[House Hearing, 113 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
EXPLORING EFFORTS TO STRENGTHEN THE
TEACHING PROFESSION
=======================================================================
JOINT HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EARLY CHILDHOOD,
ELEMENTARY, AND SECONDARY EDUCATION
AND THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HIGHER EDUCATION AND
WORKFORCE TRAINING
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
AND THE WORKFORCE
U.S. House of Representatives
ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, FEBRUARY 27, 2014
__________
Serial No. 113-47
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Education and the Workforce
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COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE
JOHN KLINE, Minnesota, Chairman
Thomas E. Petri, Wisconsin George Miller, California,
Howard P. ``Buck'' McKeon, Senior Democratic Member
California Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott,
Joe Wilson, South Carolina Virginia
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Ruben Hinojosa, Texas
Tom Price, Georgia Carolyn McCarthy, New York
Kenny Marchant, Texas John F. Tierney, Massachusetts
Duncan Hunter, California Rush Holt, New Jersey
David P. Roe, Tennessee Susan A. Davis, California
Glenn Thompson, Pennsylvania Raul M. Grijalva, Arizona
Tim Walberg, Michigan Timothy H. Bishop, New York
Matt Salmon, Arizona David Loebsack, Iowa
Brett Guthrie, Kentucky Joe Courtney, Connecticut
Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee Marcia L. Fudge, Ohio
Todd Rokita, Indiana Jared Polis, Colorado
Larry Bucshon, Indiana Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan,
Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Northern Mariana Islands
Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania Frederica S. Wilson, Florida
Joseph J. Heck, Nevada Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon
Susan W. Brooks, Indiana Mark Pocan, Wisconsin
Richard Hudson, North Carolina
Luke Messer, Indiana
Juliane Sullivan, Staff Director
Jody Calemine, Minority Staff Director
------
SUBCOMMITTEE ON EARLY CHILDHOOD,ELEMENTARY, AND SECONDARY EDUCATION
TODD ROKITA, Indiana, Chairman
John Kline, Minnesota Carolyn McCarthy, New York,
Thomas E. Petri, Wisconsin Ranking Minority Member
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott,
Kenny Marchant, Texas Virginia
Duncan Hunter, California Susan A. Davis, California
David P. Roe, Tennessee Raul M. Grijalva, Arizona
Glenn Thompson, Pennsylvania Marcia L. Fudge, Ohio
Susan W. Brooks, Indiana Jared Polis, Colorado
Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan,
Northern Mariana Islands
Mark Pocan, Wisconsin
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HIGHER EDUCATION AND WORKFORCE TRAINING
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina, Chairwoman
Thomas E. Petri, Wisconsin Ruben Hinojosa, Texas
Howard P. ``Buck'' McKeon, Ranking Minority Member
California John F. Tierney, Massachusetts
Glenn Thompson, Pennsylvania Timothy H. Bishop, New York
Tim Walberg, Michigan Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon
Matt Salmon, Arizona Carolyn McCarthy, New York
Brett Guthrie, Kentucky Rush Holt, New Jersey
Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania Susan A. Davis, California
Joseph J. Heck, Nevada David Loebsack, Iowa
Susan W. Brooks, Indiana Frederica S. Wilson, Florida
Richard Hudson, North Carolina
Luke Messer, Indiana
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on February 27, 2014................................ 1
Statement of Members:
Foxx, Hon. Virginia, Chairwoman, Subcommittee On Higher
Education and Workforce Training........................... 5
Prepared statement of.................................... 6
Hinojosa, Hon. Ruben, Ranking Minority Member, Subcommittee
on Higher Education and Workforce Training................. 9
Prepared statement of.................................... 10
Polis, Hon. Jared, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Colorado.......................................... 7
Prepared statement of.................................... 9
Rokita, Hon. Todd, Chairman, Subcommittee On Early Childhood,
Elementary, and Secondary Education........................ 1
Prepared statement of.................................... 4
Statement of Witnesses:
Gist, Deborah,A., Dr., Commissioner, Rhode Island Department
of Elementary and Secondary Education, Providence, RI...... 11
Prepared statement of.................................... 14
Hall, Christina, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Urban Teacher
Center, Baltimore, MD...................................... 41
Prepared statement of.................................... 43
Peske, Heather, G., Dr., Associate Commissioner for Educator
Quality, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and
Secondary Education, Malden, MA,........................... 31
Prepared statement of.................................... 34
Singer-Gabella, Marcy, Dr., Professor of The Practice of
Education, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN............ 20
Prepared statement of.................................... 23
Additional Submissions:
Mr. Davis:
American Psychological Association, prepared statement of 73
Mr. Hinojosa:
Association of Texas Professional Educators ATPE,
prepared statement of.................................. 78
Chairman Rokita questions submitted for the record to:
Dr. Gist................................................. 84
Ms. Hall................................................. 86
Peske.................................................... 88
Dr. Singer-Gabella....................................... 90
Response to questions submitted:
Dr. Gist................................................. 92
Ms. Hall................................................. 97
Dr. Peske................................................ 102
Dr. Singer-Gabella....................................... 105
EXPLORING EFFORTS TO STRENGTHEN THE
TEACHING PROFESSION
Thursday, February 27, 2014
U.S. House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary,
and Secondary Education,
joint with
Subcommittee on Higher Education and
Workforce Training
Committee on Education and the Workforce,
Washington, D.C.
----------
The subcommittees met, pursuant to call, at 10:05 a.m., in
Room 2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Todd Rokita
[chairman of the Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary
Education subcommittee] presiding.
Present from Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary
Education subcommittee: Representatives Rokita, Kline, Foxx,
Roe, Brooks, Scott, Davis, Polis, and Pocan.
Present from Higher Education and Workforce Training
subcommittee: Representatives Foxx, Walberg, Salmon, Guthrie,
Brooks, Hudson, Messer, Bonamici, Davis, and Wilson.
