School Finance and Teacher Quality

Exploring the Connections

Margaret L. Plecki, David H. Monk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317927792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The yearbook is organized around four issues, each of which can be viewed as representing an important focal point to improve teacher and teaching quality and having important implications for school finance. The issues are (1) teacher recruitment, induction, and retention; (2) the ongoing porfessional development of teachers; (3) equity in the allocation of teaching resources; (4) teacher compensation and workplace conditions.

1

School Finance and Teacher Quality: Exploring the Connections

Margaret L. Plecki

University of Washington

David H. Monk

Pennsylvania State University

In recent years, attention has been focused on the quality of teachers and teaching as keys to improving student learning. Several studies point out that teacher quality is an important, perhaps the single most important, factor in raising student achievement. Consequently, policies at national, state, and local levels have increasingly called for strategies aimed at improving the quality of teachers and teaching. A specific example of the increased attention on teacher quality can be found in the recent federal legislation, No Child Left Behind, which requires states to ensure that every child has a highly qualified teacher.

This intensified focus on the quality of teachers and teaching is a predictable consequence of standards-based reform initiatives. For more than a decade, state after state has fashioned some version of an educational reform policy rooted in ambitious student learning standards that attempts to align higher expectations for all students with assessments, an accountability system, and other supporting policy features. Although much of the policy attention is focused on how states, districts, and schools perform in the aggregate, the weight of expectations created by standards-based reform efforts falls most heavily on the shoulders of classroom teachers. The standards-based movement asks a great deal of teachers and is dependent on teachers’ knowledge, skill, and will to achieve results inside classrooms. These high expectations presume, at the very least, that a well-equipped and sustainable teacher workforce is available. They also presume that well-qualified teachers are appropriately and equitably assigned to teach the vast array of our nation’s students.

Education finance policies and practices have direct bearing on the extent to which policies aimed at improving the quality of teachers and teaching are enacted. This yearbook provides research, information, and insights into the numerous connections between school finance policy and teacher and teaching quality. The goal of the yearbook is to stimulate thought, to inform debates, and to consider future research directions that will help us better understand the connections between school finance and our efforts to improve the quality of teachers and teaching.

The yearbook also provides a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives on school finance and its relation to the quality of teachers and teaching. Consequently, the works contained in this volume represent a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The contributions here draw on a variety of conceptual approaches and disciplinary constructs, and the forms of inquiry used by the contributors include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed method designs.

The yearbook is organized around four issues, each of which can be viewed as representing an important focal point to improve teacher and teaching quality and having important implications for school finance. The issues are (1) teacher recruitment, induction, and retention; (2) the ongoing professional development of teachers; (3) equity in the allocation of teaching resources; and (4) teacher compensation and workplace conditions.

The first section of the yearbook comprises issues related to teacher recruitment, retention, and induction. The first contribution in this section is the work of Roellke and Meyer. They conducted a longitudinal, qualitative examination of the early career experiences of “academically talented” teachers in New York City. Their work discusses the research, policy, and practice implications of what they learned from the experiences of novice teachers working under challenging circumstances. The second contribution, by Theobald and Laine, explores why teachers are leaving public school districts in four Midwestern states and provides suggestions about what districts and states can do to address the issue of teacher turnover. The final chapter in the first section features the work of Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, and Wyckoff. The authors offer a detailed analysis of teacher labor markets and connect their findings to key issues of educational equity.

The second section of the yearbook focuses on another important aspect of improving the quality of teachers and teaching: investment in the ongoing professional development of teachers. In this section, Miles offers a comparative analysis of spending on teacher professional development in five urban districts and explores the implications for research and practice that emerge from understanding the differences in spending levels and patterns. Rice offers another perspective on professional development. Using a national database, her work involved an examination of professional development for high school mathematics and science teachers and its impact on teaching practices and student achievement in these two subject areas. A third perspective on teacher professional development is found in the work of Plecki, Monk, and Killeen. They analyzed the issue of spending on teacher professional development by first examining state budgets to assess investment levels in four states (California, New York, North Carolina, and Washington) and then offer a conceptual approach for improving our accounting of the level and type of investment made in professional development at the local level.

The third topic in the yearbook focuses on the equity of the allocation of teaching resources. Imazeki’s work provides an examination of the effects of class size reduction policies in California on the distribution of teacher quality across the state and the equity concerns emerging from the transfer of qualified teachers away from the highest-need districts. The contribution by Darling-Hammond and Snyder provides a school-level analysis of the reallocation of teaching resources when comparing restructured with traditionally structured schools.

The final section of the yearbook examines issues of teacher compensation and working conditions. Odden describes and offers an early assessment of alternatives to the traditional compensation structures for teachers, with a specific focus on three examples of comprehensive new structures in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Iowa. This section concludes with the work of Koppich. She draws on examples in Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, and Montgomery County, Maryland as a context for discussing the interaction between labor-management agreements and decisions regarding the allocation of fiscal resources for purposes other than the improvement of salary levels.

