Teacher Quality & Qualifications

An adequate analysis of a state's or district's need for science and mathematics teachers requires attention, not only to the extent to which the available supply of teachers meets the state's or district's demands, but also to the quality of the teachers who constitute the supply. The question that a state's educators and policymakers should ask about teacher need is not simply whether or not there is a teacher available to teach every science and mathematics class that districts wish to offer. It is whether or not the teachers who will staff those classrooms have sufficient skill and knowledge to enable their students to achieve the level of science and mathematics competency that the state intends for them to have. At the most basic level, states may expect every student to have at least some sort of minimum proficiency in mathematics and the sciences, which may be defined by state K-12 content standards and by high school graduation requirements. Beyond that, however, as states look towards the need for increased technical expertise in the workforce and seek to be competitive with other states economically, they must raise their expectations for their students' knowledge of science and mathematics and thus for the knowledge of the teachers who instruct them. The ultimate policy goal would be to ensure the high quality of all science and mathematics teachers in a state. It is the specific purpose of this unit, Teacher Quality and Teacher Licensure, to provide guidance to policymakers, educators, and other state and district stakeholders in their efforts to assess the general quality of their pool of science and mathematics teachers as part of a statewide assessment of teacher need.

Indicators of Teacher Quality

There is a

Note

9

This is reflected in the discussion of the research in Questions 1 and 2 in Allen, M. (2005). Eight Questions on Teacher Preparation: What Does the Research Say? Denver, CO: Education Commission of the States. Also see M. Cochran-Smith & K.M. Zeichner (Eds.). Studying Teacher Education. Washington, DC & Mahwah, NJ: American Educational Research Association and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates..

general consensus⁹ that what makes for a high quality teacher is the possession of several core competencies, such as the following, although experts do not agree on a complete list that is both necessary and sufficient:

• Solid knowledge of their content field
• The ability to teach that content effectively to students who may have different abilities and different learning needs (subject-specific pedagogy, or “pedagogical content knowledge”)
• The ability to motivate students to learn
• Good classroom management skills.

For the concern here to introduce a teacher quality dimension into a statewide overview of teacher supply and demand, there are two challenges involved in identifying the strength of these core competencies among a state's science and mathematics teachers:

1. How to measure these competencies in a way that is valid and reliable
2. How to signal those measures readily and clearly in the context of a broad assessment of teacher supply and demand.

Those individuals who have the responsibility to hire and evaluate teachers in individual schools and districts can look, not only at detailed academic transcripts and other records to determine the extent of teachers' subject knowledge and academic ability, but also at assessments of classroom performance to gauge their teaching prowess. School principals can interview individual teacher candidates and contact references to determine whether or not candidates seem to fit into the culture of a particular school and how effective they are likely to be with the school's particular population of students. To be sure, it is theoretically possible to store such specific and detailed information about individual teachers in a comprehensive teacher data system of the kind that

Note

10

See, for example, the data warehouses maintained by Florida and Virginia.

several states¹⁰ already have in place.

To be useful in a broad, statewide analysis, however, the information would have to have inter-rater reliability and be standardized and coded so as to serve as an easily interpreted indicator of teachers' more nuanced qualifications. And these requirements seem simply beyond the ability of most states to meet even if they theoretically have the data capacity. Not only that, but privacy considerations generally limit broad access to information about individual teachers, and these restrictions also would have to be overcome.

Measuring these competencies is also difficult, and one response to this difficulty that also addresses the need to identify ready signals of teacher quality is to propose several proxy indicators that are taken to be correlated with effective teaching and, by implication, with the core competencies listed above. Among the most commonly suggested proxy indicators are teaching experience, academic ability, and licensure or certification.

A number of

Note

11

Evidence of a limited correlation between experience and teacher quality can be found in the following studies: Hanushek, E.A., Kain, J.F., O’Brien, D.M., & Rivkin, S. G. (2005, February). The Market for Teacher Quality. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research; and Clotfelter, C.T., Ladd, H. F., and Vigdor, J.L. (2007). How and Why Do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement? Washington, DC: Urban Institute. Evidence of a correlation between teacher quality and academic ability can be found in Presley, J. B., White, B. R., & Gong, Y. (2005). Examining the Distribution and Impact of Teacher Quality in Illinois. Carbondale, IL: Illinois Education Research Center; and Boyd, D., Lankford, R. H., Loeb, S., Rockoff, J., & Wyckoff, J. (2007). The Narrowing Gap in New York City Teacher Qualifications and Its Implications for Student Achievement in High-poverty Schools. Albany, NY: Teacher Policy Research.

research studies¹¹ indicate that inexperienced teachers tend to be less effective than more experienced teachers, but also that teachers' effectiveness generally peaks once they have been teaching for 5-6 years. Clearly, experience is an imperfect proxy; there will always be novice teachers who are exceptionally effective and veteran teachers who are mediocre. To the extent that experience is a valid indicator of teacher quality, however, it implies that a high overall percentage of inexperienced science and mathematics teachers in a state's workforce may signal a compromise in quality. Similarly, if the percentage of inexperienced science and mathematics teachers varies significantly between schools and districts in a state, that can be taken as an indication that the quality of teachers between districts may be unequal. While such inequality is not necessarily the result of a shortage problem statewide, it is an indication that some schools and districts may have difficulty hiring and keeping science and mathematics teachers and that at least a localized shortage may be a factor.

