Teachers, Teaching, and Reform

Perspectives on Efforts to Improve Educational Outcomes

Ralph P. Ferretti, James Hiebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351737449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Comprised of contributions from distinguished education scholars, Teachers, Teaching, and Reform takes a critical look at evidence about systemic efforts to identify excellent teachers and promote excellent teaching practices. Organized to include diverse and often contrasting perspectives on the topic, this book provides insight into some of the most vexing historical issues affecting the policies that shape current reform initiatives focused on teachers, teaching, and educational outcomes. Educational scholars, policy makers, instructors, and graduate students will come away with a keen understanding of different perspectives about the assessment of teachers, teaching, and teacher education programs, as well as strategies for improving educational outcomes for students.

1

Improving Educational Outcomes

Contrasting Perspectives

Ralph P. Ferretti and James Hiebert

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

This book is about the vexing issues that surround current efforts to improve student outcomes by improving teachers, teaching, and teacher education. Reformers are hard at work, tackling these issues from different perspectives and in numbers that require a scoreboard to track. Efforts to evaluate and improve the quality of teachers, measure the effectiveness of teaching practices, and assess the impacts of teacher preparation programs are all part of the mix. Because educational outcomes for students do need improvement, and because many reforms are high stakes for teachers and teacher preparation programs, what we choose to reform matters to U.S. students, teachers, and teacher educators. It is important, therefore, for the education profession to choose well. The purpose of this book is to advance the profession’s discussion about which reform paths show most promise, and what criteria educators should use to guide choices.

To understand the different reform perspectives, and to make wise choices for the future, it is important to understand the historical context. We begin this introduction at the beginning of U.S. public education. We tell the story that sets the stage for the chapters in this volume, soliciting help by citing the chapters’ authors along the way. Emerging from the story is a distinction in the basic assumptions of education reform, assumptions rooted in the industrial and service worlds and incorporated into educational reform efforts since their origins. Making explicit these assumptions provides a useful perspective from which to consider current reforms aimed at the improvement of educational outcomes.

From the transformation of the village school and the search for “the one best system” (Tyack, 1974), efforts to reform public education and improve classroom instruction have emphasized the quality of the personnel (Kennedy, 2010). Horace Mann’s pioneering advocacy for the common school model, the earliest comprehensive effort to universalize and standardize U.S. education, called for teachers who were systematically trained and professionally certified. As a result, the state normal schools were created to promote a common standard for teacher preparation (Labaree, 2008).

Movements to reform U.S. public education have always reflected prevailing societal standards and methods for achieving them (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). In his Twelfth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann argued that common schools should promote virtues that were foundational to the nation’s republican values. In the modern era, A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) echoed concerns about threats to our republican values and deep apprehension about the nation’s economic prospects resulting from the failures of public education. The primary response of policy makers was to focus on education personnel, and to establish evaluation systems that would hold teachers accountable for increased student learning (Labaree, 2008; Ravitch, 2016). The perceived failures of public education, and the proposed solutions focusing on teacher accountability, have been foundational to reform-inspired federal legislation since the issuance of A Nation at Risk, including The Goals 2000: Educate America Act (1994), No Child Left Behind (2002), and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (2015).

Current and past efforts to evaluate teachers and teacher education programs reflect historical patterns of personnel evaluation that have dominated U.S. organizations (Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016). At the end of the nineteenth century, mechanization transformed the workplace, resulting in a shift from simple means of organizational control (the boss used idiosyncratic means to manage workers) to rule-based, structural controls that are associated with bureaucratic organizations. Educational bureaucrats appropriated scientific management practices (Taylor, 1911) that were designed to maximize output and increase worker efficiency. They used rating schemes from industry designed to provide objective and quantifiable information about teachers’ traits that presumably improved outcomes by either increasing efficiency or selecting those who were efficient. Such accountability practices in education have, over time, been shaped by the different purposes for performing the evaluation (Noell & Gansle, this volume), the audiences for whom the evaluation is performed, and the evidence those audiences privilege at any point in time (Floden, this volume).

