teacher quality

The Best of the “Best Schools” Ratings

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer about what parents read it is that, most of the time, it has to do with the question starter “Where do I find the best…?”

Parents, I am right there with you. I love lists – the shorter the better – and ideally with pictures.

So, here’s a meta-exercise. Let’s rank school rankings.

Methodology? Ugh!

Parents are busy people who care about getting their children the “best.” We want to find out where the “best” is, how much the “best” will cost, and how can we can get the “best” at the best price. Parents want the data quickly, and they want the data in a pre-chewed fashion. These are just a few simple reasons why lists work.

But, not all school rankings are created equally. In fact, they’re extraordinarily unequal. As parents, we often put far too much faith in the idea that other people, or “experts,” know best about what’s best.

Here’s the thing: They don’t because they’re not usually experts.

The trouble is that in order to understand how these sources generate their lists, you need someone to give a darn about the study’s methodology. But, ugh…who wants to do that?

I am such a person.

It has forever bothered me that school rankings are based on one or two-dimensional statistics such as the number of Advanced Placement courses offered in the school like the Daily Beast’s list (pre-2014), or average scores on state-mandated tests like Great Schools, and School Digger, or combination of similar metrics like the US News and World Report Best High Schools list.

These rankings are seriously limited because the methodologies are seriously flawed.

Curious Measures of School Quality

First, who determined that those factors make a school “the best?” Basing school ratings on advanced placement classes matters very little and tells parents even less about the quality of a school when their child doesn’t qualify. Even when they do qualify to take the class, odds are against them that they will earn a high enough score on the AP test to “place out” of first-year college coursework anyway.

Only 20% high school graduates, or about 607,000 students, earned a “3” or higher on an AP exam in 2013. Remember, since America only graduates about 80% of students from high school, this means that only one-fifth of that 80% of high school students take and pass an AP exam.

This article in the Atlantic exposed the ratings machine as “meaningless,” and issued a full-out take down of AP as signifying anything but the antithesis of quality and rigor. The author notes these classes are typically about memorization and regurgitation rather than critical reading, reflection, analysis or synthesis – the high-leverage skills of a quality education. (For a counter-point on AP check out this article by Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.)

At the same time, the Atlantic article credited these organizations for making slight but important adjustments to their measurements:

To their credit, US News and Newsweek/Daily Beast, which also use AP and IB courses as a measure, have made their rankings more sophisticated and reasonable by also adding other measures of a school’s quality, such as graduation rates and college-acceptance rates, and performance on state accountability tests and the proficiency rates of a school’s least advantaged students on those tests.

Despite these amendments, the measures are flawed for the simple reason that they don’t help parents make informed decisions about where to buy a home to start their family. Young families want to know where to find the best Kindergarten. These parents realize the first years in elementary school are crucial. High school is nearly a decade away.

Are We Just Looking at Rankings of the Richest Districts?

Second, these rankings identify “best” schools where very few middle class Americans can afford to buy a home.

If you’ve ever read any of my previous blog posts, or if you follow these rankings and school data at all, you know that school performance is typically in direct relationship to the wealth of the school district. Put another way, wealth and poverty matter.

Newsweek’s recently released high school rankings (again limited geographically to participating schools and limited to averages on standardized tests) have taken to creating two different school rankings. They clarify:

The question, “What are the best schools?” has two different answers depending on whether or not student poverty is taken into account. In an effort to address the effect of socioeconomic disadvantage on education, Newsweek is publishing two lists: our “absolute” list and … our “relative” list, which ranks schools based on performance while also controlling for student poverty rates.

If you’re someone who prioritizes having your children attend a public school with other children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, or if you’re like a friend of mine who doesn’t want to “raise a child who is afraid of poor people,” you might want to know how a school performs regardless of what’s in the savings accounts of the parents who send their children to school there.

What are the “Best Metrics” for Measuring “Best Schools?”

Finally, these rankings are flawed because they mask so many indicators of quality that families and educators should prioritize.