Staff present: Janelle Belland, Coalitions and Members
Services Coordinator; James Bergeron, Director of Education and
Human Services Policy; Lindsay Fryer, Professional Staff
Member; Amy Raaf Jones, Deputy Director of Education and Human
Services Policy; Nancy Locke, Chief Clerk; Daniel Murner, Press
Assistant; Krisann Pearce, General Counsel; Jenny Prescott,
Legislative Assistant; Dan Shorts, Legislative Assistant; Alex
Sollberger, Communications Director; Alissa Strawcutter, Deputy
Clerk; Brad Thomas, Senior Education Policy Advisor; Tylease
Alli, Minority Clerk/Intern and Fellow Coordinator; Jeremy
Ayers, Minority Education Policy Advisor; Kelly Broughan,
Minority Education Policy Associate; Jody Calemine, Minority
Staff Director; Jamie Fasteau, Minority Director of Education
Policy; Scott Groginsky, Minority Education Policy Advisor;
Julia Krahe, Minority Communications Director; Brian Levin,
Minority Deputy Press Secretary/New Media Coordinator; Megan
O'Reilly, Minority General Counsel; and Michael Zola, Minority
Deputy Staff Director.
Chairman Rokita. Finding a quorum present, the subcommittee
will come to order. Good morning, and welcome to today's joint
subcommittee hearing.
I would like to thank our witnesses for being here to help
us examine ways we can work together to encourage better
teachers in our nation's schools.
I would like to thank my colleague from North Carolina, Dr.
Foxx, the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education
and Workforce Training, for agreeing to hold this joint hearing
on ``Exploring Efforts to Strengthen the Teaching Profession.''
Today we will have opening statements from the chairmen and
the ranking members of each subcommittee.
And with that, I recognize myself for my opening statement.
Ladies and gentlemen, research has confirmed that teachers
have an enormous influence on student learning and performance.
Outside of their parents, teachers are often the single
greatest influence on students' ability to build the best
possible life for themselves.
Whether as a parent or in our own school days, many of us
have had the fortune to witness firsthand the impact of a truly
exceptional educator and what effect the educator can have on a
child's life. Effective teachers can motivate students to
explore the unknown, think critically, and challenge
expectations. Because we fight not only for our children, but
for all people so that they can build better lives for
themselves and their families, we must also find ways to see
that teachers achieve greater success.
Most educators earn a degree from an education program at a
traditional 4-year college or university. After obtaining the
degree the prospective teachers must then pass the state
licensure or certification exams to become eligible to teach in
that state. As the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Higher
Education and Workforce Training will explain in her remarks,
far too many teacher preparation programs, also known as
``teacher colleges,'' are underperforming and failing to ensure
new educators are ready for success in the classroom.
States play a major role in improving teacher quality and
preparation, as they have authority over the licensure and
certification requirements. Recognizing teacher preparation
programs aren't making the grade, some states have proactively
raised teacher preparation program standards and taken steps to
tie teacher effectiveness to license renewal.
In Rhode Island, for example, the state board of education
recently strengthened admission criteria and implemented
policies to hold novice teachers accountable for improving
student achievement. Additionally, the state has forged
valuable partnerships with local school districts to better
align pre-service training with the needs of today's students.
We will learn more about the efforts underway at the state
level from our witness, Dr. Deborah Gist--is that right? Okay,
thank you--commissioner of the Rhode Island Department of
Elementary and Secondary Education.
We also have with us today Ms. Christina Hall from the
Urban Teacher Center, an alternative certification program
based in Baltimore. These programs allow individuals who
already have a postsecondary degree and work experience to earn
certification to teach without completing a traditional teacher
education program.
Alternative certification programs have become increasingly
popular in recent years, particularly with the release of
studies confirming alternatively certified educators are just
as effective as traditionally certified teachers. Additionally,
the alternative routes help districts address educator
shortages quickly and more efficiently, helping to ensure more
students have access to good teachers, and isn't that the
point?
The House Education and Workforce Committee has also been
working to encourage more effective educators. Last year we
successfully advanced the Student Success Act, legislation to
revamp federal K-12 education law that includes a number of key
provisions affecting teachers.
First, the Student Success Act eliminates the antiquated,
quote--``highly qualified teacher,'' unquote, or HQT, provision
that values an educator's degrees or credentials over his or
her ability to motivate students in the classroom. States,
school districts, and teachers have criticized this policy for
years and it is past time we got rid of it.
Second, the legislation includes language to support state
or school district efforts to develop unique teacher evaluation
systems, helping ensure educators can be fairly judged on their
ability to raise student achievement.
Finally, the Student Success Act also consolidates most of
the teacher quality programs in current K-12 education law into
a Teacher and School Leader Flexible Grant. The new grant
program also absorbs some of the ideas behind the Teacher
Quality Partnership Grant program under the Higher Education
Act.
The Teacher and School Leader Flexible Grant supports
creative approaches to recruit and retain effective teachers
and grants districts the authority to partner with higher
education institutions and other organizations to improve
teacher and school leader prep programs. Additionally, states,
alone or in partnership with state agencies of higher
education, can use these funds under the grant program to
reform teacher certification, recertification, and licensing;
improve state teacher preparation programs; or improve
alternate certification programs.
But we must not rely exclusively on our teachers, for many
are asked to do far too much. That is why the Student Success
Act empowers local communities and states with the authority to
find their own solutions.
For example, in Indiana's 4th District Gary Henriott, of
the Henriott Group, and Steve Horne, a volunteer with the
United Way in Lafayette, who are both in attendance today as
part of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce's annual fly-
in, have led an enormously successful school reading program,
called Read to Succeed, that brings business and community
leaders into schools where they not only read and teach
students but provide valuable mentorship for our young people.
One-size-fits-all programs will inevitably limit these sort
of dynamic educational efforts that at their core are
supporting children, teachers, and our communities at large.
Together the policies in the Student Success Act will
encourage states to implement strategies that will help get
better teachers, strengthen families, and enrich communities.
Unfortunately, this critical legislation to revamp the nation's
K-12 system has been awaiting Senate consideration for several
months now. It sits on Senator Reid's desk.
Once again, I urge the Senate to bring education reform
legislation up for a vote as soon as possible. Our children
deserve a better education law and they deserve the greatest
opportunity to build better lives for themselves.
With that, I will now yield to my distinguished colleague,
Higher Education and Workforce Training Subcommittee Chairman
Virginia Foxx, for her opening remarks.
