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Isolating the effect of a given teacher on student achievement (value-added modeling) is complicated when the student is taught the same subject by more than one teacher. We consider three methods, which we call the Partial Credit Method, teacher Team Method, and Full Roster Method, for estimating teacher effects in the presence of co-teaching. The Partial Credit Method apportions responsibility between teachers according to the fraction of the year a student spent with each. This method, however, has practical problems limiting its usefulness. As alternatives, we propose two methods that can be more stably estimated based on the premise that co-teachers share joint responsibility for the achievement gains of their shared students. The teacher Team Method uses a single record for each student and a set of variables for each teacher or group of teachers with shared students, whereas the Full Roster Method contains a single variable for each teacher, but multiple records for shared students. We explore the properties of these two alternative methods and then compare the estimates generated using student achievement and teacher roster data from a large urban school district. We find that both methods produce very similar point estimates of teacher value added. However, the Full Roster Method better maintains the links between teachers and students and can be more robustly implemented in practice. 

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.

This study examines how teacher turnover differs between charter and traditional public schools and seeks to identify factors that explain these differences. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), we found that 25% of charter school teachers turned over during the 2003-2004 school year, compared to 14% of traditional public school teachers. Fourteen percent of charter school teachers left the profession outright and 11% moved to a different school, while 7% of traditional public school teachers left the profession and 7% moved schools. Using multi-nomial logistic regression, we found the odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school are 132% greater than those of a traditional public school teacher. The odds of a charter school teacher moving schools are 76% greater. Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this "turnover gap" lies in differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. We address these two issues by analyzing school district data from grades 3-8 for 2.5 million children linked to tax records on parent characteristics and adult outcomes. We find no evidence of bias in VA estimates using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental research design based on changes in teaching staff. Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher- ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers. teachers have large impacts in all grades from 4 to 8. On average, a one standard deviation improvment in teacher VA in a single grade raises earnings by about 1% at age 28. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase students' lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample. We conclude that good teachers create substantial economic value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers.

Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some Teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some Teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of Teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence Teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical Teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of Teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful.

We use North Carolina data to explore the extent to which teachers in the lower grades (K-2) of elementary school are lower quality than in the upper grades (3-5) and to examine the hypothesis that accountability contributes to a shortfall in teacher quality in the lower grades. Our concern with early elementary grades arises from recent studies that have highlighted that children's experiences in the early school years have long lasting effects on their outcomes, including college going and earnings. Using licensure test scores as the primary measure of teacher quality, we find that concern about teacher quality in the lower elementary grades is warranted. teachers in those grades are of lower quality than teachers in the upper grades. Moreover, we find that accountability, especially the form required by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, increases the relative shortfalls of teacher quality in the lower grades and increases the tendency of schools to move teachers of higher quality from lower to upper grades and teachers of lower quality from upper to lower grades. These findings support the conclusion that accountability pressure induces schools to pursue actions that work to the disadvantage of the children in the lower grades. 

Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that  teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this paper investigates the validity of this assumption. Among teachers who switched between schools with substantially different poverty levels or academic performance levels, we find no change in those teachers' measured effectiveness before and after a school change. This pattern holds regardless of the direction of the school change. We also find that high-performing teachers' value-added dropped and low-performing teachers' value-added gained in the post-move years, primarily as a result of regression to the within-teacher mean and unrelated to school setting changes. Despite such shrinkages, high-performing teachers in the pre-move years still outperformed low-performing teachers after moving to schools with different settings.

