Plaintiff parents testified for MALEDF.
Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford Professor and National Education Expert
- Quality teachers are the fulcrum of success or failure in school reform initiatives because it is important to have good teachers who can implement the changes.
- Dr. Darling-Hammond testified that teaching is a profession. Teaching requires specialized education and on-going training, as is found in other professions such as medicine and law.
- Dr. Darling-Hammond addressed myths surrounding teaching profession: (eg. time off, summers off). She said that US public school teachers work more hours than teachers in any other country, and they usually work more hours, with less planning time. In other high-achieving countries, there is greater support and better compensation for teachers. For example, in other high-achieving countries she has studied, including Singapore and Finland, teachers are allocated 15-25 hours in the week of compensated time to plan, collaborate, and have professional development. In the US, teachers are lucky to get 3-5 hours per week of compensated planning time.
- “As hard as I work now, I never worked as hard as I did as when I was a public high school teacher.”
- The job of teaching is complex, and with the changing socio-economic status of students (more at-risk students, more students learning English, and more students with disabilities, all in the general education classroom) it becomes even more challenging to teach to every student’s level and ability. Teachers need to be able to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all the kids in the classroom. Teachers need to meet student needs across diverse spectrum of students in the classroom.
- Dr. Darling-Hammond described some of the best practices for supporting and creating successful classroom teachers. These include:
- On-going and high quality assessment of the teacher
- Using standard-based tools (practices known to be effective for student learning)
- Feedback linked to professional development that will help teachers fill student needs
- Good leaning environment helps teachers collaborate and provides the opportunity for them to work together on improvements in the school and put them into practice
- She notes that there is a positive effect on student achievement from teacher collaboration.
- Professional development for teachers is critical for improving student achievement, especially in an environment with changing standards, but much of the professional development used in the U.S. doesn’t meet what we know to be best practices, which are:
- Professional development must be sustained over time and curriculum based to create sustained iterative practice
- 50 hours of professional development on specific topics are needed to be successful, but US average is 8 hours or less; this is not sustained or long-term professional development that changes practice because it is a very active process of deeply understanding strategies and topics on the part of the teachers.
- Even in a local control state such as Colorado, the State has an important role in developing and sustaining professional development.
- She notes that there is no evidence that para-professionals who are charged with providing instructional time are an effective way to increase achievement.
- Value-added assessment to high stakes testing for teachers: NRC (National Research Council) reports raising concerns about instability, vulnerability to error, and “teacher effect”. In her expert report, Dr. Darling Hammond writes: “While value-added models based on student test scores are useful for looking at groups of teachers for research purposes – for example, to examine the results of professional development programs or to look at student progress at the school or district level, they are problematic as measures for making evaluation decisions for individual teachers.”
- The value-added measures are vulnerable to error and bias of measures; it is intuitively appealing to look at student learning, but these value-added methods have issues like error term in regression—but has to do with other factors that are outside variables (if student has had tutoring, past teachers, principal leadership); further, value-added ratings bounces around dramatically from year to year.
- No proof that raising standards alone will raise achievement: evidence shows that standards won’t teach themselves; if standards are raised without supporting teachers, schools, and districts, it can mean higher rates of drop-outs and push-outs if there aren’t supports to help students achieve them.
- To implement new, higher standards requires: resources, re-tooling of the curriculum, access to technology, training teachers to teach in new ways, and more pedagogical content knowledge, as standards go up and students are more diverse.
- Implementing new standards also requires changing the tests that we use because the old assessments don’t measure what new standards are asking for.
- Professor Darling-Hammond testified that resources do matter because research has shown that when resources are targeted to research based strategies, student achievement has improved.
- There is a strong relationship between resources and achievement, and resources spent effectively have an even bigger effect. More money spent close to instruction makes a larger difference than those dollars spent further from the classroom.
- Some states have shown how investment in education can play a role in student learning and closing the achievement gap. For example, New Jersey, after 30 years of litigation, put in place comprehensive school reforms, and over the past 10 years has become one of the highest achieving states in country (in the top 5). New Jersey cut its achievement gap, even with higher number of students in poverty and minority students than Colorado has.
- Wyoming not a good comparison state to Colorado. Wyoming has less than 10% of the students compared to Colorado’s. Their average school size is half that of schools in Colorado. The socio-economic data between the two states is also not comparable.
- Dr. Darling-Hammond, when asked about existing Colorado resources noted that we can try to implement all the recommendations with existing resources, and we can always imagine spending some resources more strategically, but it is hard to imagine accomplishing all the new standards with out new investment in education.
- Dr. Darling-Hammond testified that it is difficult to draw a direct comparison between the U.S. and other countries in terms of spending for education, but some differences can be noted. Other countries’ overall spending on teachers is greater and many countries include health care and pensions as part of government spending, not education spending. The U.S. appears to spend more than other countries, but the costs of health care and pensions are included as part of the education budget.