[The statement of Chairman Rokita follows:]
Research has confirmed teachers have an enormous influence on
student learning and performance. Outside of their parents, teachers
are often the single greatest influence on students' ability to build
the best possible life for themselves. Whether as a parent or in our
own school days, many of us have had the fortune to witness firsthand
the impact a truly exceptional educator can have on a child's life.
Effective teachers can motivate students to explore the unknown, think
critically, and challenge expectations. Because we fight, not only for
our children, but for all people, so they can build better lives for
themselves and their families, we must also find ways to see teachers
achieve greater success.
Most educators earn a degree from an education program at a
traditional four-year college or university. After obtaining the
degree, the prospective teachers must then pass the state licensure or
certification exams to become eligible to teach in that state. As the
Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce
Training will explain in her remarks, far too many teacher preparation
programs - also known as `teacher colleges'- are underperforming,
failing to ensure new educators are ready for success in the classroom.
States play a major role in improving teacher quality and
preparation, as they have authority over the licensure and
certification requirements. Recognizing teacher preparation programs
aren't making the grade, some states have proactively raised teacher
preparation program standards, and taken steps to tie teacher
effectiveness to license renewal.
In Rhode Island, for example, the state board of education recently
strengthened admission criteria and implemented policies to hold novice
teachers accountable for improving student achievement. Additionally
the state has forged valuable partnerships with local school districts
to better align pre-service training with the needs of today's
students. We will learn more about the efforts underway at the state
level from our witness, Dr. Deborah Gist, Commissioner of the Rhode
Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
We also have with us today Ms. Christina Hall from the Urban
Teacher Center, an alternative certification program based in
Baltimore. These programs allow individuals who already have a
postsecondary degree and work experience to earn certification to teach
without completing a traditional teacher education program.
Alternative certification programs have become increasingly popular
in recent years, particularly with the release of studies confirming
alternatively certified educators are just as effective as
traditionally certified teachers. Additionally, the alternative routes
help districts address educator shortages quickly and more efficiently,
helping to ensure more students have access to good teachers.
The House Education and the Workforce Committee has also been
working to encourage more effective educators. Last year, we
successfully advanced the Student Success Act, legislation to revamp
federal K-12 education law that includes a number of key provisions
affecting teachers.
First, the Student Success Act eliminates the antiquated ``Highly
Qualified Teacher,'' or HQT, provision that values an educator's
degrees or credentials over his or her ability to motivate students in
the classroom. States, school districts, and teachers have criticized
the policy for years, and it is past time we got rid of it.
Second, the legislation includes language to support state or
school district efforts to develop unique teacher evaluation systems,
helping ensure educators can be fairly judged on their ability to raise
student achievement.
Finally, the Student Success Act also consolidates most of the
teacher quality programs in current K-12 education law into a Teacher
and School Leader Flexible Grant. The new grant program also absorbed
some of the ideas behind the Teacher Quality Partnership grant program
under the Higher Education Act.
The Teacher and School Leader Flexible Grant supports creative
approaches to recruit and retain effective teachers, and grants
districts the authority to partner with higher education institutions
and other organizations to improve teacher and school leader
preparation programs. Additionally, states - alone or in partnership
with state agencies of higher education - can use funds under the grant
program to reform teacher certification, recertification and licensing;
improve state teacher preparation programs; or improve alternative
certification programs.
But we must not rely exclusively on our teachers, for many are
asked to do far too much. That is why the Student Success Act empowers
local communities and states with the authority to find their own
solutions. For example in Indiana's 4th District, Gary Henriott, of the
Henriott Group, and Steve Horne, a volunteer with the United Way in
Lafayette, Indiana, who are both in attendance today as part of the
Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce's annual fly-in, have led an
enormously successful school reading program, called Read to Succeed,
that brings business and community leaders in to schools where they not
only read and teach students but provide valuable mentorship for our
young people.
One size fits all programs will inevitably limit these sort of
dynamic educational efforts that, at their core, are supporting
children, teachers, and our communities at large.
Together the policies in the Student Success Act will encourage
states to implement strategies that will help get better teachers,
strengthen families, and enrich communities. Unfortunately, this
critical legislation to revamp the nation's K-12 system has been
awaiting Senate consideration for several months now. Once again, I
urge the Senate to bring education reform legislation up for a vote as
soon as possible. Our children deserve a better education law, and they
deserve the greatest opportunity possible to build better lives for
themselves.
______
Chairwoman Foxx. Thank you, Chairman Rokita.
Good morning and welcome.
I thank our panel of witnesses for joining us for today's
joint subcommittee hearing on strengthening the teaching
profession. We look forward to your testimony.
So often teachers are unfairly blamed for the problems in
our nation's schools. I had many excellent teachers throughout
my education and have known many exceptional teachers since
then. In fact, my own experience highlights the difference a
good teacher and educational opportunity can make in the life
of a student.
While we will take an honest look at teacher preparation
programs today, I want to commend the hardworking individuals
on the front lines of education every day. I believe I speak
for most if not all of my colleagues here today when I say
there is an urgent need to address the sad state of teacher
preparation programs in this country.
According to the National Council of Teacher Quality's 2013
Teacher Prep Review, teacher preparation programs at American
colleges and universities, quote--``have become an industry of
mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom
management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in
classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic
student diversity.'' The scathing report details myriad
problems within teacher preparation systems, including overly
lenient admissions policies, outdated coursework, and a severe
lack of hands-on classroom experience.
In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, education
consultant Harold Kwalwasser and Napa County Superintendent,
Dr. Barbara Nemko echoed the National Council of Teacher
Quality's findings, stating, quote--``Too often these future
educators learn to 'teach' math but they don't necessarily
learn how to do the math itself,'' end quote.
Without strong teacher preparation programs we cannot make
real progress in our efforts to improve K-12 schools, raise
graduation rates, and help more children get on the path to a
successful future. It is time to shine a bright light on the
problems with teacher preparation as we examine ways school
districts, postsecondary institutions, organizations, and
states are working together to challenge the status quo.
Chairman Rokita has already discussed ways states and
school districts are working to bring more effective teachers
into the classroom and reviewed our efforts in the Student
Success Act to support state and local efforts to recruit,
hire, and retain better teachers.
