Search

Believe and Prepare is a teacher preparation reform implemented by the Louisiana Department of Education in collaboration with school systems and teacher preparation programs across the state. It was piloted in the 2014/15 school year and became mandatory in July 2018 for incoming teacher candidates in all 18 institutions of higher education that offer traditional teacher preparation programs. The reform focused on competency-based curricula, extended clinical experiences, and rigorous mentor teacher training. A central requirement of the reform is that teacher candidates must participate in a yearlong residency with a mentor teacher. This replaced the prior shorter-term student teaching requirement, typically six weeks. To explore the extent to which the reform is contributing to expected improvement in outcomes for early career teachers, this study examined the association between the reform and in-service teacher performance ratings, teacher retention, student test scores, teacher competency, and the likelihood of three placement outcomes (being placed in the school where the teacher completed a residency, filling a teaching position in a shortage area, and being placed in a rural school). Teachers who completed a program that had implemented Believe and Prepare were 2 percentage points more likely than teachers who completed a program that had not implemented it to stay in Louisiana for at least one year and 7 percentage points more likely to stay in the same school district for at least three years. Grade 4-8 students whose teachers completed a preparation program that had implemented Believe and Prepare during the pilot years scored 0.04 standard deviation lower on English language arts tests than students whose teachers completed a program that had not implemented it. Other teacher outcomes such as in-service performance ratings, competency as measured by Praxis II scores, school placement, and job assignment were not statistically different between teachers who completed a program that had implemented Believe and Prepare and teachers who completed other programs. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED624403. For the appendixes, see ED624404.]

New Mexico is one of 48 states that offer a biliteracy seal to high school graduates to recognize their proficiency in a non -English language. The Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest English Learners Research Partnership collaborated with a large urban district in New Mexico to study the characteristics and college readiness of students who earned different types of biliteracy seals (state, district, and global seals), the number of students who met some requirements for a seal but did not earn one, and the effect of earning a seal on college outcomes. The study used data from three cohorts of grade 12 students in the district from 2017/18 to 2019/20. Between 2017/18 and 2019/20, 7 percent of graduates earned at least one type of biliteracy seal, and these graduates were more likely than graduates who did not earn a seal to be Hispanic, to be eligible for the National School Lunch Program, to be a current English learner student, to have ever been an English learner student, and to speak Spanish at home. Graduates who earned a biliteracy seal were more likely than similar graduates who did not earn a seal to enroll in college within one year of high school graduation. Finally, among graduates who enrolled in college, graduates who earned a biliteracy seal were more likely than graduates who did not earn a seal to enroll in a four-year college and to enroll in college full time. The New Mexico Public Education Department and district leaders can use the findings to decide how to expand access to biliteracy seals. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED624244. For the appendixes, see ED624246.]

Many states seek to increase the education levels of their early childhood education (ECE) workforce to improve the quality of care for children. Oregon encourages all ECE workforce members to sign up for a career lattice, a career pathway system that helps them determine goals related to increasing their education. The state also offers incentives for reaching specific steps in the career lattice and scholarships for college credit and community-based training. This study used two randomized controlled trials in 2018 and 2019 to test whether sending emails and offering different financial incentives to Oregon ECE workforce members increased career lattice sign-up and increased education and training levels or workplace retention. The study found that sending emails encouraging career lattice sign-up had no detectable impact on career lattice sign-up or workplace retention. Sending emails offering a monetary incentive at an earlier-than-usual step on the career lattice had a positive impact on training hours recorded but no detectable impact on career lattice movement, college credit hours earned, or workplace retention. Sending emails about automatic enrollment in a scholarship program had no detectable impact on scholarship use, career lattice movement, college credit hours earned, or workplace retention. Lastly, after participants were randomly assigned to study groups, the email campaigns were implemented as planned, reaching all intended participants, although the interventions ended sooner than planned because of a state policy change. The findings suggest that low-touch interventions such as emails have promise for increasing training hours but are not sufficient to induce changes in career lattice sign-up, continuing postsecondary education, or workplace retention for Oregon ECE workforce members. These results have implications for future research, in addition to demonstrating how better messaging and supports can mitigate barriers to further education and training and how email campaigns can be leveraged for workforce communication efforts. This information is particularly relevant for state agencies and education and training providers. [For the Study Snapshot, see ED614625. For the appendixes, see ED614626.]

