Teacher Supply, Demand, and Quality Policy Issues, Models, and Data Bases (1992) / Chapter Skim
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PART III POLICY ISSUES
PART III POLICY ISSUES
Pages 63-126
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From page 63... ...
III POLICY ISSUES Part III addresses policy issues in teacher supply, demand, and quality. The focus is on issues entailed in forming effective federal and state policies designed to ensure a sufficient supply of teachers who are fully qualified in their primary teaching assignment.
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Yet we are still not satisfied with the quality of classroom teaching practices.
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We now know, for instance, that many people who are prepared to teach never enter the profession, that many of those who do teach leave the profession after only a few years, and that only about 25 to 30 percent of leavers are likely to return after a career interruption. These returning teachers are often referred to as a reserve pool of teacher supply that augments the pool of new college graduates available for teaching.
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From page 67... ...
These practices have become criticized recently, both because they threaten the quality of classroom practices and because they diminish the status of the profession as a whole. Finally, much of the evidence currently available regarding teacher supply and demand suggests that the issue is not a universal one, but instead the ratio of supply to demand varies by school, subject matter, and grade level.
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Yet classroom practice is highly influenced by teachers' a priori ideas about what counts as good teaching. Teachers acquire seemingly indelible imprints of teaching from their own experiences as students, and these imprints are tremendously difficult to shake.
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POLICY EFFORTS TO IMPROVE THE SUPPLY OF QUALITY TEACHERS The special problem facing contemporary policy makers is that of, at one and the same time, increasing the supply of teachers available and improving the quality of their classroom teaching practices. Certain features of the teaching population bear notice when considering either supply and demand or quality.
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From page 70... ...
For purposes of this discussion I would like to distinguish five dimensions of quality that form the basis of most policy activities. The first two dimensions, quality of credential and tested ability, refer to characteristics of individual teachers: policy makers want to ensure that those who enter teaching hold credentials that are appropriate to their task, that they have acquired the subject matter knowledge and pedagogical training needed, or that they have some minimal level of intellectual ability deemed appropriate for teaching.
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From page 71... ...
The ethnic mix of teachers, for instance, may have positive benefits on both student motivation and learning that will not be easily discerned from observations of teachers' classroom practices, and changes in the professionalism of teaching may alter teachers' regard for their work in ways that influence both their retention in the job and the tacit messages they communicate to students about the importance of school and of learning to a variety of life's endeavors. The problem for policy makers is one of sorting out these several dimensions and recognizing each as a separate issue that warrants its own attention.
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Several aspects of teachers' formal education have been presumed important indicators of teacher quality. Three popular measures are: (a)
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These policies, however, manipulate only the supply of new graduates who might enter teaching. They do not address the large reserve pool of teachers, from whom many new hires are drawn.
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Although it may seem counterintuitive to argue that providing shortcuts into the profession would enhance teacher's credentials, states offering alternative routes generally hope to attract into teaching people who have stronger subject matter knowledge and stronger liberal arts educations. Their reasoning is that such people were, as college students, either deterred from teaching by its curriculum requirements, or attracted to higher salaries in other career lines.
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Most states readily provide emergency credentials for misassignments, few monitor the appropriateness of teachers' assignments, and many promote alternative routes into teaching as a means of increasing the number of teachers who have specifically not obtained formal credentials.
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Coding teachers on the subject they majored in, or on whether they have the correct credential for their teaching area, provides too little knowledge of the actual courses teachers took and of what they actually learned in these courses. Even transcript studies are unlikely to reveal the detail we need about teachers' formal education, for courses with similar titles can be remarkably different from one another.3 If researchers wish to pursue further the relationship between credentials or formal course work and teaching practices, they need to invest in more carefully designed studies, studies that follow candidates over time and that examine the actual content they are taught rather than the number of credits they have taken.
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1983~. Tested ability is the dimension of quality that most policy makers assume is related to classroom teaching practice, and consequently it has received more attention from policy makers than any of the other dimensions of quality.