On the postsecondary level, four institutions have earned
national recognition for their efforts to strengthen the
teaching profession. Rigorous coursework, high academic
standards, and extensive hands-on experience at The Ohio State
University, Lipscomb University, Furman University, and
Vanderbilt University have earned these institutions' teacher
preparation programs high marks from the National Council on
Teacher Quality.
We are fortunate to have Dr. Marcy Singer-Gabella from
Vanderbilt's Peabody College with us today to describe the
institution's efforts to ensure students graduate ready to move
to the front of the classroom.
As the committee continues to prepare for the
reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, reducing
regulatory burdens on higher education institutions remains a
top priority. Like most postsecondary programs, teacher
colleges are overwhelmed with reporting requirements, few of
which have any real bearing on the quality of teachers produced
by the programs.
While we agree on the need to strengthen data collection
under the law, we must make sure the right kind of data is
collected to provide helpful information. I look forward to
continuing conversations with my colleagues on ways to help
states and schools report useful, timely information for
policymakers, states, districts, institutions, prospective
teachers, and the public. We also must ensure federally
mandated reporting requirements do not create additional
burdens or hinder the good work already underway.
We must also continue monitoring actions by the Obama
administration that would increase federal overreach and limit
innovation in postsecondary education, especially with regard
to the teaching profession. I remain concerned about the
direction of the administration's spring 2012 negotiated
rulemaking session, which did not result in consensus among
participants.
Though the regulations have yet to be released, I am wary
of any new federal dictates on teacher preparation programs,
program quality, and teacher effectiveness. These
responsibilities are best left to states and institutions, not
federal bureaucrats.
Once again, I would like to thank our witnesses for joining
us today. We look forward to learning your views on
strengthening the teaching profession.
And with that, I yield back.
[The statement of Chairwoman Foxx follows:]
So often teachers are unfairly blamed for the problems in our
nation's school. I had excellent teachers throughout my education and
know many exceptional teachers. In fact, my own experience highlights
the difference a good teacher and educational opportunity can make in
the life of a student. While we will take an honest look at teacher
preparation programs today, I want to commend the hardworking
individuals on the frontlines of education every day.
I believe I speak for most, if not all, of my colleagues here today
when I say there is an urgent need to address the sad state of teacher
preparation programs in this country. According to the National Council
of Teacher Quality's 2013 Teacher Prep Review, teacher preparation
programs at American colleges and universities ``have become an
industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom
management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in
classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student
diversity.''
The scathing report details myriad problems within teacher
preparation systems, including overly-lenient admissions policies,
outdated coursework, and a severe lack of hands-on classroom
experience. In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, education
consultant Harold Kwalwasser and Napa County Superintendent Dr. Barbara
Nemko echoed the National Council of Teacher Quality's findings,
stating, ``Too often, these future educators learn to `teach' math, but
they don't necessarily learn how to do the math itself.''
Without strong teacher preparation programs, we cannot make real
progress in our efforts to improve K-12 schools, raise graduation
rates, and help more children get on the path to a successful future.
It is time to shine a bright light on the problems with teacher
preparation as we examine ways school districts, postsecondary
institutions, organizations, and states are working together to
challenge the status quo.
Chairman Rokita has already discussed ways states and school
districts are working to bring more effective teachers into the
classroom, and reviewed our efforts in the Student Success Act to
support state and local efforts to recruit, hire, and retain better
educators.
On the postsecondary level, four institutions have earned national
recognition for their efforts to strengthen the teaching profession.
Rigorous coursework, high academic standards, and extensive hands-on
experience at The Ohio State University, Lipscomb University, Furman
University, and Vanderbilt University have earned these institutions'
teacher preparation programs high marks from the National Council on
Teacher Quality. We are fortunate to have Dr. Marcy Singler-Garbella
from Vanderbilt's Peabody College with us today to describe the
institution's efforts to ensure students graduate ready to move to the
front of the classroom.
As the committee continues to prepare for the reauthorization of
the Higher Education Act, reducing regulatory burdens on higher
education institutions remains a top priority. Like most postsecondary
programs, teacher colleges are overwhelmed with reporting requirements,
few of which have any real bearing on the quality of teachers produced
by the programs.
While we agree on the need to strengthen data collection under the
law, we must make sure the right kind of data is collected to provide
helpful information. I look forward to continuing conversations with my
colleagues on ways to help states and schools report useful, timely
information for policymakers, states, districts, institutions,
prospective teachers, and the public. We also must ensure federally
mandated reporting requirements do not create additional burdens or
hinder the good work already underway.
We must also continue monitoring actions by the Obama
administration that would increase federal overreach and limit
innovation in postsecondary education, especially with regard to the
teaching profession. I remain concerned about the direction of the
administration's spring 2012 negotiated rulemaking session, which did
not result in consensus among participants. Though the regulations have
yet to be released, I am wary of any new federal dictates on teacher
preparation programs, program quality, and teacher effectiveness. These
responsibilities are best left to states and institutions, not federal
bureaucrats.
______
Chairman Rokita. Thank you, Dr. Foxx.
I now yield to my distinguished colleague from Colorado,
Mr. Jared Polis, for his opening remarks.
Mr. Polis. I thank the chair. I am thrilled that the
committee has called this important hearing.
Not only does our own personal experience highlight the
importance of our own teachers that we had and that I had
growing up, and common sense indicates that the most important
factor is a teacher in the classroom, but the data bears out
that there is no more important school-level factor that
influences a child's education than the quality of the teacher
that they have.
On day one our teachers need to enter the classroom with
the skills, the knowledge they need to succeed. We need to make
sure we prepare teachers for success, that they are evaluated
fairly, that they are compensated well, and that they have
working conditions that allow them to thrive in helping their
students achieve.
Unfortunately, our system for preparing teachers today is
hit or miss and systemically is falling short of ensuring that
we have enough quality teachers to enter particularly the
classrooms that serve our most at-risk kids. According to a
recent study of schools of education, almost two-thirds of
recent school of education alumni reported that schools of
education at 4-year colleges did not adequately prepare them to
enter the classroom on day one.
Students in high-poverty schools are twice as likely to be
assigned new teachers. This means our most vulnerable students
often bear the brunt of a system that fails to consistently
prepare high-quality teachers to enter the classroom.
But there is good news, as well. We can and we are doing
better.
