Parents As Advocates, Working With Teachers Despite a System That Doesn't Ask For Excellence

A Question of Quality: Examining the roots of uneven instruction quality in our schools
Any consumer of public education knows that teacher quality can be uneven. But why does the gap exist? And how do you beat the luck of the draw?
By Jane Elizabeth, Post-Gazette Education Writer, February 2, 2003

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Each year on the brink of autumn, students -- and their parents -- wonder about which teachers they'll get.

Will the math teacher be the good one or the mean one? Will the English teacher be the one who's happy to talk with parents, or the one who's biding time until retirement and can't be bothered?

Greg Geibel, an award-winning English teacher at North Allegheny High School, says the new federal designation for a "highly qualified" teacher is sort of like a "pre-owned certified car," which essentially means "it has an engine, it has wheels, it can run." (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Any consumer of public education knows that teacher quality can be uneven. But why does the gap exist? And how do you end the luck of the draw in the classroom?

It might seem that the answer will come from the new No Child Left Behind federal education law. Under that law, all teachers must be "highly qualified" by the end of the 2005-06 school year.

But these standards are so minimal that most teachers in Pennsylvania already meet them: They must hold a college degree, pass a test in the subject area they teach and hold a valid state certificate.

The best teachers scoff at that definition of quality.

Greg Geibel, a North Allegheny High School teacher who was named one of Western Pennsylvania's top teachers in 2001, compared the designation to a "pre-owned certified car," which essentially means "it has an engine, it has wheels, it can run."

Like many educators, he doesn't believe that teacher quality can be defined by any sort of law or truly gauged by any type of test.

But researchers who've studied the characteristics of good teachers say they can show a direct connection between the quality of the teacher and the performance of the student.

A recent Tennessee study found that students who had good teachers three years in a row scored significantly higher on state tests than students with three years of poor-quality teachers.

A study by Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond concluded that the best predictor of student performance on national tests was the percentage of high-quality teachers they had -- teachers who had majored in the subjects they taught and were properly certified.

And students who spend even one year with a bad teacher can score more than a grade level lower than students who had a good teacher, according to a University of Rochester study.

Suffering the odds

Some experts feel that the nation's teaching corps is uneven at best.

Lagging Charters

If your child is one of 28,500 students who attend a Pennsylvania charter school, chances are greater that the child is being taught by an unqualified teacher.

The irony is that charter schools were established largely because reformers claimed that regular public schools had not done a good enough job of educating students. Charter schools are funded by taxpayer money but are exempt from many of the regulations placed on public school districts.

The reformers' rhetoric may ring hollow when it comes to teacher qualifications.

While about 45 percent of regular public school teachers had at least some education beyond a bachelor's degree, fewer than 30 percent of charter school teachers were in that category, according to a study conducted by Western Michigan University.

Close to 30 percent of the state's charter school teachers were not certified to teach, according to the study. Another 4.3 percent held certificates, but not from the state of Pennsylvania. And 11.5 percent of the certified teachers weren't certified to teach the subject they were teaching.

By comparison, about 4.4 percent of regular public school teachers in the state are improperly certified; half of those are in Philadelphia.

Some argue that certification is overrated as a measure of how good a teacher is, but the ongoing Western Michigan study also shows that while charter students have made some gains in achievement, their test scores continue to lag behind those of students in regular public schools.

Many parents now don't expect good teaching every time, or even from time to time," said California-based researcher Leon Lessinger, who was assistant education secretary under presidents Johnson and Nixon. "From experience, they know, if only intuitively, that luck or chance can rule in the quality of classroom teaching."

In Pennsylvania, recently approved teacher quality controls could help improve those odds. But some of the new rules -- including more rigorous requirements to get into education schools and to graduate -- apply only to new teachers.

The teaching staff in half of Pennsylvania's 501 school districts has been on the job an average of 15 years or more, and most older teachers never had to meet any particularly stringent standards.

