Measuring the Effectiveness of a National Fellowship for Teachers of Color

• In Event: Education for Diverse Democracy Requires Democracy for Diverse Educators: Critical Insights From National Teaching Fellows

Abstract

This paper explores the effectiveness of a national fellowship program geared toward
teachers of Color. Although this program has existed for over 5 years, to date, there have been no attempts to evaluate fellows’ effectiveness across multiple domains. The research question is: How
does a national teacher cohort model combined with comprehensive teacher preparation programs,improve minority teacher effectiveness?
To answer our research question, we created and administered a survey to teachers of Color
in the program and to teachers in a similar national fellowship program which does not specify its orientation for teachers of Color as the comparison group (Fowler, 1995). We organized the survey in the following sections: teaching history and school characteristics, the teacher’s educational background and preparation, use of the national foundation’s program resources and perceptions of program quality, teacher efficacy in their school, teacher’s career plan, and teacher demographic
information. In total, the survey had about 70 questions.
Survey questions were coded according to the outcome space in Table 1 (Wilson, 2004). Teachers who saw themselves as much more engaged in the school and much more able to raise student achievement, as compared to their colleagues in the school, scored on the highest level. Teachers who felt less effective in both raising student achievement and in contributing to their school and the national foundation’s fellows community were at the lowest level. For the fellowship program supporting teachers of Color, we had responses from 53 of the 74 (~72%) fellows. For the comparison program, we had responses from 76 of the 105 (~72%) fellows.
In this study, we are attempting to measure teacher beliefs about effectiveness using three
constructs: teacher perception of student academic achievement, teacher perception of impact on
non-cognitive student development, and teacher involvement in school community. Given our
assumptions about the relationship between the constructs, we employ multivariate multiple
regression, which takes into account the correlations between the outcomes (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001). However, one of the weaknesses of multivariate regression comes from the fact that it ignores measurement error.
In order to take into account measurement error, we also carry out item response theoryanalysis, and in particular, employ the latent regression partial credit model. The latent regression Rasch model is a person explanatory model that comes from the class of generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) (De Boeck & Wilson, 2004). The latent regression is a good fit because we are trying to understand differences in outcomes for teachers with varying degrees of experience and education prior to entering the teaching fellow programs.
We find that teachers in both fellowship programs give themselves similar rankings on
academic achievement and involvement. On average, both groups describe being more effective and involved in the school community then their peer teachers in their school. However, differences exist on the third dimension, student socio-emotional development. While both groups rate themselves more effective than other teachers in their school at addressing student socio- emotional development, participants in the fellowship program geared toward teachers of Color have higher scores than those of teachers in the comparison program.

Author

• Tolani Britton, Harvard University