Across the country innovative teacher preparation programs
like the Urban Teaching Center, the Relay Graduate School of
Education, and the Match Teacher Residency program are breaking
the traditional classroom model, partnering with school
districts, prioritizing practice and coaching instead of
theory, and demonstrating that the first-year teacher does not
need to learn through failure.
That is why I have introduced the bipartisan GREAT Act,
along with Congressman Petri, which would encourage the growth
of teachers and principal academies, which are held accountable
for high standards in exchange for being free from burdensome
input-based regulations that are unrelated to student
achievement. It is our hope that these academies open up the
profession of teaching to people who otherwise might not choose
to enter it, as well as ensure that graduates of the academies
are ready to be excellent teachers on day one.
These programs use video to emulate best practices, allow
novice teachers to learn from mentors and professors who
themselves are experts, and recommend students for licensure
based not on seat time but on proven results. These innovations
are already leading to improved student outcomes as well as
increased teacher retention and morale. Unfortunately, many of
these programs are unable to offer federal financial aid
because they are not able to make it through the current
burdensome, costly accreditation process that focuses more on
inputs than outcomes and hasn't changed in recent history.
On the state level, the Council of Chief State School
Officers has partnered with seven states to adopt bold reform
measures in teacher preparation and licensure. These and other
states are taking a comprehensive approach to improve their
human capital pipelines for teachers by raising the bar on
teacher preparation and performance across all programs.
It is important for states and for the federal government
to support innovation and reform in the field of teacher
preparation. We need to ensure that transparency exists and
remove the Higher Education Act's onerous input-based reporting
requirements, but focus on outcomes to ensure that success is
rewarded.
We have a crucial role to play in ensuring that meaningful
data exists, is collected, is analyzed, that teacher
preparation programs are held accountable, and to promote best
practices in the field.
Doing so in preparation programs requires restructuring of
data systems to ensure that teacher performance can be tracked
back to programs--17 states already have the ability to do
that. We also need to ensure that high-quality induction and
mentoring experiences are available when teachers enter the
classroom.
I look forward to hearing from our esteemed witnesses about
their experiences and perspectives on improving the teaching
profession and investing in our future--America's children.
[The statement of Mr. Polis follows:]
I am very glad that the Committee has called this important
hearing. There is no more important school-level factor influencing our
children's education than the quality of our teaching force.
On day one, our teachers need to enter the classroom with the
skills and knowledge they need to succeed. Unfortunately, our system
for preparing teachers is falling short.
According to a leading study of schools of education, almost two-
thirds of education school alumni reported that schools of education at
four-year colleges did not adequately prepare them for the classroom.
Moreover, students in high-poverty and high-minority schools are
twice as likely to be assigned to new teachers. This means our most
vulnerable students are bearing the brunt of a system that fails to
consistently prepare high-quality educators.
We can do better. Across the country, innovative teacher
preparation programs, like the Urban Teacher Center, the Relay Graduate
School of Education, and MATCH Teacher Residency, are breaking the
traditional classroom model, partnering with K-12 school districts,
prioritizing practice and coaching instead of theory, and demonstrating
that the first year teacher does not need to learn through failure.
These programs use video to emulate best practices, allow novice
teachers to learn from professors who are themselves expert educators,
and recommend students for licensure based on mastery, not ``seat
time.'' These innovations have lead to improved student outcomes and
increased teacher retention.
Unfortunately, many of these programs are unable to offer federal
financial aid because they are not able to make it through a
burdensome, costly accreditation process that focuses more on inputs
than outcomes like teacher performance, job placement, and retention.
On the state level, the Council of Chief State School Officers has
partnered with seven states to adopt bold reform measures in teacher
preparation and licensure. These and other states are taking a
comprehensive approach to improve their human capital pipelines by
raising the bar on teacher preparation program performance.
It is important for states and for the federal government to
support innovation and reform in the field of teacher preparation. We
need to remove the Higher Education Act's onerous input-based reporting
requirements, and focus on outcomes.
We have a crucial role to play in collecting meaningful data on
program results, holding teacher preparation programs accountable, and
promoting best practices in the field.
Doing so requires increasing the selectivity of who enrolls in
preparation programs, restructuring data systems to ensure that teacher
performance can track back to programs, which 17 states currently have
the ability to do, and ensuring that teachers have high-quality
induction and mentoring experiences when they enter the classroom.
I look forward to hearing from our esteemed witnesses about their
experiences and perspectives on improving the teaching profession and
investing in America's future - our children.
______
Mr. Polis. I would also like to ask unanimous consent to
submit Chairman Hinojosa's statement to the record?
[The statement of Mr. Hinojosa follows:]
Thank you, Representative Polis.
Today's hearing will focus on efforts to strengthen the teaching
profession. As Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Higher Education
and Workforce Training, I believe that all students should have access
to outstanding teachers. Research clearly shows that the most important
factor in the education of a child is teacher quality, followed by
school leadership.
Along the same lines, it is also critical to recruit and train
exemplary teachers who reflect the rich cultural and linguistic
diversity of the student population and local community that they
serve.
Improving the quality of the teaching profession is key to student
success, but we know that it begins with teacher preparation programs,
before teachers actually enter the classroom.
In my view, the federal government, states, and institutions can do
more to improve the quality of teacher preparation programs and ensure
that they are adequately funded.
To begin, federal policy on teacher preparation is limited and not
well-funded. Title II of the Higher Education Act (HEA) provides a mere
$40 million per year and requires states to report on basic aspects of
their teacher preparation programs, but places few requirements on
them. Federal policy can help states reform and improve their teacher
preparation programs. HEA requirements can shift the focus on outcomes
and help teacher preparation program improve.
For example, H.R. 2172, the ``Educator Preparation Reform Act,'' a
bill sponsored by my colleague, Representative Mike Honda, would help
to improve the quality of teaching in high need schools by reforming
and strengthening accountability of educator preparation programs as
well as support partnerships to meet the needs of educators and
educational leaders.
As a proud cosponsor of the bill, I would like to see improvements
to the Teacher Quality
Partnership Grants Program in Title II of the Higher Education Act.
Finally, I want to underscore what is quite obvious in to us in my
home state of Texas: American public schools have and will continue to
become increasingly diverse. Students of color in Texas already
comprise the majority of the state's public school enrollments. As a
result, teacher diversity must be a central part of this discussion.