There are many metrics that can tell you how well a school is performing just as well or better than standardized test scores. For example, many people might want to know how parents review the school, school safety in the district, the budgeting track record of administrators, the quality of the teaching force, or the size and diversity of the district.

So, drumroll please. Here is the shortlist of the best of the best school ratings that manages to do all that:

  1. Niche
  2. See above
  3. Sorry, that’s probably the only one, but I’m still looking.

Niche Rankings

Why Niche Wins

Niche has five winning features, and I can express them in a quick list too:

  1. They employ expert statisticians who
  2. draw from a fantastically rich dataset (NCES)
  3. to identify, cluster and weight important indicators
  4. with very little over-emphasis on any single indicator, and
  5. provide tools to parents on their website to dig and play in the data.

I’ll say more about each of these indicators and what they mean in a future blog post, and since you’re likely scurrying off to explore Niche’s ratings and rankings, I won’t say very much about Niche’s methodology either. Suffice it to say any group that references Bayesian probability and their subsequent weighting decisions in it’s “How do we Compute our Rankings” section is an outlier among these groups in terms of their attention to detail.

I could deconstruct any list of “the best,” but if you’re looking for a fast source with interesting and accessible data, Niche is the best of the best.

When Teachers Strike

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment
Photo by Ben Sutherland

I am torn on teachers’ unions.

As a first year teacher in Connecticut, I resented being compelled to pay over $700 in yearly union dues, but within two years I was the building representative for our districts’ teaching association. Even as a rep, I still felt torn on two union mainstays: teacher tenure and the threat of strikes.

On reflection, I realize my distrust of unions stems from two things. First, teachers unions do sometimes defend pretty lackluster teaching. Frankly, I find that deplorable. Second, my knee-jerk response is to buy the anti-union rhetoric. I suspect the standard anti-union zingers resonate with many other Americans as well.

Yet, as I watch a contract dispute unfold in my state’s biggest public school district, it is clear that, though intuitively easy to buy into, the anti-union rhetoric is based on some seriously misguided perceptions of teachers’ work.

These misperceptions must be considered before any parent or community member can meaningfully comment on union activity.

Misguided Perceptions of Teaching

It doesn’t take much to find examples of wrong-headed beliefs about teaching. If you follow any headline story about teachers’ union activity, a quick scroll through the “comments” sections will yield some pretty consistent messaging.

  • Teachers’ salaries are already bloated. How dare they negotiate for raises?
  • Our district just negotiated a new contract. Why are teachers asking for more?
  • Teachers should be there for our children, and not there to “line their pockets.”
  • Teachers should only get raises if their students perform well.
  • The teachers’ union is threatening to strike when our children need them most. Why did the teachers wait until the eleventh hour to make this an issue?

And the most seriously misguided sentiment:

  • Teachers get several vacations throughout the school year. They have a two-month break over the summer, and work six hours a day. Part-time pay for part-time work is fair.

On first blush, it would be easy to buy into all of these popular sentiments. Though, all of them are mostly wrong.

An 8 o’clock to 2 o’clock workday? Yes, I’ll have what they’re having.

My suspicion is that most of the American public bases their understanding of the work of teachers on their experiences with teachers when they were children in school. Beyond this first hand experience with teachers, many Americans don’t think very hard about the true work of teaching unless they live with a teacher or they are one.

For example, if my students’ perceptions about what I did during the school day were true, I would be sleeping on a cot in the broom closet in my classroom, and my life would be sustained through a steady diet of apples and chalk dust.

Okay, that’s overstating it, but students were always shocked when they saw me eating real food in the cafeteria, and let’s not even mention what happened when they saw me in public. All this is to say students give little thought to what goes into teaching, especially when they are not sitting in a classroom.

I liken assumptions about “knowing what it means to teach” to going to your favorite restaurant, ordering your favorite dish and deciding – as you wait for then devour your meal – that you know what it means to be chef.