In many ways, this volume provides an example of how school finance research is evolving, both in terms of the types of inquiry methods employed and the range of topics and issues emerging as worthy of the attention of school finance scholars. We are indebted to the contributors of this yearbook for their disciplined pursuit of important questions regarding the conditions that impact the teacher workforce, the policies and strategies that have been employed to address teacher quality, and the challenges that lie ahead to improve the quality of teachers and teaching, and—ultimately—the continuous improvement of student learning.

Section I

Teacher Recruitment, Induction, and Retention

2

Recruitment, Induction, and Retention of Academically Talented Urban School Teachers: Evidence from New York City

Christopher Roellke

Vassar College

Tom Meyer

State University of New York, New Paltz

The intent of this study is to better understand the challenges associated with recruiting, inducting, and retaining high-quality teachers in urban areas. Specifically, this chapter draws on longitudinal case study data and supplemental interview data (Appendix 1) to analyze the early career experiences of academically talented teachers in New York City public schools. The respondents in this study are graduates of most-selective undergraduate institutions and are currently within the first five years of a teaching career in the New York City Public Schools system. Each of these teachers was identified for excellence in urban teaching by teacher education faculty of the Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education (CETE)¹

The purposeful selection of teacher education graduates from most-selective colleges and universities is intended to shed light on the high attrition and mobility behaviors of this type of classroom teacher. Moreover, the selectivity and prestige of the institution attended by the teacher have a positive effect on student achievement.² A severe teacher quality gap, as measured by academic indicators such as college selectivity and college entrance examination scores, clearly exists between low-poverty and high-poverty (and often urban) schools.³ Therefore, understanding the early career experiences of this talented pool of New York City teachers may be helpful for policymakers and school officials as they seek to address issues of teacher supply and quality in our central cities.

The following research questions guide the inquiry:

1. How are academically talented novice teachers prepared, recruited, and inducted into New York City Public Schools?
2. What are the professional challenges and rewards of academically talented novice teachers in New York City?
3. From the perspective of academically talented novice teachers, what preparation practices, school policies, and working conditions are likely to improve their recruitment and retention in New York City and other urban schools?

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the research on teacher supply and demand in urban areas. Attention then turns to the specific teacher supply and teacher quality challenges faced in New York State and New York City in particular. The next section describes the data and methods used for the longitudinal, case study, and supplemental interview components of the study. The findings are organized thematically into five distinct but overlapping areas: (1) preservice teacher preparation, (2) recruitment and hiring practices, (3) induction, support, and evaluation, (4) compensation, and (5) short- and long-term career forecast. The chapter concludes with an effort to synthesize what we have learned from these beginning teachers and to assess the implications for research, policy, and practice.

Teacher Supply and Demand in Urban Areas

Demographic fluctuations, shifts in curricular emphases, and alterations in policies related to teacher education and licensing create changes in teacher supply and demand. Boe and Gilford (1992) identify seven trends that will increase teacher demand and decrease teacher supply in the next decade: (1) high teacher attrition, (2) increasing teacher retirement rates, (3) increasing student enrollments, (4) decreasing pupil-teacher ratios, (5) decreasing enrollments in teacher preparation programs, (6) decreasing interest among women in teaching, and (7) more stringent entry standards and teacher licensing for the profession.⁴ Although these trends apply to all schools, it is important to recognize that problems associated with low supply and high demand vary considerably across regions, schools, and subject areas.

Earlier analyses of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), for example, showed that an overall balance in the supply and demand of teachers may mask critical shortages in particular types of schools and/or within specific subject areas. Although evidence suggests that temporary substitutes were rarely used to fill vacancies in schools, central city public schools were three times as likely to engage in this practice than were schools in rural areas or small towns. Similarly, central city public schools with high minority enrollments were more than twice as likely to hire uncertified substitutes than their more racially homogeneous urban counterparts.⁵ This use of temporary, noncertified teaching staff has led some states to pass legislation to eliminate the practice. New York State, for example, has eliminated temporary teaching licenses beginning in the 2003–2004 school year.

This type of policy reaction will inevitably have differential impact among school systems, with the greatest challenges anticipated for low-income, urban schools. It is these schools in which critical shortages and alarming attrition rates of certified teachers are well documented. The supply and quality problem is most acute in schools serving primarily low-income, low achieving, nonwhite students.⁶

Although shortages periodically affect all types of schools and districts, urban school systems consistently suffer from high demand and low supply of qualified teachers. In a recent survey completed by the Council of Great City Schools, for example, all 40 citi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• 1 School Finance and Teacher Quality: Exploring the Connections
• Section I Teacher Recruitment, Induction, and Retention
• Section II Professional Development
• Section III Finance, Equity and Teacher Quality
• Section IV Teacher Compensation and Teacher Unions
• Index