A typical scenario: Patsy Tallarico, a former New Kensington teacher who graduated from Edinboro College in 1966, didn't have to take a test to get his teaching certificate and did half of his 12-week "student teaching" without a supervisor.

Then he was handed a lifetime teaching license.

"I could have gone from '66 to 2000 without doing another thing," said Tallarico, now president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state's largest teachers union.

Even though teacher requirements appear to have gotten tougher in recent years, there are loopholes you could drive a school bus through. For instance, teachers who have flunked required tests can take them again and again until they pass -- and even if they don't pass, they still can teach under so-called "emergency certificates" for up to two years.

And some teachers in public charter schools are allowed by law to be uncertified.

President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education reform act is supposed to close some loopholes and improve the quality of both new and older teachers.

Under the law, the federal government plans to distribute $2.85 billion this year to state education departments nationwide to improve teacher quality. Pennsylvania will get $112.5 million of that money to be used for teacher training and evaluation, which amounts to about $1,000 a teacher.

The PDAP flap

Evaluating teachers, however, can be an onerous political struggle, as Pennsylvania's experience with the Professional Development Assistance Program, or PDAP tests, has demonstrated.

Teachers unions continue to criticize the $1.5 million-a-year teacher testing program started by former Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican; and Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell has said he may scrap the test.

Union officials said the tests were poorly administered and didn't reliably measure how well teachers perform in the classroom.

But it's also true that many teachers who took PDAP's basic math and reading tests scored poorly, raising the question of whether some of the unions' concern was simply that the test results were embarrassing.

Nevertheless, teachers didn't have to worry about being punished for poor scores.

Under the testing rules, even if a teacher flunked every question on the exam, principals couldn't use those scores to fire employees or force them to get help. That's because principals don't get individual teacher's scores, which aren't supposed to be given to anyone but the teachers themselves.

However, tests aren't the only way to measure a teacher's performance -- there are observations and evaluations by school administrators or fellow teachers.

But while teachers in Pennsylvania are supposed to be evaluated regularly, when a teacher receives tenure -- after three years on the job -- evaluations can become far less stringent. Overwhelmed administrators may barely have time to fill out the evaluation forms, much less closely observe dozens of teachers in their classrooms.

Even though he said he makes the time to do proper evaluations, Richard Sternberg, principal at Grandview Elementary School in Pittsburgh and president of the Pittsburgh Administrators Association, acknowledged that school principals "do have to do a lot of things," and so "something will get sacrificed."

Principals often use the squeaky-wheel theory, he said. If there are complaints about certain teachers, they may get a closer observation.

And as for principals who think they don't have time for thorough evaluations: "There's always time. . . . You have to prioritize what's important," Sternberg said.

Nepotism dangers

The prevalence of nepotism or favoritism in school district hiring also can lower the chances of honest teacher evaluations. If you were a principal, would you want to give a poor evaluation to a school board member's daughter?

Sometimes, problem teachers stick around for years because no one wants to criticize them -- at least not openly.

Teachers generally won't complain about a low-quality colleague to an administrator. And parents typically are extremely reluctant to comment on the record about bad teachers, fearing backlash against their children -- even though local teachers who were interviewed said they wouldn't punish a child for complaints made by their parents.

Typical is one parent's lament about a teacher in a Pittsburgh high school.

"She sits in the classroom and plays computer games all day long," said the parent, who would not allow her name to be used because "there would be retribution against my child," who is an honor student.

"The teacher tells the children, 'I don't care if you come to my class. Why don't you just cut the class; you're in my way anyway. You bother me.' "

No one will listen to complaints about the teacher, the parent said, because "the school is afraid to do anything because she has tenure."

Even when parents express satisfaction with their children's teachers, their comments often are tinged with relief.

"I've been lucky," said Nancy Sample, a West Jefferson Hills parent.

"We've been fortunate," said Dave Gadd, whose children have attended schools in North Carolina, Virginia and in Pittsburgh.

