Involuntary teacher transfers can improve school performance, Stanford researchers say
By Andrew Myers
A study of Miami-Dade's transfer policy suggests that moving poor-performing teachers into better schools improves equity.
The ability to move teachers, against their wishes, to a different school is a necessary tool, argue school and district leaders, to improve teacher performance and get the right mix of teachers across a district.
But forced transfers remain hotly contested, and critics say the policies only shuffle ineffective teachers to new schools or place them in situations where their skills are underused.
Weaker Teachers Leaving Schools Under N.Y.C.'s Tenure Changes
After New York City encouraged principals to be more deliberative in awarding tenure, ineffective teachers were more likely to leave schools or the profession voluntarily—to the benefit of students, according to a recently released working paper.
Even though the overall percentage of teachers actually denied tenure did not change much, the more-rigorous process appears to have reshaped the workforce—suggesting that changes in practice rather than underlying tenure laws, may bear fruit, said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University professor and one of the study's authors.
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Tenure Reform Increases Voluntary Attrition of Less Effective Teachers in NYC, New Study Finds
A new study of New York City schools shows that recent teacher tenure reforms dramatically reduced the portion of teachers approved for tenure. Many relatively ineffective teachers whose probationary period was extended instead of being granted tenure voluntarily left their teaching positions.
Is a Good Teacher a Good Teacher for All?
Jim Soland, Doctoral Candidate of Stanford Graduate School of Education, discusses his research of Is a Good Teacher a Good Teacher for All? Comparing Value-Added of Teachers with Their English Learners and Non-English Learners
Principals Pressed for Time to Lead Instructional Change
After delving more deeply into specific practices and behaviors of instructional leadership, however, researchers Susanna Loeb and Ben Master of Stanford University and Jason Grissom of Vanderbilt University, found that classroom "walk-throughs"—the most typical instruction-related activity of principals in Miami-Dade schools—were negatively associated with student performance, especially in high schools.
CEPA Scholars Highlighted at AEFP 39th Annual Conference
The 2014 conference theme is New Players in Education Finance and Policy. Both K-12 and higher education are in the midst of rapid and fundamental change: proliferation of new technology; new sources of investment capital and start-up vendors offering potentially game changing products/services; new public-private partnerships; venture philanthropy; continued growth of new sources of teachers and school leaders; the emergence of ‘big data.’ What is the impact of these trends on the education sector and the prospects for improving effectiveness and equity? How can research help make sense of this fast-changing environment?
Stanford research shows long-run benefit of English instruction
Stanford research has found that high-quality English instruction helps student performances across other subjects – including math – in future years. Great English teachers boost their students' achievements in math, a very different subject, according to Stanford researchers. The researchers found that students of good language arts teachers had higher than expected math scores in subsequent years – a crossover effect.
Preschool is important, but it’s more important for poor children
Yet these scholarly groups consistently find distinct and lasting gains for poor children, as I discovered in
tracking of 14,162 youngsters nationwide with Stanford University economist Susanna Loeb. The minuscule gains experienced by middle-class children largely fade out by fifth grade, according to a second longitudinal study overseen by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Still, gains for poor children persist with greater strength when they attend high-quality preschools and then enter comparatively robust elementary schools.Politicians such as de Blasio ignore these consistent findings when arguing, as he did last year, that subsidized pre-K should be “for everyone, doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy, doesn’t matter if you’re poor, doesn’t matter what color you are.” But empirically, a child’s home environment sharply conditions the efficacy of preschool.
Impacts of Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers on Equity and Teacher Productivity
District policymakers often argue that rules in teacher contracts and collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), that limit their ability to transfer teachers to different schools unless the teacher initiates the move, handcuff them in achieving the right mix of teachers across the district. In many districts in California, for example, CBAs prevent districts from involuntarily transferring teachers except when schools lose teaching positions, and even then, seniority often governs which teachers can be moved. Could loosening those restrictions benefit students? On the one hand, maybe so.