You'll often hear the argument that half or almost half of all beginning U.S. public school teachers leave the profession within five years. The implications of this statistic are, of course, that we are losing a huge proportion of our new teachers, creating a "revolving door" of sorts, with teachers constantly leaving the profession and having to be replaced. This is costly, both financially (it is expensive to recruit and train new teachers) and in terms of productivity (we are losing teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness). And this doesn't even include teachers who stay in the profession but switch schools and/or districts (i.e., teacher mobility).* Needless to say, some attrition is inevitable, and not all of it is necessarily harmful, Many new teachers, like all workers, leave (or are dismissed) because they are just aren't good at it - and, indeed, there is test-based evidence that novice leavers are, on average, less effective. But there are many other excellent teachers who exit due to working conditions or other negative factors that might be improved

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

I can think of no other profession in the public or private sector in which this kind of unreliable and potentially damaging data is made public.  The only effect of this will be to further undermine teacher morale -- already at an all-time low in this city -- and to dissuade teachers from working in our public schools and with the highest needs children.  Yet so far, GothamSchools is the only media outlet that has pledged not to publish them.  Meanwhile, the Governor is pushing a deadline of Thursday for the state and city teacher unions to agree on a statewide evaluation system, called APPR,  for the Annual Professional Performance Review, that will rate teachers 20-40% on test scores, and the rest on principal evaluations. Yet nearly one third of all principals in the state have signed onto a letter protesting this system, for reasons that are further explained here and here.  In the city there is even more discord, because the DOE refuses to give teachers the right to appeal a principal's negative rating to an independent arbiter, despite numerous documented cases in which NYC principals have arbitrarily delivered unsatisfactory ratings to teachers for political or personal reasons. Below is a letter from eight esteemed teachers of the Year, originally posted on the NY State teachers website, sent to the NY State Board of Regents last spring, pointing out how the proposed APPR is likely to unfairly penalize many excellent professionals, especially those work with at-risk students.  Nevertheless, on Monday, the Regents voted to go full speed ahead with its NCLB waiver application to the US Department of Education, that will further commit them to this damaging evaluation system.

In schools across America, teachers know who among their peers is doing the best work and who is not. Yet our evaluation systems tend to foster the notion that all teachers perform the same way, with the same results for students. Indeed, in an attempt at equality - uniform treatment for everyone - current evaluation systems often end up being fair to no one. Ideally, performance evaluations should serve to help teachers identify strengths and areas for development, as they work to improve their practice. Systems that work have the goal of lifting quality across the profession, aiding all teachers to become good and prompting good teachers to become great. This paper highlights key elements of evaluations that live up to these aspirations. Quality evaluation systems include regular classroom observations by trained evaluators with clear standards. They also include measurements that consider the contribution each teacher makes to student learning over a year's time, taking into account the achievement level and remediation needs students bring to the classroom. Ultimately, everyone stands to gain when teacher evaluation systems are designed to gauge teacher performance fairly, clearly, and comprehensively, with an eye to the kind of professional growth that fuels student learning. We hope this paper demystifies some of the newer approaches to evaluation for districts and states that might be considering them. Our aim is to illustrate why these new systems are better for teachers and students.

In 1968, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike over the involuntary transfer of 19 Teachers by a newly empowered community-controlled school board in New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. The controversies at the heart of that bitter struggle live on in current debates over the methods of Teacher selection, the role of seniority and due process in Teacher assignment, and the appropriateness of affirmative action in the composition of urban teaching corps. Then, as now, the role of educators of color in urban school districts was an issue that sparked controversy. In recounting how rules for Teacher selection evolved in New York, Christina Collins' book, "Ethnically Qualified", Race, Merit and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920-1980, illuminates the failure of the city's Teachers' unions to effectively challenge the exclusion and marginalization of African American Teachers.

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

The findings are also a reminder not to make assumptions about who are the unhappiest educators. It's not necessarily the burned-out veteran, or those working with the most challenging student populations. In reality, when comparing teachers with higher and lower job satisfaction, the survey shows no real difference in their years of experience, the grades they taught or the proportions of their students from low-income households.  However, there were real differences in the day-to-day experiences of the less satisified and the more satisified teachers. The unhappier teachers were more likely to have had increase in average class sizes, and to have experienced layoffs in their district. They also had more students coming to class hungry, and had more families needing help with basic social services. There was also a marked gap among the teachers when it came to how much they believed they were viewed as professionals by their peers. Among the unsatisfied teachers that rate was 68 percent, compared with nearly 90 percent of the satisfied teachers.  The survey also found a connection between the satisfied teachers and their relationships with their students' families. Happier teachers work at schools where they say there's a better plan in place for engaging parents in their children's learning. 

