By Peter Hutchinson and Louise Sundin
1999
By the time you finished high school you had been inspired, instructed, nurtured, ignored, challenged, guided, bored, and coerced by 80 to 100 different teachers. You can instantly remember the teachers who had the most impact on you. The math teacher who unlocked the secrets of algebra. The English teacher who inspired you to love your own language and books of your own choice. The fourth grade teacher who gave you special encouragement just when you needed it. Or the coach that pushed you beyond your own expectations. We can all name great teachers we had. They were the exception.
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According to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, "What teachers know and can do is one of the most important influences on what students learn." The commission found that the quality of teaching explained more of the differences in student achievement than any other school-related factor and nearly as much as home and family. If we want better student achievement, we must have better teaching. And if we want great teaching - or even good teaching - we need to redesign the systems that recruit, develop, support, reward, and retain it.
The strategies for improving teacher quality outlined in this article stem from our experience in the Minneapolis school system. The Public Strategies Group (which Peter Hutchinson co-founded) was the first company in the nation with responsibility for leading a large urban public school district. Our contract was performance-based and our pay was tied to achieving specific goals, including improved student achievement. PSG's most important partner was the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (of which Louise Sundin is president). Together, we understood the critical role of good teaching in student success and committed ourselves to improving results in the classroom. We did so by developing a model of an effective teaching professional and using it as a basis for improving the practice of teaching throughout our schools.
Recruitment - Grow Your Own
Schools are facing a demographic double whammy. Enrollments are rising just as teacher retirements are beginning to accelerate. More troublesome is the fact that up to one-third of teachers leave teaching within their first few years. As a result, 200,000 teachers will need to be hired each year through 2007 (1.8 million in all) to ensure that we have the 3.34 million we will need at that time.
Where will we find the best possible teaching recruits? The best candidates are already in our classrooms. They are our students for 13 years. No other profession has such immediate access to potential recruits and manages to ignore and waste it. We call our strategy, based on this built-in advantage, the "grow your own." It has three parts. First, open teaching magnet high schools to encourage promising students to pursue teaching as a career. Give them a chance early on to experience the rewards of teaching. If a full magnet high school is not possible, then create student internships or tutoring opportunities designed to encourage careers in teaching.
Second, offer college scholarships, internships, and even part time jobs to support candidates in college who commit to teach. This should include classroom aides and paraprofessionals who have already made a commitment to children and the classroom, but have not yet completed their degree. The U.S. government could help by forgiving all or a portion of federally subsidized loans for those who teach.
Third, grow your own by providing alternative pathways into teaching. Our communities are filled with people for whom teaching would be a better use of their college degrees, work experiences, and talents than their current career or the prospect of early retirement. They want to give back to their communities. We can equip these people to succeed in today's classrooms without requiring them to go back to college and start over. Post-secondary institutions can partner with K-12 schools to design a curriculum for these older, more experienced students that is tied to the real world of teaching. K-12 schools can accelerate and intensify teacher preparation with hands-on classroom experiences. The prospect of employment and financial support during the transition will make this "grow your own by transplanting" strategy more effective.
Development - Making Good Teaching Count
In most places, teachers are isolated from colleagues and get little professional feedback. They are time-starved in a world of rising expectations, in classrooms that are more diverse and demanding, and in a society with limitless access to information. The traditional role of the teacher as the "sage on the stage" is outdated. Our best recruiting efforts will fail to produce good teaching unless K-12 schools embrace what we know works - continual quality improvement based on demonstrated competence. Again, there are three parts to making this happen.
First, teacher licensure should be competency-based. Under this system, teachers progress from a student or practice teaching license, through intern or resident status, to a professional license, then to lead teacher or mentor status, and ultimately to national certification (by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.) At each step, teachers are expected to demonstrate their competencies with a portfolio of their work, a series of in-class observations, action research, teaching demonstrations, and testing. Teachers are required to renew their license every five to seven years.