"It's just the luck of the draw," said Roberta Horwitz, a Pittsburgh parent, explaining how a friend's son was placed in a favored teacher's math class.

Luck isn't good enough, maintains Lessinger, who said schools must operate as "high-reliability organizations."

That's business-management jargon for services that are performed under quickly moving, high-stress conditions -- such as emergency medicine or air traffic control. Highly skilled employees are needed for those jobs or the results can be disastrous. Many experts say the same is true for education.

One way to ensure that reliability, experts say, is to insist that teachers be trained in the subject matter they're teaching.

But the latest figures from the National Center for Education Statistics show that nationwide, more than half the teaching force didn't have a major or a certificate in the area they were teaching -- from 57 percent in science courses to 71 percent in history courses.

In Pennsylvania, 22 percent of high school teachers didn't even have a minor in the field they were teaching, according to a study done by University of Pennsylvania Professor Richard M. Ingersoll. And in higher-poverty school districts, that number jumps to 34 percent.

Nationwide, poor children are about twice as likely to get inexperienced teachers, uncertified teachers or teachers who scored poorly on teaching exams, according to Ingersoll's study, conducted for the Washington-based Education Trust.

The problem of improperly certified teachers -- or teachers who just aren't sufficiently educated -- has been a popular research topic for academics, and a profusion of national organizations has attacked the issue from all sides.

Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the retired chairman of IBM, announced just last month that he has assembled a panel of education experts, high-powered politicians and business owners to study teacher quality for 14 months: The Teaching Commission.

Not everyone was impressed. "We don't need this problem studied again," said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. "We need action."

More often than not, these reports and statistics aren't seen by some very important consumers -- parents.

And when they are, the studies can be contradictory and confusing, especially to frustrated parents who are usually more concerned about their child's next teacher than any academic review of teacher quality.

State and federal officials continue to wrestle with how to improve teaching. Lessinger warns that improvements need to be made quickly, however, before another generation of students goes through classrooms where mediocre teaching is ignored.

The classroom, he said, "is not like a gambling casino. It's not the place for a game of chance."
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A question of quality: Are teacher entrance tests tough enough?
By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer, February 3, 2003

Second in a series
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Abby Ivory, a junior at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, loves working with children and decided in high school to pursue a career in special education.

But she hasn't been able to pass all of the tests required to get a teaching certificate, or even enter IUP's education program.

Ivory, who was an honors student at Central Cambria High School and has a 3.2 GPA at IUP, passed the reading test the first time she took it. But it took three tries before she passed the math test. And she still is trying to pass the writing test.

Under IUP's rules, that means Ivory can't continue as an education major. Now she plans to work with children in a hospital setting.

In Pennsylvania, the teacher tests -- called Praxis exams-- are supposed to be "make-or-break." Flunk just one of them, and you can't become a certified teacher.

But while IUP restricts the number of times students can take the tests, the state and some other education schools permit unlimited attempts.

One student flunked 21 times before getting a passing score, said Frank Meehan, teacher certification director for the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

And even students who don't pass can teach with a so-called "emergency certificate" for up to two years.

These loopholes may dilute the effectiveness of a test that is designed to be a basic gateway to the teaching profession.

The standardized, written tests are not supposed to be particularly difficult. In fact, they simply test "minimum competency," said Meehan.

"It's meant to be the floor; not the ceiling," Meehan said.

A basic requirement

Added Mari Pearlman, vice president of Educational Testing Service, which developed the Praxis tests:

"If you can't pass this test at a standard set by states for minimal levels to be licensed, you really need to reflect on whether or not you have enough content knowledge to teach children effectively."

And Rosalie Dibert, who taught special education in city schools for 38 years, said prospective teachers need to know how to take tests.

"We ask kids to take tests non-stop," Dibert said. Teachers need to learn test-taking strategies for themselves, she said, so they can later help students do their best on standardized exams.

Nearly all states have testing requirements for teacher candidates.