Teach For America (TFA) is an organization that aims to address educational inequity in part through a program of training and placing teachers in U.S. K-12 public schools that have the highest proportions of high-poverty students. In this report, the authors quantify the impacts of Teach For America Indianapolis (TFA Indy) on student and school outcomes in the Indianapolis area. They evaluate the effectiveness, retention, and career trajectories of TFA Indy teachers who work within the Indianapolis area, with comparisons made to other teachers hired during the same period. In additional subgroup analyses, the authors identify differential patterns of TFA Indy teacher retention, promotion, and career progression as a function of whether teachers are White versus non-White. [This study was sponsored by the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation.]

This study was conducted at the request of education policymakers who participate in the Montana Rural Recruitment and Retention Task Force. Like many states, Montana is struggling to recruit and retain qualified educators, especially in certain subject areas and in more rural parts of the state. The purpose of this study is to provide information that will help the task force address these challenges. Task force members asked REL Northwest to examine the following questions: (1) What is the extent of educator shortages in the state in 2017/18? How do educator shortage patterns vary by characteristics of school systems?; (2) To what extent did educators stay in their position and school system, move to a different position within the school system, move to a different school system, or leave the public education system between 2016/17 and 2017/18? How do educators' decisions to stay, move, or leave school systems and/or positions vary by the characteristics of educators and school systems?; and (3) To what extent were teachers and principals in Montana employed in multiple roles within their school systems and/or within multiple school systems in 2016/17? How did patterns in holding multiple roles differ by the characteristics of school systems? To examine these questions, REL Northwest used statewide administrative data from 2016/17 and 2017/18 .Task force members were also interested in the intended mobility of educators in the following school year (2018/19), including factors associated with accepting their current position, and--for administrators--the top barriers they faced to hiring teachers. To meet this request, we examined data from an existing statewide survey of teachers, principals, and superintendents, and we provide the findings in an appendix. Task force members and other policymakers in Montana will use this information as they determine how to address the state's educator workforce challenges. Given the high percentage of schools located in rural areas in Montana, the study findings may be useful to other states with similar demographics. Educator mobility in Montana: Understanding issues of educator shortages and turnover. Key findings: (1) Educator shortages in Montana: (a) In the 2017/18 school year, district administrators in Montana reported that 62 percent of positions in shortage subject areas, such as math and science, were difficult to fill or unable to be filled; and (b) In the 2017/18 school year, rural school system administrators reported a higher percentage of positions as difficult to fill or unable to be filled, as compared to non-rural school system administrators; (2) Educator mobility and attrition in Montana: (a) In the 2017/18 school year, 86 percent of teachers and 87 percent of principals in Montana returned to the same position and school system they were working in the previous school year; (b) Among educators who did not stay in their position and school system from 2016/17 to 2017/18, more than half left the Montana public education system; (c) The percentage of teachers who stayed in their position and school system was higher in school systems with a below-average proportion of American Indian students, school systems located in non-rural areas, and school systems with higher enrollment; (d) Among teachers who moved between school systems, more teachers moved from rural to non-rural areas (29 percent) than from non-rural to rural areas (21 percent), indicating that rural school systems lost teachers to non-rural school systems from 2016/17 to 2017/18; and (e) The percentage of principals who stayed in their position and school system was higher in school systems with a below-average proportion of American Indian students, those with lower levels of poverty, those with higher enrollment, and those located in non-rural areas; and (3) Multiple educator roles: In the 2016/17 school year, 29 percent of Montana teachers and 24 percent of principals held multiple positions. This percentage was higher in school systems located in the most remote rural areas, where 36 percent of teachers and 40 percent of principals held more than one position. [This project was conducted in partnership with the Rural Recruitment and Retention Task Force, which is convened by the Montana Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education and RISE4MT (Recruiting Incredible School Educators for Montana).]

