What do educators themselves say about the best way to improve teacher effectiveness?

See Mike Petrilli's post on the Fordham "Gadfly" about how we should focus more on making the teachers we have more effective, rather than continuing to search for the elusive "higher quality" teacher through strategies like eliminating tenure, pay for performance, or alternative certification.

While I agree with the thrust of his argument, his suggestion that one way of doing this through "augmenting technology" is bogus. No study has shown that technology improves teacher effectiveness or raises student achievement.

Instead, teachers themselves say that the best way to improve their effectiveness by far is to reduce class size. See the recent national survey of first year teachers from Public Agenda, called "Lessons Learned" .

76% of teachers overall said that reducing class size would be "a very effective" way of improving teacher quality, and 78% of teachers who work in high needs schools. 21% of teachers said reducing class size would be "effective", for a total of 97% -- far outstripping every other strategy mentioned, including :

Increasing teacher salaries (57%), increasing professional development opportunities (54%), making it easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers (41%), requiring new teachers to spend time under the supervision of experienced teachers (35%) requiring graduate degrees in education (21%), requiring teachers to pass tough tests of their knowledge ot their subject (21%), tying salaries to principal or colleagues assessment (15%) tying rewards and sanctions to student performance (13%), eliminating tenure (12%), reducing regulations for teacher certification (8%), and relying more on alternative certificaiton (6%)..

(In each of the categories I have put in parentheses the percent who said this would be a "very effective" way to to improve teacher quality.)

By the way, these views about the effectiveness of reducing class size to improve teacher effectiveness are shared by more experienced teachers and most principals as well.

See this 2006 public agenda survey of teachers and school administrators, "Is Support for Standards and Testing Fading."

"If the public schools finally got more money and smaller classes, they could do a better job." 88% of teachers agreed with this statement, and 85% of superintendents and principals, far outstripping any response.

Compare how many teachers, superintendents and principals agreed with this statement: "More testing and higher standards will ensure kids will master the skills they need": 1% (teachers), 7% (supers); 10% (principals).

If we really respected the opinions and views of the professionals who work in our schools, we would do everything in our power to reduce class size.

Why are inside-the-beltway so clueless at diagnosing the real problems of our public schools?

See the typical screed in Slate, by Ray Fisman, a professor at the Columbia Business School, subtitled “Why are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?” It decries the inability of principals to get rid of incompetent teachers, and attributes poverty, the achievement gap and God knows what else to teacher tenure.

Strangely enough, it reports that the principal featured in the story, Anthony Lombardi at PS 49 in Queens, managed to get rid of one third of entire his teaching staff since he arrived, despite the existence of tenure, and, you got it, test scores rose.

The article doesn’t question that looking at test scores alone may not be the best or the only way to evaluate teachers or the quality of education. This is peculiar, especially since Lombardi seems to have rated his teachers not by looking at their test scores, but by examining their lesson plans and observing them in action, which is exactly how tenure decisions are made now.

(By the way, the school got a “B” in its recent DOE school progress report, for whatever that’s worth. And the teachers who remain at the school, though they may have been spared Lombardi’s wrath, don’t seem to respect him much – in the teacher survey, 50% disagreed with the statement that “School leaders invite teachers to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions for this school for this school,” And 57% disagree that “School leaders encourage open communication on important school issues.”

Most notably, the article omits the fact that teachers no longer have the right of automatic transfer – and in fact implies otherwise: “Since his arrival, a third of PS 49's teachers have been squeezed out through Lombardi's efforts. Of course, this just meant they were moved to another classroom in another school, lowering the test scores of someone else's children.”

Perhaps this inaccuracy results from the fact that much of the description of Lombardi and his schools seem to be lifted directly from a now-outdated NY Magazine article from 2003 (click here).

But the most interesting aspect of the piece, to me anyway, is that it cites the findings in a study by Kane, Staiger and Gordon (yes, the infamous Robert Gordon) that the quality of teaching in LA did not diminish one iota after they had to triple their hiring of teachers to reduce class size, despite the repeated claims of the Bloomberg/Klein administration that lowering class size in NYC would inevitably do just this. In fact, there is no evidence in the research literature that this has ever occurred.

To the contrary, providing them with smaller classes is the most certain way to improve the effectiveness of the teachers we already have in NYC, as well as reducing our sky-high attrition levels, in the process making it more likely that students have experienced teachers – the most reliable predictor of effectiveness, as parents know and which is also backed up by research. It is widely known that no private school in NYC will hire a first year teacher, but makes them spend a couple of years of “seasoning” in the public schools first.