In Pennsylvania, teacher candidates must pass Praxis tests in reading, math and writing as well as in their content area to become certified. They also have had to pass a written Praxis test on teaching techniques. But beginning in the fall of this year, the state will accept evidence from their student teaching instead.

While some say the tests ensure at least a minimum level of knowledge, others say they carry too much weight because they exclude potentially good teachers who may not test well.

"There is probably some baseline knowledge everyone should know," said John Johnson, who is in charge of the teacher education program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. "On the other hand, from our experience, we believe there are a number of potentially fine teachers being excluded on a single indicator."

Passing the Praxis doesn't guarantee high-quality teachers in every classroom, said University of Kansas psychology professor John Poggio. "There are people who will pass these tests and will make horrible teachers," he said.

And minorities and those who speak English as a second language have difficulty with the tests, said Marilyn Cochran-Smith, a Boston College education professor who is co-chair of the American Educational Research Association's Consensus Panel on Teacher Education.

"There is some evidence teacher tests may be discouraging more minority members from entering teaching in the first place," she said.

Testing 'wrong stuff'?

Ivory said there were several reasons she struggled with the math test.

Ivory, who had a 940 SAT score and took trigonometry in high school, said she was thrown off by a lot of things: the math test format, the time limit, the rule against using a calculator, the gap between when she learned the material and took the test, and perhaps some test anxiety.

"I just think that the tests are important, but you're tested on the wrong stuff. You should be tested on your skills, how you work with children and how you manage and handle them," she said.

Lori Tweedy, an IUP junior with a 3.6 GPA and a 970 SAT score, also has struggled with the Praxis.

Tweedy believes she would be a good teacher, but because of a learning disability that slows her reading, she has failed the Praxis writing test three times by as little as one point. To try to reach her dream, she plans to transfer to Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania so she can keep taking the test.

"I don't want to be anything else," she said. "I want to be a teacher."

Last year, an average of 84 percent of Pennsylvania students who had completed teacher education programs had passed all of the required Praxis exams by October.

That percentage is likely to go up because some schools are planning to require students to pass the Praxis before they begin student teaching. Students who can't pass the tests would have to switch majors to graduate.

For now, there is a wide range of pass rates on the Praxis tests among Pennsylvania colleges and universities, ranging from 100 percent at several colleges to just 25 percent at Lincoln University near Philadelphia.

Pearlman said it isn't necessarily fair to judge the quality of an education program based on how many students pass the Praxis, because some schools have made it their mission to train more challenging students with diverse backgrounds.

And Cochran-Smith said that while she favors high standards and accountability for education schools, "I think teacher tests are a poor measure if they are the only measure."
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A Question of Quality: Do schools hire the best teachers? Probably not
By Carmen J. Lee, Post-Gazette Education Writer, February 4, 2003

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Most school officials intend to hire good teachers.

They solicit applications, screen resumes and interview candidates.

Sto-Rox Superintendent Anthony Skender uses salesmanship and an appeal to candidates' altruistic motives to recruit teachers to a school district where the starting salary is $25,000. (Joyce Mendelsohn, Post-Gazette)

And at each stage, they'll tell you they're looking for qualified individuals who will be the right fit for their districts.

But local and national education experts contend that too often, school officials -- particularly those in low-income areas-- focus more on filling jobs quickly than on building a high-quality teaching staff.

"What I hear is that most [local] school districts wait for the applications to flow in. There is a lackadaisical aspect to all this," said Lauren Resnick, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, a nationally known organization that pushes for higher standards in public schools.

The effort that some school officials put into recruiting top teachers can vary widely, said Charles Gorman, executive director of the Tri-State Area School Study Council at Pitt.

"A lot depends on the attitude of the superintendent," he said. "If it's a high priority for the superintendent, then you'll see change. Where it's not a high priority, it doesn't happen, so it's left for good people to find their way into the system."

There is no question that hiring good teachers can make a vital difference.

Studies in Texas and Tennessee have shown that the years students spend in classrooms with good teachers improved their performance on achievement tests.

