagers. They conclude: "Replacing a teacher whose true VA is in the bottom 5% with one of average quality would generate cumulative earnings gains of $52,000 per student or more than $1.4 million for the average classroom."
I want to point you to a few resources related to Common Core Standards implementation. The Department of Education has released state-specific reports on the progress of the 12 Race to the Top grantees. Progress is uneven, but the states seem to be making good progress on implementing the CCSS. The reports use a common format and near the front there is a section on Standards and Assessments that provides a quick review of what's going on in each of the 12 states. The individual reports can be found at http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/performance.html
Editorial Projects in Education, (the publisher of Education Week) partnered with Education First, a Seattle-based education policy and consulting group, on a survey of states' plans to implement the Common Core State Standards. Researchers looked at implementation plans in three areas: providing curriculum or instructional materials, offering professional development to teachers, and adapting teacher evaluation to reflect instruction in the new standards. Overall states have a long way to go. Only seven states-Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and West Virginia-have completed plans in all three of those areas, while 18 reported no completed plans in any of them. Download Preparing for Change at http://www.edweek.org/media/preparingforchange-17standards.pdf .
