Senate Hearing on Teacher Quality

Last Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) held a No Child Left Behind (NCLB) hearing entitled Strategies for Attracting, Supporting, and Retaining High Quality Educators. “America’s most at-risk students are too often taught by the least prepared, the least experienced and the least qualified teachers,” observed Chairman Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA). “Students in high poverty and high-minority schools are twice as likely to be taught by new, inexperienced teachers. Such teachers are less likely to receive the pay and support they need and they often leave their school or leave teaching all together, further destabilizing already struggling schools.”



So, what strategies address the problems successfully? As the nine-person panel of experts demonstrated, there are many, but getting any to scale is the challenge. The panel included:

1. Pam Burtnett, President, Lake County Education Association, Florida;

2. Dr. Linda Darling Hammond, Professor of Education, Stanford University, Stanford California;

3.Amy Wilkins, Vice President, The Education Trust, Washington, DC;

4. Barbara Maguire, Teacher and Math Instructional Facilitator, Park Elementary School, Casper, Wyoming;

5. Dr. William Sanders, Senior Manager, Value-added Research and Assessment, SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina;

6. Jon Schnur, Chief Executive Officer, New Leaders for New Schools, New York, New York;

7. Jesse Solomon, Director, Boston Teacher Residency, Boston, Massachusetts;

8. Wanda Watkins, Principal, Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, Richardson, Texas;

9. Dr. Beverly Young, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, Teacher Education and Public School Programs, California State University, Long Beach, California.


The experts provided a broad spectrum of school, district, state and organization strategies to improve teacher quality and retention. The evident theme of the hearing was that there are many ways to address the issue, but the Committee sought something more difficult – a way to weave the strategies together into a federal approach that could be part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization.

While no epiphany delivering such a federal strategy manifested itself, there were common themes in the testimonies that could end up in the reauthorized law. The following list highlights the most common testimony themes and identifies issues that will likely warrant more attention as NCLB reauthorization unfolds:

§ NCLB’s three-part definition of a highly qualified teacher seems to have been accepted. No testimony questioned the requirements reasoning;

§ NCLB’s existing highly qualified teacher provisions have been poorly implemented;

§ Teachers need better career ladders. Their career paths must be exciting and challenging. Programs such as the Teacher Advancement Program, the Boston Teacher Residency, and the California State University Math and Science Teacher Initiative provide program designs that Congress may consider to promote at a national scale;

§ Teachers need better ongoing professional development early and throughout their careers;

§ The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has been successful and will likely gain more attention;

§ The principal is critical to school success and its successful leadership programs should be based on system-wide, results-based strategies;

§ The teaching profession should develop better financial incentives to draw qualified teachers to hard-to-staff schools;

§ The learning environment is critical. Small class size promotes good learning environment;

§ When educators have reliable measures of student progress, such as value added growth models, they tend to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses to the benefit of classroom instruction.

That the testimonies presented so many varying strategies may ultimately support a point made by Dr. Hammond, Dr. Sanders and Pam Burtnett in their closing comments: that a single federal approach may not be appropriate and that more innovation and study is needed.


Resource:
Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, “NCLB Reauthorizations: Strategies for Attracting, Supporting, and Retaining High Quality Educators,” http://help.senate.gov/Hearings/2007_03_06/2007_03_06.html.
Author: DAD