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It is conceivable that, if we took into account the other occupations that need to draw high-scoring individuals, and if we knew more about the relationship between test scores and teaching performance, we would conclude that the problem is not so grave as we have been supposing. It is also conceivable that tests that were structured to target more specifically on teaching valid content, rather than recognizing it when it is presented, would demonstrate a stronger relationship to classroom practice.
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A second popular strategy for improving tested ability is the alternative route. Just as policy makers believe that college students with strong interest in the liberal arts might be repelled from vocationally oriented teacher education programs, many also believe that students with higher tested ability tend to avoid the presumably less rigorous teacher education curriculum.
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My main reason for insisting on thinking about these dimensions separately, though, is that policy makers often assume that, if they improve tested ability, they also automatically improve classroom teaching practice. There are several reasons for doubting this assumption.
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And most teacher candidates have not thought about these content issues since they first learned them themselves, when they were students in high school or middle school. The significance of questions of this sort is more apparent when these questions are contrasted with state assessments that focus on the content teachers will teach.
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From page 82... ...
The examples I describe, though, do provide some alternative ways of thinking about tested ability and about the kinds of questions we need to be asking teachers. My second recommendation, though, is that this test development activity should not be undertaken by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
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From page 83... ...
So even if we successfully meet all our goals regarding demographic representation in the teaching work force, we would still have numerous individual teaching situations in which teacher and student come from different demographic backgrounds. Given all of this, one could argue that, if our main concern is that minority students be able to learn school material, we should worry as much or more about measuring the dimension of quality of classroom practice as we do about measuring the demography of the work force, for no matter
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From page 84... ...
For students, such diversity among teachers may improve their future chances of interacting successfully with the different groups they will encounter in their own work. For teachers, such diversity may enhance their ability to interact successfully with their own students, thereby improving the quality of their classroom practices.
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From page 85... ...
Many school districts also keep such records both on their students and on their practicing teachers, and so could report on the makeup of their current teaching force and the similarities between their teaching populations and their student populations. And many NCES data bases include data on demographic characteristics.
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However, we also have evidence to suggest that the reason for girls avoiding science courses may not be a lack of female role models in these particular content areas, but instead may be due to the teaching practices employed by these male teachers.~° If that is the case, it is difficult to know whether we really need representativeness within each field of study or whether, instead, we might be satisfied with representativeness among teachers as a whole, provided that we also address the improvement of teaching practices within particular subject areas. My second recommendation is that predictions of the number of potential minority college graduates should become part of NCES's routine projections.
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These people believe that teachers are more qualified than central administrators to make decisions that will improve classroom practice, and that teachers
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In addition, the arguments are still mainly at the stage of speculation, with few data available to test the merits of any of these propositions. At a minimum, we can separate their potential for reducing attrition from their potential for improving the quality of classroom practice.
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With respect to professionalization as a means of improving the quality of classroom practice, we also have reason to be skeptical. If it is true that teachers teach as they were taught, then there is no particular reason to believe that, left to their own devices, teachers would be very likely to make radical changes in their own practices.
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From page 90... ...
In addition, plans that require teachers to observe and comment on one another's classroom practices fly in the face of the culture Reteaching, in which teachers are very careful never to comment on one another's work (Little, 19881. Similarly, ideas that differentiate among teachers, either through staffing arrangements or through career ladders or merit pay, are generally distasteful to teachers.
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From page 91... ...
If we begin gathering data on the presence or absence of a particular idea, such as school-based management or merit pay, and then look for evidence that such programs have altered teacher attrition or improved classroom practices, we may easily find the same result we have found when studying the role of credentials. And the finding would be similarly difficult to interpret, for we cannot know whether such programs could make a difference, if done in such a way that teachers really feel more professional responsibility.
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From page 92... ...
Yet traditional teaching practices encourage students to work in isolation and compete with one another, to learn discrete facts and skills rather than to solve complex problems, and to follow fixed routines rather than experiment with novel tasks. Preparing students for tomorrow's work place requires a different kind of teaching, so policy makers face the task of finding ways to improve classroom teaching practices.