The end of the twentieth century was associated with increasing interest in evidence-based accountability to ensure that government services addressed social concerns and used its resources efficiently (Noell & Gansle, this volume). Evaluation models were developed to produce quantitative scores intended to objectively measure the performance of teachers (Gitomer, this volume; Stigler, Hiebert, & Givvin, this volume) and teacher education programs (Floden, this volume; Noell & Gansle, this volume). These models have been used to make causal attributions about variation in students’ academic achievement to teachers and teacher education programs using value-added models (VAMs) (McCaffrey, Lockwood, Koretz, & Hamilton, 2004). VAMs use sophisticated statistical methods in an effort to obtain an unbiased estimate of a teacher or a teacher education program’s contribution to student learning by identifying and controlling the effects of other factors known to contribute to academic achievement (Floden, this volume; Gitomer, this volume; Noell & Gansle, this volume; Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016; Stigler et al., this volume).

Evaluation models based on VAMs represent the most recent in a long line of techniques intended to improve education outcomes by improving personnel. Two assumptions underlie their use. One is that identifying and retaining the most effective personnel while removing the least effective will improve the system’s outcomes (Hanushek, 2009; Klein, 2010). A second is that providing incentives to personnel, such as merit pay to high performers, will motivate personnel, especially classroom teachers, to try harder to improve student learning (Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016).

Early in the twentieth century, an alternative view of improving a system’s outcomes was emerging. Also rooted in U.S. industry, this model focused on managing the system in which people worked rather than on improving the quality of the people within the system (Shewhart, 1931). The primary assumption was that a system was designed to produce the outcomes it produced. If the outcomes were flawed, then the system was designed to produce flawed outcomes. Improvement came through changing the system. Systems should be designed to produce the desired outcomes despite the natural variations in the personnel who work in them.

Developed and popularized by W. Edwards Deming (1982), the emphasis on systems rather than individuals became the basis for a different approach to improving the quality of products. Accountability applied to managers of the system, not to individuals whose performance was seen to be constrained by the system within which they worked. For Deming (1982), the evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review of individuals was counter-productive because it led to poor morale, increased the variability among people, and removed the pride of contributing to the performance of the group. Individual accountability “is unfair,” said Deming (1982), “as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be caused totally by the system that they work in” (p. 102).

Although Deming’s (1982) focus on improving systems, rather than finding or creating better individuals, has been less common in the United States than outside the United States (Rother, 2009), the model has more recently drawn the attention of a range of U.S. manufacturing, technology, and service companies (Langley, Moen, Nolan, Nolan, Norman, & Provost, 2009). The model also has extended its reach to systems involving the welfare of people, including medicine (Kenney, 2008) and education (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015; Stigler et al., this volume). In education, its effect is seen most clearly in processes such as lesson study, in which methods for teaching are continuously improved through iterative cycles of experimenting with small changes to instruction, gathering data on students’ learning, feeding the information back into the system and creating further revisions, and recording the results as the basis for the next cycle (Hiebert, Wieman & Berk, this volume; Lewis, 2002; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999).

History suggests that both models we have described for improving educational outcomes – the first model based on improving people and holding individual workers accountable, and the second based on improving systems and holding management accountable – had their roots in improving industrial production and, over time, were appropriated for improving educational outcomes. Their applications to educational settings have mirrored their distinctive assumptions in at least two ways. Applying the first model yields a focus on teachers and improving their quality, through selecting better applicants, improving their training, and weeding out those who perform poorly. Applying the second model yields a focus on teaching and improving the methods of instruction, often through the collaboration of teachers and administrators working to improve the developmental opportunities for students. A second significant difference between the two models lies in the solutions to poor performance they promote. The first model assumes a deficit in talent or motivation. Accountability will cull out people with less talent, and incentives will motivate individuals to work harder and perform better. The second model assumes a learning problem. “Everyone doing his best is not the answer. It is first necessary that people know what to do” (Deming, 1982, p. x).