Clearly, when that dish is presented to you, you know very little about the ingredients, the preparation, the cook time, the training or the thought that went into that dish. The same can be said for students in a classroom. You are only consuming the finished product of teaching.

Teachers work much longer than six hours a day. Six hours a day is the amount of time teachers spend with your children. Six hours a day is the amount of time it takes for teachers to present their fully-cooked dishes to students.

The six-hours-a-day calculation leaves out the “cook time” that went into lesson planning, their assessment of students’ performance and feedback, the continuous training and professional development, the committee work and communication with parents. Let us also consider the constant preparation, clean-up and organization of materials that classroom teachers manage every day, all day. (Those lima beans didn’t count themselves into those twenty-five little plastic Dixie cups, kid!)

Teachers’ work day starts well before the school day begins (which is earlier and earlier every year). Teachers’ calendar year also starts well before the school year begins as teachers prepare the classroom for the school year, and they’re there well after the school year ends writing reports, debriefing and unpacking the school year, and making plans for the next one to come. That two-month summer vacation is something your children enjoy, not their teachers.

Work to Rule

Union activity doesn’t happen out of nowhere, either. There are many activities a union might engage in well before they resort to a strike. Before a teachers’ union strikes, they might call for a “work to rule.” In a nutshell, “work to rule” means that the teachers voice their grievances by refusing to work beyond the terms and conditions outlined by the previous contract.

This means teachers may be asked by the union not to return to the classroom earlier than they are required to set up for the school year. Teachers might be asked to be at the school and in the classroom the minimum required time of the school day. They will be asked to refrain from purchasing equipment for the classroom with their own money (about $500 per teacher amounting to billions of dollars a year across the nation). 

In other words, work to rule means the community gets what they’re paying for, which is far less than the bargain many communities usually get out of teachers.

For teachers who typically work far and above the terms of their contract, a work to rule order represents a significant change in their pre-school-year practice, and is emotionally difficult for many dedicated teachers. When you think of the things that these teachers are not doing to prepare for and serve their students, it is clear a work to rule order makes their workday much more difficult.

The truth is that it is hard to know how many teachers actually carry out the work to rule even if they say they will.

For example, that same school district that is now embroiled in the contract dispute I spoke of earlier has experienced work to rule orders before. During a work to rule order a few years back, the district changed busing companies to cut costs. As an outcome of serious mismanagement, the busing company failed to pickup children on time from school to be bussed home. Several teachers told me that they violated the work to rule order by waiting in their classroom with the children for the bus to come until after four o’clock pm.

You ask, “Yes, but what cruel and heartless teacher could leave a group of scared and abandoned 8-year-olds in the classroom unattended to comply with a work to rule order?”

The answer is very few if any of them.

So, a work to rule order in a district that is regularly mismanaging funds and contracting mediocre services for children isn’t a very effective tactic.

The Long and Winding Path of a Failed Teaching Contract

Teaches strike out of desperation when all other avenues have failed, but even then their efforts are often in vain. This is because teachers can’t win the media war when they’re out of their classrooms and picketing in the streets. When there is even the threat of such an activity, the anti-union rhetoric and false assumptions quickly kick in.

The irony as I see it is that the media glare focuses only on the teachers’ actions and spares not even a second to consider the role played by community leaders, like mayors, who may share responsibility for failed union contracts.

So, I’ll offer a bit here on the anatomy of contract negotiations, but with the caveat that my experience is limited.

Teachers typically negotiate a “master contract” with the municipality or the district every few years. This is known as collective bargaining and it happens again and again because, written in the terms of the contract is the contract’s own expiration date.

There are many people involved in contract negotiations including the mayor, the board of education, aldermen or local representatives as well as the teachers. The contract involves much more than annual salary. Rather, negotiations often focus on things like health insurance, retirement and minimum work safety standards.

These contract negotiations typically happen in the springtime for the upcoming fiscal year, and are usually settled in time for districts to predict staffing needs, post advertisements, and fill open positions by the late spring.