Teachers, like the students they serve, never stop learning. In-service teacher professional development (PD) gives educators opportunities to learn more about pedagogy and improve their own instruction methods to boost students' academic and social and emotional outcomes. Districts make a significant financial investment to provide teacher PD, and research on the impact of teacher PD on teacher instructional practices and student education outcomes has been mixed. In addition, there are only a few studies that examine the impact of teacher PD using rigorous empirical evaluation designs (such as randomized control trials) and consider PD across multiple contexts (public versus charter schools). The authors evaluated the Chicago Collaborative, a teacher PD program that is aligned to Common Core Standards and implemented by Leading Educators, a national nonprofit organization that partners with districts and charter management organizations to help teachers develop the leadership skills that they need to successfully transition from leading students to leading their peers. The authors conducted a randomized control trial evaluation using data from 40 schools across three school districts in the Chicago area during the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school years. They examined how the Chicago Collaborative program was implemented and whether the program impacted student achievement. The authors found that the Chicago Collaborative was successfully delivered, despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic at the end of the research period in 2020. The authors also found robust evidence that the Chicago Collaborative increased student test scores. [This research report was published by the RAND Corporation (ED621808).]

Most states' teacher evaluation systems have changed substantially in the past decade. New evaluation systems typically require school leaders to observe teachers' classrooms two to three times a school year instead of once (Doherty & Jacobs, 2015). The feedback that school leaders provide to teachers after these observations is a key but understudied step in the teacher evaluation cycle. The feedback and subsequent professional development are intended to help teachers change their instructional practices and improve student achievement (Correnti & Rowan, 2007; DeNisi & Sonesh, 2011; Taylor & Tyler, 2012). However, little is known about the feedback that school leaders provide to teachers following classroom observations or about how to train leaders to make that feedback more effective. This study examined the impact of disseminating a detailed checklist intended to structure an effective feedback conference between a school leader and a teacher following a classroom observation. The feedback conference checklist is a modified version of one created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Tang & Chow, 2007). The checklist, along with short testimonial videos, was a low-cost, low-intensity intervention provided to a randomly selected half of 339 participating New Mexico principals in fall 2015 by the study team. These principals' schools constituted the treatment group. Principals in the treatment group schools received an email with an attachment containing a guide and a 24-item feedback conference checklist, plus a hyperlink to a three-minute testimonial video featuring a principal. Principals were encouraged to distribute the checklist to other school leaders and to use the checklist in all their feedback conferences in the 2015/16 school year. Principals were also asked to distribute the checklist to all their teachers in order to promote greater teacher participation in the feedback conference. The study team also emailed the same checklist plus a hyperlink to a three-minute testimonial video featuring a teacher to up to 10 randomly sampled teachers in each treatment group school. The other half of the principals in the study schools formed the control group. Each of the control group principals received a two-page principal guide as an email attachment in fall 2015. The two-page guide reprised the five tips about feedback included in the summer 2015 New Mexico Public Education Department--sponsored professional development for principals and informed principals about the study. In addition, the study team sent up to 10 randomly sampled teachers in each control group school a two-page teacher guide summarizing the teacher evaluation system (Skandera, 2013) and teachers' right to receive post-observation feedback. All principals and teachers in both the treatment group and the control group who consented to be in the study were asked to complete an online survey (one for principals, another for teachers) in spring 2015 and again in spring 2016. The main outcomes of the study were principals' and teachers' reports of the impacts of the checklist and testimonial video on the perceived quality of feedback conferences following formal classroom observations; principals' recommendations for and teachers' take-up of professional development; and the quality of teachers' subsequent instructional practices as measured by principals' formal classroom observation scores and teachers' self-reported scores. Additional exploratory outcomes included the impact of the checklist on student achievement (school-average math and English language arts scores on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers assessment) and school report card grades (reported as an A, B, C, D, or F of multiple measures of a school's student achievement) compiled annually by the New Mexico Public Education Department. The study also documented how many recipients reported using the checklist and what they thought about it. The checklist had few clear impacts on the quality of feedback, professional development outcomes, instructional practice, or student achievement. There were two exceptions: teachers who received the checklist reported that their principals were less likely to dominate the feedback conferences, and they reported that they were more likely to follow their principal's professional development recommendations. Use of the checklist in the treatment group was moderate: 77 percent of principals surveyed who received the checklist reported viewing it, and 58 percent said they used it with one or more teachers. At the same time, 29 percent of control group principals (who were not emailed the checklist) reported that they had seen the checklist, and 10 percent reported using it with one or more teachers. The relatively moderate use of the checklist by treatment group principals, combined with the reports by some control group school leaders that they were using it, implies that the estimated impacts of using the checklist would be larger than the estimated impacts of receiving it. Though distribution of the feedback conference checklist to principals and teachers had a few modest impacts, this study indicates that distributing the checklist is unlikely by itself to substantially alter feedback conferences, teachers' classroom practices, or student achievement, at least during the first school year in which the checklist is used. This study suggests that only a fraction of school leaders are likely to use the checklist if it is distributed in the low-cost manner followed in this study. But the checklist may also have failed to help principals overcome common barriers to effective feedback, such as providing critical comments to teachers or recommending appropriate professional development. The study results raise the possibility that additional (or different) investments might be necessary to improve school leaders' feedback conferences with teachers--for example, pairing training with written guidance.