In 2013, the Equity and Excellence Commission's report, entitled
``For Each and Every Child'' provided a number of recommendations to
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to address the teacher quality
pipeline.
With regard to teacher diversity, I am pleased that the commission
highlighted the importance of this issue.
In particular, the Commission called on teacher training and
professional development programs to be tailored to meet the needs of
today's contemporary classrooms, where students of color, low-income
students and students learning English as a second language are
increasingly the majority.
The commission also recommended that states recruit and retain
excellent multilingual teachers and teachers of color.
In closing, I look forward to hearing from our distinguished
panelists on how our nation can strengthen the teaching profession and
improve student success for all.
Thank you!
______
Chairman Rokita. Without objection. And thank you, Mr.
Polis.
I now would like to say for the record, pursuant to
committee rule 7(c) all subcommittee members will be permitted
to submit written statements to be included in the permanent
hearing record. And without objection, the hearing record will
remain open for 14 days to allow statements, questions for the
record, and other extraneous material referenced during the
hearing to be submitted into the official record.
It is now my pleasure to introduce our distinguished panel
of witnesses.
Again, we have joining us this morning Dr. Deborah Gist.
She is the commissioner of the Rhode Island Department of
Elementary and Secondary Education.
Before coming to Rhode Island she served as the first state
superintendent of education for the District of Columbia. She
also serves as a founding member of Chiefs for Change.
We also have with us this morning Dr. Marcy Singer-Gabella.
She is a professor and associate chair for teacher education in
the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt
University. Before coming to Vanderbilt she taught high school
social studies in New York and worked with the Stanford
School's Collaborative Professional Development Center in the
California Bay Area.
Welcome.
Dr. Heather Peske is the associate commissioner for
educator quality at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary
and Secondary Education. Prior to that role she was vice
president of programs at Teach Plus. She has also served as the
director of teacher quality at the Education Trust and as an
elementary school teacher and Teach for America Corps member in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Welcome.
Ms. Christina Hall is the cofounder and co-director of the
Urban Teacher Center in Baltimore, Maryland. Prior to co-
launching Urban Teacher Center, Ms. Hall was chief of staff for
the chief academic officer in Baltimore City Public Schools.
She has also served as an attorney advocating for disadvantaged
youth at the Department of Social Services for the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts and as a public high school teacher.
Welcome to you, Ms. Hall.
Before I recognize each of you to provide your testimony
let me briefly explain our lighting system.
You will each have 5 minutes to present your testimony.
When you begin the light in front of you will turn green; when
1 minute is left the light will turn yellow; when your time has
expired the light will turn red. At that point I ask you to
wrap up your remarks as best as you are able.
After everyone has testified, members will each have 5
minutes to ask questions of the panel--fairly self-explanatory.
It is mostly a reminder for us up here about the lighting
system.
I would now like to recognize Dr. Gist for 5 minutes.
Dr. Gist?
STATEMENT OF DR. DEBORAH A. GIST, COMMISSIONER, RHODE ISLAND
DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION, PROVIDENCE,
RI
Ms. Gist. Good morning, Chairman Rokita, and good morning,
Chairwoman Foxx and Representative Polis and all of the members
of the committee. It is really an honor to be here this morning
to talk with you about a topic that is truly important to all
of us as Americans, the issue of educator quality and teacher
preparation.
My name is Deborah Gist. I am the Commissioner of Education
in Rhode Island.
I also serve on the board of directors of the Council for
the Accreditation of Teacher--Educator Preparation, which is
known as CAEP. I am also a member of the technical panel for
the Teacher Prep Review for the National Council of Teacher
Quality, and as a member of the board of directors of the
Council of Chief State School Officers, which has provided
tremendous support to those of us in our states as we do all of
our work, but including our work with teacher preparation.
Because of my work in all of these different roles I have
an appreciation for how necessary it is that we make dramatic
improvements to our current system of teacher preparation. To
teach successfully our graduates need--they need to know their
subject, they need to know how to reach a diverse population of
students, and they need to know how to apply their learning and
their skill in the classroom.
So recognizing this need, in Rhode Island we worked closely
over the past year, with our partners in higher education in
our state, to significantly revise our approval standards for
our educator preparation programs, and our board adopted these
standards in November. I have attached them and you should have
a copy of those standards.
These new standards that we put in place in our state were
modeled after the standards developed by CAEP, the Council for
the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. And there was a
large commission that worked on that; I am sure you are
familiar with that work. So we modeled our standards after
CAEP.
So I want to tell you a little bit about those standards. I
will just talk about four different--or five different parts of
those standards.
The first is that we are focused on the importance of
classroom practice, with more emphasis on partnerships between
our preparation programs and the schools--the K-12 schools
within our state. We want to make sure that our aspiring
teachers have experiences in our classrooms with students. We
want our teacher preparation programs to coordinate with our
schools and make sure that those field placements are high
quality and make sure that aspiring teachers are performing and
getting strong feedback when they are in those programs.
Second, we want our teaching force to reflect the diversity
of students in Rhode Island. Therefore, we expect our teacher
preparation programs to recruit, to make sure that they have
diverse candidates that they are bringing into their programs
and supporting all candidates as they strive to become
teachers.
Third, we expect our teacher preparation programs to have
criteria and assessments to determine whether or not their
candidates are truly ready to be candidates for certification.
That all starts with how they attract and recruit and the
selection criteria they use when aspiring teachers are coming
into their programs. And then they also need to evaluate their
performance once they are actually in their practicums.
And fourth, we expect our programs to continue to gather
information about the performance of their graduates through at
least the first year of their teaching by gathering feedback
from the graduates and from their employers.
And finally, we are going to be sharing data about and
report information widely, and we are going to do it publicly
through a series of report cards on each preparation program.
I strongly encourage the committee to take note of the work
that state leaders have done, that educators in the field have
done, and national organizations such as CAEP have done. There
is a lot of movement happening in this area, and we are really
engaged in making changes--dramatic changes in the system,
including through educator preparation program accreditation,
which is what CAEP is responsible for.
