Understanding Teacher Effects: Market Versus Process Models of Educational Improvement

• In Event: Assessing Teacher Quality: Understanding Teacher Effects on Instruction and Achievement

Abstract

During the 1990s and 2000s, market-based models of school reform—those based on the principles of accountability, competition, and choice—have flourished. Increasingly, educational policymakers are looking towards the teacher as the critical lever of educational improvement, applying the principles of accountability to individual teachers. Certainly, the accountability movement has shined a powerful light on educational inequality, defining success not as the number of star pupils a school can produce, but in whether or not they provide instruction that is effective for all students. Underlying market-based models of reform is an intrinsic commitment to equality of educational opportunity.
But can market-based models of school reform fulfill this promise? Will the accountability movement, in particular the growing emphasis on teacher accountability, lead to significant declines in educational inequality? The use of standardized tests to identify high- and low-performing teachers offers a potential means to motivate teachers and address core challenges of the profession. Teacher accountability programs can also be designed to encourage the best teachers to take jobs in chronically low-performing schools. Yet, as I will argue in this presentation, the promises of teacher accountability are dwarfed by the many pitfalls of using standardized tests to label teachers as effective and ineffective. Can ineffective teachers really be reliably identified with a standardized test, and does such a system encourage best practice in the classroom? These are not ancillary issues, but rather, concern the policy core of any teacher accountability system.
Most importantly, even if teacher accountability programs work as intended, they simply will not be able to solve our most persistent educational problems, because they do not directly address the most common barriers to effective instruction. Instead, school reforms must make a serious investment in teachers’ instructional capacity; an approach I term a “process model” of school reform. This orientation should have a familiar feel to it, for it is the basis of much of the frustration concerning current educational policy; we have renewed commitment to addressing educational inequality but are taking an exceedingly indirect approach to actually doing something about it. In choosing this specific terminology to talk about school reform, I mean to explicitly reference Duncan and Biddle’s (1974) orientation to school improvement in The Study of Teaching. Whatever the lever of change applied to schools and classrooms, in order to be successful, it must have an impact on “what teachers and pupils do in the classroom.” Fortunately, process models of school improvement are concretely expressed in many successful contemporary reform initiatives. Such initiatives, starting with a conceptual understanding of fundamental problems of classroom instruction, offer innovative ways for schools and teachers to meet these problems head-on. The real business of school reform will mean investments in existing process-models of reform, the development of new and better ones, and continued basic research into the nature of educational problems. As a first step in that direction, we first need to admit that a more genuine effort at school improvement is needed than current educational policy offers.

Author

• Sean P. Kelly, University of Pittsburgh