In recent years, the casual observer of debates over public education policy might be led to believe that improving teacher quality and ensuring that low income and minority school children have access to high quality teachers has little or nothing to do with the equity or adequacy of financing of schools. The casual observer might be led to believe that there actually exists a sizable body of empirical research that confirms a) that high quality teaches matter, b) that money doesn't matter and c) by extension money has nothing to do with recruiting, retaining or redistributing teacher quality. These arguments, while politically convenient for those hoping to avoid thorny questions of tax policy and state aid formulas, are not actually grounded in any body of decisive, empirical research. Rather, to the contrary, it is reasonably well understood that while teacher quality does indeed matter, teacher wages also matter and teacher working conditions matter, both in terms of the level of quality of the overall teacher workforce and in the distribution of quality teachers.

"Chicago teachers are fighting not just for fair pay and decent health care but for a host of things that will improve education for Chicago kids-smaller classes, needed books and teaching materials, comfortable and well-maintained schools. But they're running into a buzz saw of well-organized, well-funded opposition from the massive anti-teacher, pro-corporate education policy world. teachers don't have the money or the media platform that Wall Street billions and Mayor Rahm Emanuel will get you, which is why they need our help and support. What we're seeing in Chicago is the fallout from Jonah Edelman's hedge fund backed campaign to elect Illinois state legislators who supported an anti-collective bargaining, testing based education proposal giving Edelman the "clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down [the teachers unions'] throats," political capability he used as leverage to jam an only slightly less awful proposal down their throats. It's a political deal that explicitly targeted Chicago teachers, while trying to make it impossible that they would strike by requiring a 75 percent vote of all teachers, not just those voting, for a strike to be legal. But more than 90 percent of Chicago teachers voted to strike. It's not just Jonah Edelman, though. Rahm Emanuel worked with a tea party group to promote Chicago charter schools and denigrate traditional public school teachers and their unions."

School administrators gave 99.4 percent of all Pennsylvania teachers "satisfactory" ratings during the 2009-10 school year, the latest data available from the state Department of Education show. But, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on teacher Quality: "That kind of teacher evaluation system tells you almost nothing." The state's teacher evaluations "give no consideration to teacher effectiveness and include no objective measures of student performance," Jacobs said. The nonprofit, nonpartisan council, partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently gave Pennsylvania an overall grade of D+ for progress on policies to support and measure teacher effectiveness and an F for efforts to rid schools of ineffective teachers. That could change. State education officials are trying to convince legislators to change the Pennsylvania school code to allow for more comprehensive teacher evaluations, a move teachers unions tentatively support.

An often quoted 'statistic' by various 'reformers' is that an effective teacher is three times as good as an ineffective one.  Sometimes it is said that the ineffective teacher gets a half year of progress while the effective teacher gets one and a half years of progress. I don't doubt that there are a small percent of teachers who have little classroom control, mostly new teachers, who only manage to get a half a year of progress.  I also can imagine a rare 'super-teacher' who somehow gets one and a half years of progress.  (I think I'm a pretty good teacher, but I doubt I get a year and a half worth of progress.)  I don't think there is a very accurate way to measure this nebulous 'progress' aside from test scores, but I could still imagine that there is a 'true' number, even if we will never be able to accurately calculate it. As this statistic has been quoted by Melinda Gates recently on PBS and by Michelle Rhee in various places, including the StudentsFirst website I thought, in response to a recent post on Diane Ravitch's blog I would investigate the source of this claim.

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

All over the nation, teachers are under attack. Politicians of both parties, in every state, have blamed teachers and their unions for the nation's low standing on international tests and our nation's inability to create the educated labor force our economy needs. Mass firings of teachers in so-called failing schools have taken place in municipalities throughout the nation and some states have made a public ritual of humiliating teachers. In Los Angeles and New York, teacher ratings based on student standardized test scores - said by many to be inaccurate - have been published by the press. As a result, great teachers have been labeled as incompetent and some are leaving the profession. A new study showed that teachers' job satisfaction has plummeted in recent years.