So I am sure you are aware that all of our states currently
provide a report to the U.S. Department of Education on our
educator preparation programs, and going forward it would be
helpful if this data collection were limited to data points
that provide evidence of quality, and that our states and our
educator preparation programs find the data that they are
gathering and reporting to be actually valuable, such as data
that is more focused on outcomes.
It would also be valuable if we could gather and analyze
and report this data not just aggregated across the preparation
institutions, but designated by the programs that they have, so
early childhood, elementary, secondary, for example.
I think it is important that states retain the authority to
set their own benchmarks for measuring the efficacy of their
preparation programs, but the data and reports on the programs
will be most useful if we are all publicly reporting those data
and that we are sharing with those we are responsible to what
the benchmarks are that we are setting.
We may never know how important the work that we are doing
is because it is just really launching the careers of our
aspiring educators, but we know that we have to do things
differently, and I assure you that things are happening very
differently in our programs across the country. So I am happy
to answer any questions and share in a dialogue with the
committee and with my colleagues on the panel.
[The statement of Dr. Gist follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Rokita. Thank you very much.
I would now like to recognize Dr. Singer-Gabella for 5
minutes.
Doctor?
STATEMENT OF DR. MARCY SINGER-GABELLA, PROFESSOR OF THE
PRACTICE OF EDUCATION, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, NASHVILLE, TN
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Chairman Rokita, Chairwoman Foxx,
Congressman Polis, Congressman Hinojosa, members of the
subcommittees, thank you for inviting me to talk with you today
about Vanderbilt's teacher education programs. I serve as
associate chair for teacher education and work closely with
faculty across two departments responsible for preparing early
childhood, elementary, secondary, and special education
teachers.
In my comments I want to first set the context for our work
and then offer some examples of how we are preparing teachers
to succeed and persist in the profession.
My colleagues and I view teacher preparation as a larger
system of schooling intended to prepare youth to flourish in
work and civic life. In the U.S. this larger system currently
faces profound challenges. Let me point to three that shape and
motivate our work as teacher educators.
First, a bimodal distribution of school performance, with
schools at one end that are doing quite well, and a significant
number of schools, typically at the lower end of the
socioeconomic spectrum, that are not doing well at all.
Second, a teacher workforce for which the modal number of
years of experience has shifted from 15 to 1 in just over two
decades. That means that teachers have taught for--that more
teachers have taught for only 1 year than have taught 5, 10, or
15. Key causes of this shift include the absence of a real
career path, low levels of respect and compensation, and the
sapping of motivation caused by an imbalance of interest in
test scores.
And third, system churn, caused by the very real difficulty
of teaching in struggling schools, and increasing reliance on
temporary teachers--young, bright, very talented individuals
who are entering teaching for the short term as a stepping
stone to another career.
At Vanderbilt our goal is to prepare teachers who have the
knowledge, skills, and stamina to succeed and to stay in the
profession. We believe that our chances of success are
intertwined with the fortunes of the schools we serve.
To address the challenges I have noted, schools must become
sites of ongoing learning, growth, and opportunity not only for
students but also for the adults who teach in them. Central to
our strategy, therefore, is the design of partnerships with
schools that attend to the interests and challenges of school
and university simultaneously.
So, for example, with our partner schools we are
redesigning roles that enable teacher candidates to learn the
craft of teaching by working on teams with experienced and
novice teachers over the course of a year. Candidates act as
mentors and tutors for pre-K-12 students and as increasingly
able assistants for master teachers. In turn, master teachers
develop and refine new skills as they support the development
of novices and peers.
By matching up our candidates' needs for real-world
experience and models of practice with schools' needs for more
skilled and caring adults to work with learners we improve and
expand the resources available to schools in which resources
are scarce. Again, we are positioning teacher education in
relation to a bigger project of building schools' capacity to
serve all learners well.
We are finding that really making a difference for students
requires moving beyond egg-crate models of schooling that
isolate teachers from one another, and recruiting and retaining
a more talented and diverse workforce. In my written testimony
I have suggested what this can look like in terms of
reconfigured schedules and teaching assignments, differentiated
staffing patterns, and new compensation arrangements.
In re-centering the learning of teaching and practice we
are not abandoning theory and research. Rather, throughout our
programs we help candidates draw connections between their
experiences in the field and cutting-edge research on learning
and teaching. These connections help candidates develop
principled understanding illustrated by real-world examples
that can guide their future practice. Through these activities
candidates also learn to participate in the kinds of data-
informed collegial conversations that can drive learning
throughout their careers.
So how do we know we are preparing candidates who will make
a positive difference? Here are four measures we are using.
Before they graduate, candidates in my department must pass
the edTPA, a nationally, externally scored, performance-based
measure of candidates' abilities to plan, enact, and assess
teaching and learning of rigorous content. We want to be sure
that our candidates are proficient before they become teachers
of record.
Once candidates take positions teaching, we collect survey
data on employer and graduate satisfaction 1, 3, and 5 years
out from graduation. These data indicate that our graduates
feel well prepared, and their employers agree.
We are now experimenting with surveys of student
perceptions of the classrooms in which our graduates teach.
Recent studies show interesting correlations between the degree
to which learners feel challenged and supported and their
achievement.
And finally, we are working with graduates to gather
administrators' ratings of their teaching on state-approved
observation protocols.
This collection of measures, combined with benchmark
assessments throughout our programs, provide faculty with
invaluable data to check impact and support program
improvement.
Let me close by calling out two areas in which federal
policymakers can help support advancement in the field. First,
we need policy leaders to incentivize partnerships between
schools and preparation programs and to continue to invest in
design-based research to help build and study new arrangements.
Second, policymakers can streamline and refocus reporting
requirements so they are targeted and productive, efficient and
fair. Data collected should be usable and useful, and reporting
guidelines should apply in equal measure to all organizations
that prepare teachers.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify before you
today. I look forward to answering your questions.
[The statement of Dr. Singer-Gabella follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Rokita. Thank you, Doctor.
Dr. Peske, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF DR. HEATHER G. PESKE, ASSOCIATE COMMISSIONER FOR
EDUCATOR QUALITY, MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY AND
SECONDARY EDUCATION, MALDEN, MA, DEMOCRAT WITNESS
Ms. Peske. Thank you for the opportunity to testify this
morning. I care deeply about the issue of educator
effectiveness not only because it is my job but because right
now my first-grade daughter is sitting in a public school
classroom in Massachusetts.