"Good teachers matter and they matter a lot," said Thomas Carroll, executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. "If students are in a school where they consistently receive quality teaching year to year and class to class, they have a significant advantage."

Research done by the Post-Gazette for this series has shown that students in more affluent districts are more likely to get those kinds of teachers than students in lower-income districts are. And there seems to be a strong correlation between teacher quality and student test scores in those districts, as well.

Wealthy Allegheny County school districts such as Upper St. Clair, Quaker Valley and North Allegheny attracted more new teachers with master's degrees and full-time experience. Of the last 30 teachers hired in those districts, 19 had master's degrees and 17 had previous experience as full-time teachers.

In the same districts, the percentage of eighth-graders who scored at the proficient and advanced levels in math on standardized state tests ranged from 67.1 to 87.5 percent; in reading, from 71.6 to 89.2 percent.

By contrast, of the last 30 teachers hired in the low-income Sto-Rox, Wilkinsburg and Duquesne districts, only five had master's degrees. Fourteen had previous full-time teaching experience.

Among those districts' eighth-graders, the percentage of those at the proficient and advanced level in math ranged from 1.6 to 31.4 percent; and in reading, from 8.1 to 34.4 percent.

Family backgrounds for the students in these districts obviously play a major part in test results. But several studies have shown that teacher quality can make an impact on test scores, even after allowing for demographic differences.

One reason for the difference in qualifications among the teachers hired in wealthier and poorer districts is the pay scale for new employees.

Beginning teacher salaries in Allegheny County, for instance, can range between $25,000 and $35,000 a year.

Districts on the low end of the pay scale have to work harder to attract good teachers.

One example is Sto-Rox, one of five in Western Pennsylvania that have been declared "empowerment districts" because of low student test scores.

Superintendent Anthony Skender said the large percentage of low-income students, along with the district's comparatively low starting salary of $25,000, mean that he has to employ salesmanship and an appeal to candidates' altruistic motives.

"I just can't throw money at problems," Skender said. "I tell college kids, 'We need you. You can make a difference. If we can't offer more money, we can offer something to build your soul.' There are still kids out there who believe in that kind of thing."

Affluent districts, on the other hand, may get hundreds or even thousands of unsolicited applications.

Quaker Valley in the Sewickley area received about 900 applications last year. The average number of unsolicited applications that flow into Upper St. Clair annually is about 4,000, and includes prospective teachers from as far away as Alaska, California and Florida.

A large pool

While other regions have to recruit out of state or even out of the country to meet their demand for teachers, many Western Pennsylvania districts can generate most of their candidates from responses to ads, applications on file, their substitute teachers' lists, or by using the Allegheny Intermediate Unit's Internet teacher employment service, called Pa-Educator.Net.

Those sources are usually sufficient because Pennsylvania colleges graduate far more new teachers than districts in the state can hire. Last year, for instance, the state Board of Education certified 10,520 new teachers, but only 4,384 were hired.

Teaching job openings also attract more applicants because Pennsylvania, at $52,832, has the highest average teacher salary in the country.

But having ready access to so many applicants may not yield the best teachers.

"It's not so much whether your state is producing enough teachers, it's whether they are producing the right kind of teacher in terms of quality and diversity," said Mildred Hudson, chief executive officer for Recruiting New Teachers, a Belmont, Mass., nonprofit devoted to improving teacher recruiting nationally.

"Are they producing enough teachers in the specific areas where teachers are needed? Are they serving those districts that need them most?"

Hiring top teachers is half the battle. Keeping them is the other half.

"If schools worked to reduce the turnover rate, they would have to hire fewer teachers. And if they hired fewer teachers, they could be more selective," Carroll said.

A recent report by Carroll's commission found that almost a third of all new teachers leave the classroom after three years, and that close to 50 percent leave after five years. In all, more than a quarter of a million teachers stop teaching every year.

"The conventional wisdom is that we can't find enough good teachers when the problem is that we can't keep good teachers," he said.

