Milken Family Foundation National Education Conference: How Stakeholders Can Support Teacher Quality

By Susan Couch, 2004 Louisiana Milken Educator, and J. Todd White, 2000 South Carolina Milken Educator

Susan Couch and J. Todd White are delivering a "Models of Quality" presentation at the Conference on the Teacher Advancement Program. Following is information on the four elements of TAP.

Multiple Career Paths

There are many lessons that educational leaders might learn from the field of management.  For example, Barrier (1996) reported a positive correlation between the motivation level of employees and career advancement. Barrier concluded that employees who have multiple opportunities to advance their career in their profession are highly motivated to improve the quality of their work. Murphy and Hart's (1986) research on career ladder programs revealed that teachers are most motivated by the combination of financial incentives and career advancement opportunities. The advancement opportunities presented by Murphy and Hart (1986) included career paths that expand the scope of teacher's present job, along with expanded professional development, involvement in decision-making, and  long-term promotions.

Hawley (1985) added to these recommendations, arguing that a successful career path program should consider a long list of factors, including clear standards by which to measure teacher performance, frequent evaluation and feedback, significant economic rewards for high performance, and compensation based on roles and responsibilities. Teachers must play a key role in the development and implementation of the plan, Teacher involvement raises the perceived level of fairness with the evaluation, a key to success with the evaluation system.  Another key factor is that teachers have to demonstrate high levels of performance on a continuous basis in order to keep their advanced level and compensation for that level. Since these studies were conducted in the 1980s, there has been no significant research regarding career ladders for teachers.

Elmore (2000), studying shared leadership, indicated that the practice of shared leadership is successful when it involves collective responsibility combines with shared knowledge and roles. The paradigm shift from a single leader to a shared leadership model if fraught with challenges, such as how to create a system that allows for an orderly transition to the new way people approach their job.  The new activities must be flexible enough to allow large-scale reform and not simply operating in historical ways.  TAP addresses the challenge of allowing a smooth transition to shared leadership with a school structure that fundamentally changes how individuals operate and interact within the school. TAP also provides financial and professional development support incentives to encourage the change.

Ongoing, Applied Professional Development

Elmore and Burney (1997) defined successful professional development as a program that focuses on concrete classroom applications of general ideas, exposes teachers to actual practice rather than descriptions of practice, offers opportunities for observation, critique, and reflection, involves group support and collaboration, and includes deliberate evaluation and feedback by skilled practitioners with expertise on good teaching.

The Eisenhower Professional Development Program from the U.S. Department of Education (2000) further defined professional development by defining six essential features of high-quality professional development.  The U.S. Department of Education (2000) reported that the six features increase teachers' skills and knowledge enough to change their practice.  It is important to note, however, that the changes in practice are self-reported. They further broke these down into two groups: structure features (activity structure characteristics), and core features (activity substance characteristics).

The features are divided into two categories: (a) structure features and (b) core features.  The structure features included the type of reform, the duration of the activities, and collective participation. The types of reform that were identified as high quality involved collaboration on a teacher-to-teacher level, such as mentoring, teacher networking, and teacher study groups.  This collaboration is in stark contrast to the traditional courses, conferences and workshopthat teachers typically attend. The duration of the activity was also defined. The essential elements involve activities that continue over a long period of time. Collective participation refers to how schools group teachers for delivering professional development. The groups should be teachers within the same school, but can be sub-grouped by subject taught, grade level, or student level.  The main emphasis is that the teachers should participate in professional development groups made up of teachers from the same school, rather than teachers from different schools.

Core features include active learning, coherence, and content focus. The extent to which professional development allows teachers the opportunity to become active participants in analyzing teaching and learning describes active learning.  Coherence considers how activities include teacher goals that are aligned to state and district standards and assessments. Coherence also connects to collective participation in that it also encourages ongoing professional dialogue among teachers. Content focus is defined as how the activity enhances and deepens content knowledge.

Guskey (2000) found that professional development practices and strategies that could be directly tied to resulting improvements in student achievement had four common principles. According to his research, successful initiatives focused on learning and learners, emphasized the individual and organizational change, guided small changes by a grand vision, and embedded ongoing professional development into standard operating procedures.

Instructionally Focused Accountability

The standards of performance applied in TAP quantify teaching skill, knowledge, and responsibility.  The standards, presented in the form of rubrics, were developed based on learning and instruction research in the field of education psychology. The Milken Family Foundation used instructional guidelines and standards from various national and state organizations, including the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, the National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, Massachusetts' Principles for Effective Teaching, California's Standards for the Teaching Profession, Connecticut's Beginning Educator Support Program, and New Teacher Center's Developmental Continuum of Teacher Abilities. The levels of teacher competency were based on thework of Danielson (1996) in order to define the quantified teacher performance levels.

The standards also include teacher responsibility rubrics, which were constructed based on various accountability systems across the U.S. The systems that were used as references were: (a) the Rochester (New York) Career in Teaching Program, (b) the Douglas County (Colorado) Teacher's Performance Pay Plan, (c) the Vaughn Next Century Charter School (Los Angeles, CA) Performance Pay Plan, and (d) the Rolla (Missouri) School District Professional Based Teacher Evaluation. The work of Rowley (1999) also influenced the development of the responsibility standards rubrics.

The TAP rubrics are applied to teachers' instruction in the classroom and to the responsibilities that they carry out throughout the school year.  The classroom instructional rubrics are used with every teacher between four and six times each year. The "Implementing Instruction" rubric has 12 standards and draws heavily from the work of Brophy and Good (1986), Gardner (1993, 1997), Perkins (1986), Sternberg (1985, 1998), and Sternberg, Torff, and Grigorenko (1998).

For each evaluation, the "Designing and Planning Instruction" rubric is applied.  It has three standards on the rubric.  This rubric is applied to the teacher's lesson plans, student work, and assessments. The "Designing and Planning Instruction" standards were developed using the work of Baker (1996, 1997), Danielson (1996), Hunter (1982), and Newmann, Bryk and Nagaoka (2001).

Performance-based Compensation

For the past 50 years K-12 teachers' pay has been based on number of years experience and credits earned. However, neither the number of years of teaching experience nor the credits earned by a teacher is a predictor of student achievement (Greenwald, Hedges & Lane, 1996; Hanushek, 1989). Performance award programs can be successful, but only if they are tied directly with professional development activities for teachers, accurate and consistent analyses of student achievement, strong feedback for teachers, and building-level leadership (Odden, 2000; Odden & Kelley, 1996).

Individual performance-based pay systems tied to individual performance levels have been in place in most private sectors since the 1980s (Malanga, 2001). Malanga (2001) also reported that more than half of all U.S. companies had some type of incentive pay program in place by the 1990s in order to encourage higher levels of productivity and of quality with employees work. Some even attribute the growth in private sector workplace productivity in the 1990s to these performance pay programs (Malanga, 2001).

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