Contracts often reach a stalemate when any of these moving pieces or players gets hung up. Often it has nothing to do with teachers’ salary. Sometimes contract negotiations fail because of complex municipal spending and investment guidelines, like determining what percentage of healthcare costs the teachers will cover and what the municipality will cover.

Sometimes, a contract fails because teachers don’t want riders in their contracts that allow municipal governments to divest earnings from teachers’ pension plans to offset other costs in the district with a promise to replenish the pension funds at a later, indeterminate date (go figure).

To be honest, these are the types of nuts and bolts of contract negotiation that make my eyes glaze over, but it can never be said that these are trifling details.

In the largest district in New Hampshire, the contract dispute is a perfect storm involving an impoverished district, an impatient electorate and the reelection aspirations of the city’s mayor.

First, their budget timeline and decision making seems to happen three months later than other districts in New Hampshire. This results in critical contract questions being made late in the summer months. One summer, the last-minute budget shortfall led to the district firing 137 teachers (about a sixth of the teaching force) two weeks before the school year began. The results were chaotic, with children looking forward to meeting their assigned classroom teacher (who had been fired) and classrooms of over 30 children assigned to one teacher.

In the current contract dispute, 7 out of 10 members of the Board of Alderman and all elected Board of School Committee members supported the contract. Regardless, at the eleventh hour and with little warning the mayor vetoed the contract.

In a complete denial of his role in the contract negotiation breakdown and his role as leader of the city and the Board of School Committee, the Mayor called on the teachers “to iron out” the details of a new contract. Meanwhile, it should be noted the mayor is up for reelection on September 15th, and many citizens turn the other cheek while the mayor distances himself from the contract negotiation failure and focus instead on his claims of fiscal responsibility.

Questions to Ask when Teachers Strike

While I’m still torn about unions, including some of their goals and their tactics, and while the research on unions is far from a consensus, it’s clear to me that these contests raise more questions than community members and parents are often willing to ask.

As with everything in education politics the story is much more complex than the headline.

Work strikes seem to me like an outdated tactic that yields only negative and unintended consequences. Meanwhile, teachers themselves have difficulty following through with a work to rule. Teachers don’t seem to have a winning strategy or tactics. This is especially true when teachers are hung out to dry for political gain. In this case teachers are being blamed for mismanaging city revenue and being asked to find a solution on their own.

Who wants to be a teacher, kids?! Can I get a show of hands?

When teachers threaten to engage in union activity, rather than spinning out the same wrongheaded one-liners, community members and parents might question where their city leadership went wrong.

  • How long have negotiations been going on?
  • Where are the sticking points in the negotiation?
  • What does the school board say?
  • What does the superintendent of schools in the district say?
  • How are teachers being treated in my community’s schools?

Most importantly, they might ask what role their community’s elected officials have played in the stalemate, and what those same political leaders stand to gain from selling the teachers in their district down the river.

2014’s Best and Worst States for Teachers

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

Ask the Experts

Like any professional seeking an ideally balanced work situation and personal life, educators are no exception. Teachers must be able to make a reasonable living in order to meet the challenges of their positions. To propel the discussion, we asked a panel of experts to weigh in on teacher-related issues and offer advice to both job seekers and local policymakers.

Dianna Gahlsdorf Terrell
Assistant Professor of Education, Saint Anselm College

What are the biggest issues teachers face today?

Teachers are sometimes held solely responsible, and unfairly so, for the quality of education in America. If students don’t perform well internationally or nationally, within their state, their district or the school, Americans want to know where to put the blame, and it often falls on teachers. Of course to some extent the classroom teacher plays a significant role, but there is a host of other reasons for the uneven performance of American schools. So there seems to be a real undercurrent in the discourse that holds teachers accountable, and wants to evaluate a teacher’s quality on the “value” they add to students’ standardized tests scores in a single academic year. This is a considerable, and as I mentioned, rather unfair burden to bear for a novice teacher just entering the workforce.