That is less of a problem in Pennsylvania, though, where the turnover rate is relatively low, averaging 8.7 percent annually.

Local turnover rates included 1.7 percent in North Allegheny and about 10 percent in Duquesne. Retirements caused the few staff changes in North Allegheny, while most of the turnover in Duquesne came from teachers leaving for jobs elsewhere.

Carroll's commission has found that teachers are more likely to stick with their jobs if they have been well-trained; if they have had good previous teaching experiences; and if they've received feedback on their teaching from mentors.

Mentoring is important

School officials should look at hiring as a two-stage process, said Adam Urbanski, director of the Teacher Union Reform Network, a national union-led initiative to promote education reform.

"They should scrutinize candidates' credentials, references and give some type of pre-test, but that's just the preamble," he said. "Then they should withhold judgment for a year while new teachers undergo mentoring."

Pennsylvania law requires school districts to have "induction programs" for first-year teachers that last at least one school year and must include teacher mentors.

Mentoring quality varies widely, though.

In the Pittsburgh Public Schools, for instance, "instructional teacher leaders" in each building are supposed to help both new and long-term colleagues hone their skills. But whether a new teacher receives individual mentoring for a year depends on how many new teachers are assigned to a school.

More extensive is the program in Upper St. Clair, where all new teachers are assigned master teachers in their field as mentors for two years. New teachers also are required to participate in seminars throughout the year, including a two-day orientation before the beginning of school.

And to help prevent burnout, school officials also should avoid "sink or swim placement" of new teachers in the most challenging schools or classrooms, Carroll said.

Home-grown teachers

One way urban districts can improve their pool of applicants and maintain racial and ethnic diversity, said Hudson of the Recruiting New Teachers group, is by "growing their own" candidates.

Districts can create middle and high school programs that encourage youngsters to go into teaching and provide them with opportunities to explore the profession. They also can form partnerships with local colleges to offer teachers' aides the opportunity to earn teaching degrees.

The Pittsburgh school district has tried both approaches.

Some districts also add extra twists to increase the quality of new hires.

Shaler and Quaker Valley, for example, use the Gallup Organization's Teacher Perceiver and Teacher Insight as part of their interviewing process.

The Teacher Perceiver, which is conducted in person, and the Teacher Insight, done online, are used by about 1,100 school districts across the country. Both include a series of questions designed to identify qualities essential to good teaching.

Quaker Valley officials also are so determined to have candidates teach sample lessons that even when school is out during the summer, they "round up students off the street" to sit on the sessions, said Assistant Superintendent Joseph Clapper.

The Pittsburgh district may have the most unique formal system in the region because it is required by state law to maintain an eligibility list, which ranks applicants according to a score based on points given in different categories.

Applicants receive points for interviews and evaluations, and for performance on the national teachers' exams, experience in an urban school district and whether candidates are city alumni.

Full-time teachers have to be hired from the top third of the eligibility list under this procedure, which was enacted decades ago to help prevent graft and favoritism as well as maintain quality, said district spokeswoman Pat Crawford.

The bottom line

Do these various hiring practices yield better teachers?

While the Post-Gazette research shows that affluent districts have an advantage in the kind of teaching candidates they attract, that's not the whole story.

There also are districts whose teachers don't seem as highly qualified that have been described as "beating the odds" by a state-sponsored Standard & Poors report. Such districts have produced above-average student scores despite having large percentages of poor youngsters.

Among them are Highlands in Allegheny County, Ellwood City Area in Lawrence County and Titusville Area in Venango County.

In those districts, the teachers' performances on the state content exam known as the Professional Development Assistance Program have been mediocre, ranging from average to slightly below average.

Even in districts with below-average student and teacher test results, administrators defend their teachers, saying they have to find employees with a special blend of rapport, work ethic and courage because their youngsters have so many social and family problems.

Daniel Stephens, principal of the middle and high schools in the low-rated Duquesne City School District, looks for teachers who know their subjects, can relate to children fr