Second, schools need to support every teacher with a continual improvement coaching team. Every teacher, no matter how long or how successfully they have been teaching, can improve. Few actors work without directors honing their skills on stage. No great athlete competes without a coach. Yet, for most of our history we have provided teachers either with no coaching or with the illusion that the principal would handle it. While principals need to be part of the coaching team, they are so overwhelmed themselves that we cannot count on them exclusively. Turn, instead, to peers - to the teachers themselves.
Every teacher's professional development plan, developed with a coaching team (two to three peers plus the principal), can be based on information collected from classroom observations and test scores as well as parent and student feedback. The plan lays out areas for improvement, action steps, measures of success based on standards of effective instruction, and a schedule for periodic review. The coaching team recognizes and rewards teacher success, provides support and assistance to improve performance, directs teacher action or even intervenes if improvement is not forthcoming, and recommends outplacement or a new career if poor performance and inaction to correct it persist. Such a process both provides support to every teacher and helps ensure that those who should not be teaching don't continue.
Third, make professional development performance-based. Currently, schools pay for professional development through the budget directly and, more importantly, through the teacher's contract. Professional development budgets are generally miniscule (under 2 percent) and are often doled out to individual schools or teachers to use as they see fit. The cost of professional development through the teacher's contract dwarfs the line item budget by a factor of five to one. The typical contract has a series of pay ranges, often called "lanes," that compensate teachers for the degree they hold or the number of credits they have obtained toward a degree. In essence, the contract encourages teachers to continually obtain credits, rather than to achieve results in the classroom.
We can start to make professional development performance-based by making the income of those who train teachers (including internal district staff) contingent on the successful application of techniques and knowledge in the classroom with real students. This could be ascertained through some combination of observation, surveys, or tests. The "lanes" in the contract should also be competency-based. In these ways, we can make good teaching count and better teaching count more.
Keeping the Best - Make it Rewarding
After we have grown our own, and committed ourselves to continually improving, we need to ensure that we keep the best. We frequently lose good teachers who quit early or go into administration.
One way to retain good teachers is to create a professional ladder for teaching and a role for teachers in leading their profession. Recognize and reward master teachers. Make them teacher leaders with responsibility for improving the quality of teaching throughout the organization. These teacher mentors can be among our most valuable resources.
We also need to reward good teaching. The average salary for a teacher is $39,000. Obviously, it isn't only money that matters
to teachers. Opportunities for professional development, for contributing more in the classroom and for teacher leadership are all important. But money does matter. In addition to long-term rewards tied to competence, teachers should be rewarded for their "value added" in the classroom. While every teacher is expected to add a year's worth of learning to the growth of every child they have for a year, teachers who do better than that should be recognized and rewarded. Likewise, whole schools can be rewarded when they provide their students with more than a year's worth of learning in one school year.
Need evidence?
In Minneapolis, we pursued all of the strategies identified here and more. We began growing our own teachers through a magnet school and several alternative pathways. We implemented team coaching for teachers through a Professional Development Process (PDP). We used the PDP to improve teaching in most cases and to move people out of teaching in those few but significant cases when improvement no longer seemed possible. We created a teacher's contract that institutionalized the PDP and recognized National Board Certification as a basis for compensation. We also calculated the "value added" in our schools and rewarded those schools (though not individual teachers) that added the most.
The results have been dramatic. In 1998 our students made the largest gains this decade on nationally standardized tests. We've seen a 50 percent increase over the last four years in the percentage of students passing the state's graduation test in reading. All is not perfect. Scores and achievement must be higher still, much higher; especially for African-American and Latino children, children in poverty and children without a permanent home. Nevertheless, there is little doubt in the Minneapolis Public School system that improving student achievement through improved teaching is the key to success.
Peter Hutchinson is president of the Public Strategies Group, Inc. From 1993-1997 PSG served as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. Louise Sundin is president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, a founding member of the Teacher Union Reform Network, and president of Dial-a-Teacher, Inc., Homework Hotline, and Homework On-Line.
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