Relatedly, the amount of support a new teacher receives in his or her job is extraordinarily variable. That is to say, some teachers get a great deal of support through induction and mentoring programs in their schools, while others are left to “sink or swim” with little to no support for improving their teaching skills. We know that the quality and quantity of support in the induction years plays a large part in terms of whether a teacher decides to stay in or leave the profession. With half of the teaching force leaving the profession in the first five years, attrition from the teaching career is a significant concern. So, a school’s mentoring and induction program merits a second look when a teacher is considering a job offer. They should ask the question, “Who will be my mentor and how will I be supported in my first year?”

Finally, I would say the variability in students’ “preparedness for school” – shorthand for the skills, knowledge and behavior students bring into a classroom – can be a real shock for teachers. A new teacher’s capacity to differentiate their instruction for an exceedingly diverse student body is a crucial skill for new teachers and an issue on the national stage just as much as it is at the district level.

How can local officials make their states more attractive to the best teachers?

Local officials should investigate whether new teachers and teachers transferring from other states are provided with the appropriate training and incentives to move to their district. This can be done easily by making sure local officials are current on state policies for certification, and making sure there is a clear link between teacher preparation programs’ expectations for their graduates, and state or district expectations for teacher credentialing.

An easy way to connect schools in a community with high quality novice teachers is to form relationships with particular teacher education programs in the area and to open classrooms of current teachers to pre-service teachers enrolled in those programs. Pre-service teachers can then be “trained up” within the culture of the specific school and gain a better sense of the school and community culture. Local districts that have learned how to do this enjoy the benefit of having “first pick” from a pool of qualified graduates. These are students who already have a great sense of the school and the broader community, and will require less in the way of orientation in their first year of teaching.

There also needs to be greater emphasis for teacher education programs to work with building leaders/principals in local schools to make sure teachers are being trained for the realities they will face in the classrooms in different districts and across states. Higher education institutions are trying to do this by creating networks of pre-service teacher education programs to be sure their programs are responsive to the needs of PK-12 schools, and state and local officials can support these initiatives by simply asking how they can make the “PK-20” alignment more seamless.

Another way to recruit high quality practicing teachers or career changing teachers into the community is to offer incentives like reduced costs to “tuition into” the district. In some cases, the strongest teachers live in a community outside the community that is trying to recruit them. With private schools, teachers are often offered a significantly discounted tuition rate. With public schools that allow people from other communities to “tuition in” to the school, it seems a good and simple budget-line investment would be to reduce the cost for the teacher to tuition his or her children into the school. When you have a high quality teacher who wants to bring his or her children into the district, reduced tuition costs are a win-win, as the school is showing an investment in the teacher and the teacher, with his or her children now in the districts’ schools, has the added investment of creating a better educational reality for his or her own children.

Are unions beneficial to teachers? What about to students?

Yes. Unions get a bad rap, but in some communities signing on with a union is a requirement of signing a contract with the district. In other words, if you’re not represented through the union the district will not extend you a contract. In my experience this is a good thing, because the union provides representation for novice teachers while they’re primarily focused on developing their practice.

In my second year of teaching, a student’s parents threatened to sue me and the district if I did not reexamine a grade I had issued to the student. You can imagine this is a terrifying predicament for a new teacher, but a reality in our highly litigious society. My union membership allowed me free access to counsel so I could continue to hold students accountable for the quality of their work, and to teach ambitiously knowing that, even without tenure, I would not be cast out to pasture when a true problem arose.

In the sense that unions protect ambitious teachers with high standards, unions are good for students. Of course, it makes a much better headline to show all of the unethical conduct that teacher unions appear to condone and even defend – and in those cases it’s clear that teachers unions aren’t always working in the best interests of students. What gets lost in that portrait of unions are the many teachers, like myself, who have tangible experiences that provide evidence of the fact that when unions support good teaching they’re also supporting student learning.

