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Article Excerpt
Dear 44th President of the United States,
When you enter office in November 2008, David will have just started third grade. This is a vital year for him; by the end of the year, he must be reading well. If he is not, he will have only a 1 in 10 chance of going to college (Teach for America, 2007). As a minority student attending school in a low-income community, David is already likely to be three grade levels behind his peers in more affluent neighborhoods. His school building has been recently renovated, and his classroom is full of brand-new computers and textbooks. Although these things make David excited to go to school, none of them comes close to determining whether David will read. Research tells us that his success in fact rests in large part on the quality of his teacher (Hanushek & Rivken, 2007; Sanders & Rivers, 1996). A highly effective teacher--compared to a less effective teacher--could move David up 10 percentile points by the end of the year (Gordon, Kane, & Staiger, 2006), a first step toward his long-term success in school.
It is up to you to alter this course for students like David. To do so, you must ensure that these students are taught by effective teachers. Although addressing human capital in school systems is complex and controversial, the potential it holds for radically improving student gains is reason enough to pursue an aggressive national agenda that recruits, trains, and supports more effective teachers. Without taking on human capital in this labor intensive industry, all other reforms will fall short.
Addressing teacher effectiveness is a national responsibility that other nations have already taken seriously. A recent study commissioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) identified that, of all of the strategies used by the top school systems across the 30 OECD countries, "getting the right people to become teachers" and "developing them into effective instructors" were two of the three practices critical to developing successful school systems (Barber & Mourshed, 2007).
In the American public education system today, managing the people who provide for our children is one of the greatest challenges facing schools, districts, states, and the federal government. Our nation's public education system includes more than 6.5 million employees spread across 15,000 districts and 116,665 schools (Strizek et al, 2006). At the fulcrum of our school improvement efforts are the 3.5 million teachers who most directly drive student outcomes on a daily basis. Although roughly three education dollars in four are put toward human capital, spending has been chronically misaligned from more essential school improvement goals. From policy to the bully pulpit, you can help fix this.
THE HUMAN CAPITAL PROBLEM
Student achievement in the United States remains disappointing. Troubling and persistent gaps in achievement exist between Black and Latino students and their White and Asian counterparts and between low-income students and their more affluent peers. By age 17, the average Black student is performing at the 20th percentile of the White distribution (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2007), which is accompanied by significant discrepancies between these groups' grades, course selections, dropout rates, and college-completion rates. This is not surprising when one looks at the broad contours of education policy. Overall, those students that need the most from their schools--our poor and minority students--are most likely to get the least. Nowhere is this more true than in how American public education approaches human capital. Low-income and minority students are more likely than other students to be taught by teachers without demonstrated expertise in the subjects they teach and more likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers (Haycock & Peske, 2006; Jerald, 2002; Provasnik & Dorfman, 2005).
Yet embedded in this challenge is a national opportunity. Addressing human capital, and in particular improving teacher quality, is a high-impact reform. A 2004 RAND study reviewed value-add models confirming that teachers' effects on student achievement persist across years (McCaffrey, Lockwood, Koretz, & Hamilton, 2004). The performance gap between two average (50th percentile) students assigned three effective teachers in a row and those assigned three ineffective teachers in a row was 49 percentile points (Sanders & Rivers, 1996). In their recent study measuring teacher effectiveness in Los Angeles Public Schools, Gordon et al. (2006) put these statistics in sharp perspective: "If the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap" (p. 8).
Despite the potential leverage, the reality of teacher quality today is sobering. Up front, the United States fails to set a high bar to entering teaching. Higher performing public education systems in nations such as Singapore, Finland, and Hong Kong generally recruit only the top third of college graduates to teach. Although the situation is beginning to improve in the United States, those pursuing education degrees here have among the lowest SAT scores of all college majors (Educational Testing Service, 2007). Recruiting efforts generally ignore the attributes proven to correlate to positive student outcomes, such as verbal ability (Walsh, 2001) and literacy (Wayne & Youngs, 2003; Whitehurst, 2002). Few colleges, states, or districts recruit, admit, or hire candidates on the basis of these core competencies (Walsh, 2001).
Once candidates enter preparation programs, there are few mechanisms in place to weed out ineffective candidates (Leal, 2004), and state certification tests provide meager quality assurance (Hanushek & Rivken, 2004). Candidates are tested at such low standards that if all states set their passing scores on a test of basic skills to the level that Virginia used until recently (the state with the highest score required to pass the commonly used Praxis test of basic skills), national pass rates would drop from 77% to only 47% (Gitomer, Latham, & Ziomek, 1999).
Meanwhile, graduates of teacher preparation programs attest to...
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