Neither model has led directly to their intended effect of improving teachers, teaching, and teacher education. Both have faced significant challenges. The first model, with its long-running emphasis on selecting, recruiting, training, and retaining more talented people, has met with limited success. It has proved almost impossible to identify characteristics of teachers that predict effectiveness in the classroom (Barr & Jones, 1958; Barr et al., 1953; Floden; this volume; Goe, 2007). Further, even with increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques, designing reliable and valid measures of teacher quality that can be used for accountability has been elusive (Gitomer, this volume; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2010; Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016). The consequence is that the core of teaching – the way in which teachers interact with students around content – has not changed much in the past 100 years (Cuban, 1993; Hoetker & Ahlbrand, 1969). Some educators believe it is likely that, at this point, the impact of the first model has reached ceiling effects (Branson & Grow, 1987).

However, efforts to systematically improve teaching skills have been hampered by their own historical and institutional challenges (Ball & Forzani, 2011; Cohen, 2010b; Kennedy, this volume). The nation’s system of weak government and decentralized control has resulted in little consensus about educational goals and outcomes, a curriculum that could help students achieve these outcomes, consistently effective teaching methods, and measures by which progress toward the most valued outcomes can be evaluated (Cohen, 2010a, 2010b). Even the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), promulgated to create consensus about learning outcomes, has met with resistance (Ravitch, 2016). The absence of a consensus militates against a common understanding of what skills constitute excellent teaching (Ball & Forzani, 2011; Pianta, this volume), and how to measure (Gitomer, Bell, Qi, McCaffrey, Hamre, & Pianta, 2014; Pianta, 2011) and improve them (Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002; Morris & Hiebert, 2011; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). Without consensus about goals, curricula, and teaching skills, efforts to evaluate teacher education programs are also stymied (Feurer, Floden, Chudowsky, & Ahh, 2013; Floden, this volume; Noell & Gansle, this volume).

Despite the challenges and the absence of notable successes, both models for improving educational outcomes have had strong adherents. Those favoring reforms based on the accountability of individuals have long argued for educational policies based on evidence-based practices that have been validated through scientific research involving “…rigorous, systematic and objective procedures…” and “…using experimental or quasi-experimental designs…” (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, P.L. 107–110). According to Slavin (2002), No Child Left Behind mentions scientifically based research 110 times. The seriousness of the federal government’s commitment to disseminating and promoting the adoption of evidence-based practices is evidenced by its financial support for organizations that synthesize empirical research about the efficacy of educational programs (Slavin, 2008), such as the What Works Clearinghouse and the Best Evidence Encyclopedia.

The value of rigorously testing instructional practices under tightly controlled conditions that limit internal validity threats is uncontestable. However, the history of educational reform is replete with examples of the abandonment or hybridization of well-intentioned policies that promote potentially efficacious strategies (Cuban, 1993). Organizations certainly need objective information to ensure the faithful implementation of its practices, but they also need agreement about their performance goals and control over the technical means for achieving those goals (Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016). Unfortunately, the organizational coherence presumed by efforts to bridge the research-to-practice gap is not usually found in schools (Gitomer, this volume; Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016). Relatedly, teaching takes place in larger systems, and it is influenced by the cultural context in which it occurs (Stigler et al., this volume). The imposition of practices that violate existing norms and customs often meets with resistance. For these reasons, organizations sometimes opt for systems that deemphasize measures that evaluate the performer, and emphasize processes that promote knowledge development (Kennedy, this volume) and professional improvement (Pianta, this volume; Rowan & Raudenbush, 2016).

The growing dissatisfaction with systems that target the teacher and ignore teaching has prompted attention to the alternative model that provides systemic support for effective teaching. In contrast to accountability-based reform models that embrace educational Taylorism (Gray, 1993), advocates for continuous improvement processes (Bryk, 2014; Bryk et al., 2015; Stigler et al., this volume; Hiebert et al., this volume; Holt, 1993) arg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1. Improving Educational Outcomes: Contrasting Perspectives
• 2. Promises and Pitfalls for Teacher Evaluation
• 3. Evaluating Teachers and Teacher Preparation Programs
• 4. Does VAM + MET = Improved Teaching?
• 5. Teacher-Student Interactions: Measurement, Impacts, Improvement, and Policy
• 6. Using Data to Inform Decisions Regarding Teacher Preparation
• 7. Designing Systems for Continuously Improving Instruction: The Case of Teacher Preparation Mathematics Courses
• 8. How to Reform Reform
• Conclusion: Improving Educational Outcomes: Reflections and Prospections
• Index