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EFFECTIVE TEACHERS
Policy Action: Ensure effective teachers reach all students
"If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children’s teachers and the schools where they teach.”
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, MARCH 10, 2009
Today, traditions, personnel policies and personal preferences combine to have an unintended, yet deleterious, effect on students: The most academically disadvantaged students tend to get the least experienced and least qualified teachers. This has to change. We must place effective teachers in every classroom. It’s the ethical thing to do for kids, and it’s also the practical thing to do as we dramatically increase expectations for our students.
Make it easier for struggling schools to hire and retain effective teachers. The state should change some of the ground rules that currently work against the interests of struggling schools and schools with high numbers of at-risk students. The stakes are simply too high to allow other factors to dictate who teaches our children. As a starting point, Illinois should pass legislation ensuring that schools on the Academic Watch list be exempt from seniority rules that might otherwise govern decisions involving reductions in
staff, transfers or hiring.
Support local efforts to attract effective teachers to high-need areas. One of the smartest investments the state can make is to put highly effective teachers with the students who need them most. Toward this end, the state should support local efforts to address the challenge of recruiting talented teachers to high-need areas. Because recruitment challenges run the gamut, from finding talented math teachers in rural areas to recruiting bilingual teachers in high-poverty neighborhood schools, the state should avoid implementing a statewide program, and instead make supplemental funding available for districts with thoughtful plans to address demonstrated needs. Priority should go to districts willing to redeploy their own dollars first.
Local efforts on this issue should be undertaken with an understanding that the U.S. Department of Education has directed that states actively work to ensure quality teachers in all classrooms, and will be monitoring Illinois to determine what progress it makes in attracting effective teachers to high-need schools. To reinforce this work, the state should add a metric to its state report card that measures progress in this arena, using the Illinois Education Research Council’s measure unless and until better measures become available.
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Getting Serious about Teacher Evaluation
The New Teacher Project recently released a report on Illinois’ teacher hiring policies called The Widget Effect. The title refers to the untrue idea that all teachers are essentially interchangeable. Reversing the Widget Effect depends on the ability of school systems to produce accurate and credible information on instructional performance that can be connected to personnel decisions. The report therefore recommends that states:
- Create a performance evaluation system that fairly, accurately and credibly differentiates teachers based on their effectiveness in promoting student achievement.
- Train administrators and other evaluators in the teacher performance evaluation system and hold them accountable for using it fairly and effectively.
- Integrate the performance evaluation system with critical human capital policies and functions such as teacher assignment, professional development, compensation, retention and dismissal.
- Adopt dismissal policies that provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit the district and a system of due process that is fair but efficient.
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