What tips can you offer young teachers looking for a place to settle?

The interests of a typical, young 20-something teacher are quite different from the interests of a family person, a veteran teacher or a career changer, so it’s difficult to offer advice to all of these different subpopulations entering a school as a teacher. The population with whom I have the greatest experience are the “young” teachers you reference in your prompt.

Most times, teachers are just looking for a job – this is true in particular certification areas like Elementary Education and secondary history and English teaching where the candidate pool exceeds job opportunities. In those cases, my best advice is just to find a classroom teaching job, and know you may be working in a community in which you do not see yourself long term. They also must understand that just because they’re in this position now, doesn’t mean they’re bound to that grade, school, district or even state long-term. Classroom teaching experience is preferred to non-experience, and they’ll be able to trumpet the skills they built in those initial years in their next job search. At that point, it’s more appropriate to be looking for a “place to settle.”

In any case, the best advice I have is that teachers should know that if the first job doesn’t feel like a “fit” that does not mean that the career is not a “fit.” They should understand that it may take some time before they find the right school community and culture – a place where they feel at home. Hopefully, that place will have a building principal or curriculum leader who has the development of his or her faculty at heart, and who can see the young teacher’s potential may not just be in the classroom, but could be with a different role within education. This speaks to an earlier response where I noted that a teacher looking for a job should ask the question, ““Who will be my mentor and how will I be supported in my first year?”I would add here “How will I be supported in my career?”

The preceding is an excerpt from an interview I did in 2014 with WalletHub. For the full story by Richie Bernando, WalletHub Contributor, including ratings of each state based on WalletHub’s methodology, please follow this link.

Teacher tracking: Higher ed group worried about proposed legislation

QuoteDianna Terrell Leave a comment

Proposed federal legislation that would track teachers and the institutions that educate them after graduation has the New Hampshire Institutions of Higher Education Network concerned about its implications — specifically, that it’s too difficult to implement and that it will discourage teachers from working with special-needs populations for fear that there won’t be enough evidence to prove the teachers are making progress.

Dr. Dianna Gahlsdorf Terrell, secretary of the IHE Network and professor of education at Saint Anselm College, said that on a federal level, there is increasing interest in teacher progress and regulating teacher education programs.
“They are being looked at in terms of, ‘how do we control what they are doing more?’” Terrell said.
The proposed legislation is still being drafted. It would see training institutes like Saint Anselm track teachers after graduation and into the classrooms by examining how their students perform, Terrell said.
“We’re not … equipped with the resources like that to track our graduates in their own classrooms,” she said. “It’s statistically sort of shady, the further and further you get out.”
Terrell likened it to Harvard Medical School having to track its graduates into their practices and measure them based on patient health status. Doctors who choose to work with cancer patients, for example, see a higher mortality rate in their caseloads. “It’s cumbersome for us to follow our teachers out of the classroom. It’s a stretch to say that everything that happens in the classroom is because of a teacher,” Terrell said, noting many other factors are at play.
She said it is even more statistically invalid to trace it back to the program in which the teacher was trained.
The federal government currently measures the quality of schools as a whole based on children’s scores on high-stakes standardized tests, like the Smarter Balanced test. The new legislation would put more of an emphasis on individual teachers — if a teacher doesn’t add value over the course of the year, the teacher’s quality will be called into question. “There are a lot of teachers who work with populations where it’s tough to move the needle,” Terrell said.
Terrell gave the example of the Head Start program, where it’s harder to gauge and show success on measures with standardized tests because of socioeconomic and learning challenges. “The implications [of the legislation] for teachers are [that] it’s not a good way of showing their quality. It’s going to dissuade people from working in populations with high needs,” Terrell said. “The ones that deal with the most at-risk kids are going to be the most at risk for not showing progress.”
The impact on institutions that statistically aren’t producing enough effective teachers could mean the loss of accreditation from the state and loss of Title I funds from the federal government.

As seen in the March 19, 2015 issue of the Hippo.