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I have already discussed the importance of classroom teaching practice. My main argument here is that the importance of this dimension of quality stems from a recognition that the content being taught to students is at a far lower level than we want to see.
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A teacher's ability to adopt a new, more demanding role depends not only on his or her understanding of that role, but also on emotional acceptance of and commitment to that role. Policy Activity in This Area The traditional strategy of inservice teacher education continues to be a popular one for improving the quality of classroom teaching practices.
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Teacher educators are also experimenting with ways of helping candidate teachers develop alternative teaching strategies. A popular new strategy designed to improve the classroom practices of new teachers is the inclusion of on-thejob assessments in hiring policies, such that teachers are placed on probation for the first year or two and their practices are assessed during this probationary period.
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Yet another proposal often put forward to improve classroom teaching practices is the professional development school, or PDS (The Holmes Group, 1986; Levine, 1988; Lieberman, 1989~. There was a time when most colleges of education operated lab schools schools located on or near university campuses where student teachers received their practical experience.
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It does nothing for credentials, demographic representation, or tested ability. Moreover, PDSs are intended to improve the practices of the existing teaching force as well as to provide a better preparation for new teachers.
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The work of the Educational Testing Service on a new version of the NTE, and the work of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards on a certification assessment for teachers, will contribute to our understanding of teacher knowledge and perhaps to our understanding of their pedagogical subject matter knowledge. Both are intended to yield more valid and meaningful measures of teacher quality.
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From page 99... ...
Questions such as these may prove to be highly useful indicators of teaching practice and may be more efficient than direct observation. If such questions were embedded into NAEP surveys, they could improve our understanding of the relationship between teachers' fundamental orientations toward teaching and the kinds of Comes they promote in their students.
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From page 100... ...
Improving the match between teachers' credentials and their teaching assignments won't necessarily lead to improved practice; getting a more demographically representative population of teachers won't do it; increasing tested ability won't; and neither, necessarily, will efforts to professionalize teaching. But it is also true that improving classroom teaching practices will not necessarily improve credentials or demographic representation or tested ability or teacher professionalism.
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From page 101... ...
Instead, NCES might try to develop better models for predicting teacher attrition models that incorporate relevant features of teaching jobs and that incorporate teachers' perceptions of control over various aspects of their work. With respect to classroom teaching practices, the nature of programs designed to promote improvements in classroom practices are extremely various, even though many of them share the same names.
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From page 102... ...
This result would occur in part because the production of new teachers will not alter the current teaching population, which is substantially out of balance with the racial and ethnic composition of the student population, and in part because the student population is changing so rapidly toward nonwhite students that even the most concerted minority recruiting programs are likely to lag considerably behind the student body changes. The size of the teaching force also has implications for tested ability, for schools must compete with other industries for employees and cannot expect to take a substantial fraction of adults with high tested ability from other professions and businesses.
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From page 103... ...
If brighter teachers tend to marry brighter spouses, they will live in communities that have jobs for their spouses. That is, we might find tested ability higher in communities that employ more highly educated people in general, rather than in communities in which the dominant employment is unskilled or skilled labor.
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Darling-Hammond, and D.W. Grissmer 1988 Assessing Teacher Supply and Demand.
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Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association. Hanushek, Eric 1986 The economics of schooling: Production and efficiency in public schools.
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Vance 1983 Recruitment, selection and retention: The shape of the teaching force. The Elementary School Journal 83:469-487.
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Two studies sponsored by the National Center for Research on Teacher Education, however, did examine the test scores and grade point averages (GPAs) of alternative route candidates.
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These authors argue that merit pay will probably not have an impact on classroom teaching practices and may not be feasible in those districts that are most in need of improve ment.
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STEDMAN Mary M Kennedy has fashioned a thought-provoking and well-reasoned analysis of several of the dimensions of teacher quality.
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Finally, Kennedy identifies a key context for any analysis of addressing supply, demand, and quality issues: the size of the teaching force. The dilemma is how to fashion policies to improve teacher quality when the target population is one of such magnitude.