The Leading Educators Fellowship program selects promising mid-career teachers through a competitive application process and develops their skills as leaders of school improvement efforts. The specific objectives of the program are to (1) increase the leadership skills and capacity of teacher leaders in order to improve student achievement in high-need schools and (2) retain highly effective teachers in high-need schools by encouraging commitment to the schools and improving the school leadership pipeline. This report presents findings from preliminary analyses of the program's impacts on student achievement and teacher retention in both Louisiana and Missouri in the 2011-2012 through 2013-2014 school years for teachers who are program fellows and for the teachers mentored by fellows. The findings from this early analysis of the program impacts of fellows are promising but mixed, and overall do not conclusively demonstrate that the program has affected student achievement. For mentees, the findings show some positive effects on student achievement among mentees who teach math and social studies in Louisiana. The findings do not point to a consistent pattern of retention impacts across cohorts or states. Future analyses with larger samples of both fellows and mentees will provide greater statistical power for more reliably detecting any true program effects. A technical appendix contains propensity score matching and power analyses.

School districts have begun using estimates of teachers' effects on student test scores (or "valueadded) for diagnostic purposes and allotting monetary rewards. Such estimates must be precise enough to identify high- and low-performing teachers and predict future performance accurately. We study the inter-temporal variability in value-added measures for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers from five large Florida school districts. Consistent with worker productivity measures in other occupations, teacher estimates are moderately stable, with year-to-year correlations ranging from 0.2-0.5 for elementary school and 0.3-0.7 for middle school teachers. Thirty to 60 percent of the variation in measured teacher performance is due to sampling error from "noise" in student test scores. Persistent teacher effects account for about 50 percent (70 percent) of the variation not due to noise for elementary (middle) school teachers; other time-varying factors account for the remaining variance. However, observed teacher characteristics (e.g., experience, advanced degrees and professional development) explain little inter-temporal variation unrelated to sampling errors. Averaging estimates from two years greatly enhances the stability of the estimates and improves their predictive ability. We also explore the sensitivity of stability to the value-added model specification and the achievement test. Technical Appendix is included. (Contains 7 tables, 2 figures and 11 footnotes.)