There is

Note

12

See the discussion of the research on this issue in Zumwalt, K., & Craig, E. (2005). Teacher’s Characteristics: Research on the Indicators of Quality. In M. Cochran-Smith & K.M. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying Teacher Education (pp. 163-185). Washington, DC & Mahwah, NJ: American Educational Research Association and Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

some research¹² indicating that teachers with relatively poor academic ability are less effective than teachers with stronger academic skills, but the research is mixed and it is difficult to find truly valid indicators of academic ability. One indicator that several

Note

13

Presley, J. B., White, B. R., & Gong, Y. (2005). Examining the Distribution and Impact of Teacher Quality in Illinois. Carbondale, IL: Illinois Education Research Center; Boyd, D., Lankford, R. H., Loeb, S., Rockoff, J., & Wyckoff, J. (2007). The Narrowing Gap in New York City Teacher Qualifications and its Implications for Student Achievement in High-poverty Schools. Albany, NY: Teacher Policy Research.

recent studies¹³ have found to be inversely correlated with positive K-12 student outcomes is the frequency of teachers' failure on state licensure examinations before finally passing. Thus, states that have this

Note

14

A few states have collected such licensure examination information as part of their Teacher Equity reports required for compliance with Title II Part A of No Child Left Behind. The state of Georgia, for example, presents it in summary form in its report (pp. 52-55), though not broken down by teaching discipline or individual district or school.

information¹⁴ on teachers' records and can aggregate it by school or district for science and mathematics teachers may be able to add another dimension to the comparison of teacher quality between schools and districts throughout the state. Schools that have a relatively large percentage of teachers with licensure examination failures may suffer from an inability to hire and retain better qualified teachers, a potential symptom of at least a local shortage.

Although teaching experience and academic ability (if it can be successfully measured and signaled) may provide some indication of the quality of a state's teacher workforce and of differences in teacher quality between districts, neither of these proxies provides any real indication of the specific teaching skills and qualifications that state and district officials need to identify in order to assess the adequacy of the teacher workforce – especially teachers' depth of science and mathematics subject knowledge and subject-specific pedagogy.

Licensure as an Indicator

Teacher licensure and certification, on the other hand, are intended precisely to serve as an indication that a licensed or certified teacher has met at least the minimal requirements for content knowledge and teaching readiness that a state deems necessary. The “endorsements” or “credentials” that states confer upon teachers who have met the requirements are authorizations to teach specific subjects, and, indeed, teachers without the appropriate endorsement are assumed to lack the content background necessary to teach the subjects the endorsement allows. Thus, licensure and certification would seem to offer precisely the kind of ready signal of teachers' core teaching competencies that is appropriate to a statewide assessment of teacher supply and demand.

The reality of licensure is somewhat messier than the promise, however. The ability of licensure truly to identify those teachers who have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach the subjects for which they have the appropriate credentials is compromised by the

Note

15

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the percentage of teachers teaching without a license or teaching courses for which they lack an appropriate credential has grown significantly smaller. That does not mean, however, that the quality of teachers has necessarily improved, as many states rushed to confer appropriate credentials on teachers who had lacked them by temporarily relaxing standards. This was facilitated, in particular, though the “High Objective Uniform State Standard of Evaluation” (HOUSSE) provisions that each state was instructed to develop under the No Child Left Behind Act in order to ensure that teachers who lacked the technical qualifications to meet the new NCLB requirements to be considered “highly qualified” (a subject major or passage of a content examination in each of the subjects they were teaching) nevertheless could demonstrate their command of the subjects. Several studies, including one study by the Education Trust and another study by the Education Commission of the States, provide strong evidence that some of the HOUSSE criteria were of questionable value in ensuring a solid grasp of the subject by teachers who met them.

relaxation¹⁵ of licensure standards in some states and by complexities – such as validity issues with

Note

16

See Mitchell, K.J., Robinson, D.Z., Plake, B.S., & Knowles, K.T. (Eds.). (2001). Testing Teacher Candidates: The Role of Licensure Tests in Improving Teaching Quality. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

licensure examinations¹⁶ – that plague the licensure process. These and other problems have occasioned strong and often justified

Note

17

See, for example, Gordon, R., Kane, T.J., & Staiger, D.O. (2006, April). Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution; and Goldhaber, D. (2007, April). Everyone’s Doing It, but What Does Teacher Testing Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness? Working Paper. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

criticisms¹⁷ of the dominant current licensure practices.

Nevertheless, in spite of these limitations and criticisms we believe it should be a cause for concern if a significant number of science and mathematics teachers in a state or in individual districts are teaching classes for which they lack proper credentials – full licensure and an endorsement in all subjects they teach – or if there is a significant disparity in the number of questionably credentialed teachers between one school district and another. And we believe teacher licensure offers sufficient promise of providing the quality dimension for a state assessment of teacher supply and demand to justify the detailed discussion of licensure and its challenges that constitutes the remainder of this unit.