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Perhaps only time will tell if efforts to imbue teachers with these characteristics and offer them these opportunities will improve actual classroom practice or improve students' performance. Nevertheless, these are the characteristics that are being used by many to define teacher quality; there should be efforts to measure them.
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From page 112... ...
Furthermore, and somewhat ironically, if we do a better job of instilling more teachers with a conception of their new role and a grasp of high-quality classroom practice, induction programs involving those very teachers would be a sound investment. TEACHER QUALITY ISSUES AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL The quality question, as it relates to supply and demand, is important at all policy levels, including the federal.
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Significantly, these congressional efforts were much more attuned to Kennedy's concerns than not. Credentials and tested ability were not the focus of the legislation and not being given serious consideration; rather, recruitment of minority teachers and improvement of teachers' mastery of subject matter and classroom practice were.
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In particular, as educational standards are raised and new assessments are implemented to measure progress against those standards, our entire teaching force will be expected to understand subject matter more deeply than is generally true now, and to have mastered a wider range of pedagogical skills in order to teach all children. As a result, issues of teacher quality are likely to remain at the center of education policy debates.
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From page 115... ...
The committee made some useful recommendations and identified a number of points at which NCES surveys touch on the teacher quality issues, particularly classroom practice or instructional strategies. For example, the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 eighth graders (NELS:88)
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From page 116... ...
Ultimately, we need both kinds of assessments of teacher quality ones that seek to change behavior and instill quality practice, and ones that seek to measure the sv~tem's progress in improving quality. REFERENCES The Holmes Group 1991 Toward a Community of Learning: The Preparation and Continuing Education of Teachers.
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I read the Kennedy analysis with considerable interest. Certainly she identified the significant dimensions of teacher quality about which we need to be concerned; I think her treatment of them is excellent.
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The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) will present a defining construct for advanced certification.
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Here is an illustration of how classroom practice can be incorporated into the initial teacher licensing process. Before I joined the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, I had the opportunity, along with some of my colleagues at the RAND Corporation, to work with the state of Minnesota in defining for that state the direction in which teacher licensing should move.
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From page 120... ...
In my opinion, there is no way, other than superficially, that classroom teaching practice can be sampled for purposes of judging teacher quality. Nor is it feasible to carry out the serious, national studies that would be necessary to connect teaching behavior, or teaching performance, with student outcomes very frequently.
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From page 121... ...
The teaching profession today is quite imperfect in this regard. For example, it is forced to compare the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of teachers and nonteachers when the real interest is in the teacher candidate's ability to use one of Kennedy's examples to divide fractions or perform other teaching tasks enumerated by Kennedy and her colleagues from the National Center for Research on Teacher Education.
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From page 122... ...
Understanding teacher quality, as well as teacher supply and demand, is critical. One of the reasons is that teacher quality is maldistributed today and will, in all probability, continue to be maldistributed until minimum teacher competence or minimum teacher credentialing can be defined accurately.
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From page 123... ...
Since facets of the concept of teacher quality, in relation to teacher supply and demand, was the central topic in the Kennedy paper and subsequent discussions, much of the general discussion addressed the meaning and significance of the concept of quality in this context. There was considerable agreement that quality is multidimensional and difficult to specify.
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From page 124... ...
For example, creating a more professionalized role for teachers might make the profession more attractive to more able teacher candidates and therefore in the long run lead to better student outcomes through the development of a higher-quality teaching force. A second approach to dealing with the concept of quality teaching is to establish substantial and uniform requirements across the nation for teacher licensure, and to restrict teacher hiring to individuals who are fully qualified for the teaching license.
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From page 125... ...
of teacher credentials, by type of school and community, will reveal serious inequities among school districts in the quality of teachers they can hire. These data will strengthen equity litigation brought by disadvantaged districts and should stimulate efforts to upgrade the quality of the profession further- even though the qualifications recorded will not necessarily be indicative of the quality of teaching practice.
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