Just last night I was meeting with faculty and
administrators from educator preparation programs. One
professor made the confession, ``Within our program the quality
of the teaching placements varies tremendously across our
placement sites.''
Three months from now hundreds of graduates from
Massachusetts' colleges and universities will graduate with a
license to teach. They will look for jobs--some in
Massachusetts, some in your districts. Some of them will be
well prepared and some of them will be ill-equipped for the
challenges of the classroom. This must change.
In Massachusetts we are building a comprehensive system of
educator preparation strategy to ensure that these program
graduates make impact with their students. The comprehensive
strategy includes four components, which I will outline and
describe briefly today.
The first component is standards and accountability. We
have new regulations for educator preparation program approval
in order to strengthen program accountability. We have a
revised program review and approval process in order to build a
robust evidentiary base from which to decide whether a program
can continue or whether it should be closed down.
The second component is investing in local districts. It is
essential that local school districts and schools are invested
in educator preparation. We require programs to report on these
partnerships and how the partnerships specifically impact the
candidates and, more importantly, how they impact the students.
This year we will conduct and publicly report on surveys of
district personnel in order to gather data on their level of
satisfaction with the program graduates who have been hired as
teachers and administrators in their schools. We hope these
data will catalyze conversation and further innovation.
The third component is transparency of data and reporting.
For every preparation program in our commonwealth, including
our alternative providers, Massachusetts publishes a publicly
available Educator Preparation Program Profile. This is a way
to both invest in local districts and also to provide data for
the educator prep programs and the alternative programs
themselves.
For the first time we are linking educator workforce data
and educator effectiveness data to educator preparation
programs. We will report this annually and publicly on things
like program graduates' educator evaluation ratings, program
graduates' impact in producing growth in student learning,
employment data, as well as the survey data I mentioned a
moment ago. By analyzing the data from the programs, along with
other data, we will be able to identify low-and high-performing
programs, programs we should replicate and programs we should
not continue.
The fourth component of our strategy is support. We are
committed to providing programs with easy-to-access analytic
reports on a variety of data to answer a number of different
types of questions, such as the following: Where are my program
graduates being employed? Do they stay? How long?
I want to shift now to talk about the federal role. We
believe in Massachusetts there is a critical role for the
federal government in promoting effective teacher education
programs, so I appreciate your consideration of the following
three ideas.
First, we need help from you in order to support and
disseminate research on effective programs. The current
research is really limited in being able to answer questions
like, which components of educator preparation are most
impactful when it comes to producing growth with students? Much
in the same way as the federal government now supports the What
Works Clearinghouse for local school and district policy and
practice, we need a similar analogue in educator preparation.
Second--and this has been mentioned already by my
colleagues--we need help in Title II reporting. We need you to
reduce the hundreds of data elements we are now required to
report on. We need you to develop common metrics and we need
you to focus on the highest-priority data.
Right now my staff spends far too much time collecting
meaningless data to report on Title II. There is little or no
comparability across the states when we report on these
elements, and the metrics and definitions are not common.
We also need a stronger focus in Title II reporting on
outcomes data rather than the hundreds of input measures we
provide for you now.
Number three: We need to provide federal subsidies to
establish new clinical models. Our clinical sites are
suffering. We need funding to sustain these areas.
Right now the federal government provides subsidies to
teaching hospitals in order to train the next generation of
doctors. We need something similar in terms of training the
next generation of teachers.
Without this federal subsidy some hospitals might not take
on the task of training doctors. The same is true for our local
school districts, and I can talk a little bit more in the
questions about the details of that.
I want to conclude with a short story. On July 3, 1839
three young women braved a thunderstorm to enroll in
Massachusetts' first state-supported school dedicated to
training teachers--the first Normal School in America. This
year, 2014, marks the 175th anniversary of the Normal School in
Massachusetts.
As we as a nation reflect on our history of educating
teachers we have to ask ourselves now, what can and should we
do to ensure that the experiences of teacher and principal
candidates prepare them to promote and to excel in developing
college-and career-ready students?
I look forward to the discussion and happily answer your
questions. Thank you again for the opportunity.
[The statement of Dr. Peske follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Rokita. Thank you, Doctor.
Ms. Hall, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF MS. CHRISTINA HALL, CO-FOUNDER AND CO-DIRECTOR,
URBAN TEACHER CENTER, BALTIMORE, MD
Ms. Hall. Thank you.
Chairman Rokita and Chairwoman Foxx, Representative Polis,
and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me here
today to speak with you about this important topic--teacher
quality.
My name is Christina Hall and I am cofounder of Urban
Teacher Center. We are a nonprofit that partners with urban
schools and districts to prepare new teachers.
We have 231 teachers in almost 75 schools in Baltimore and
D.C. Program satisfaction is high--100 percent of our teachers
report that our training gives them the knowledge and skills
they need, and 90 percent of our school partners returned this
year. This is testament to our value because principals pay to
bring us to their buildings.
Best of all, we can already see that our teachers are
getting results. Last year 79 percent--that is 79--79 percent
of our first-year teachers had student achievement gains equal
to or better than the typical second-year teacher.
When we set out to build our program we knew that holding a
degree in teaching is not a proxy for effectiveness, but
because of prevailing compensation systems we wanted to offer
an M.Ed. We considered applying to become our own institute of
higher ed, but an often onerous and sometimes irrelevant
process kept us from seriously considering it.
Instead, we looked for a partner that would embrace broader
criteria for hiring clinical faculty, embark on creating a
whole new preparation program, and accept responsibility for
master's conferral while releasing approval for certification
to UTC. We spoke with almost a dozen colleges and universities
and eventually found Lesley University in Massachusetts. Lesley
agreed to take the leap with us.
Here are a few features of our model: Residents get more
than 1,400 hours of real-time experience in four different
classroom settings before they get the keys to their own
classroom. Every successful candidate earns dual certification
and a dual master's in their subject area and special
education. And every participant receives sustained, on-the-job
coaching for 4 years.
UTC holds the highest bar for teacher certification in the
country, and not every teacher who begins our program gets
certified. Even with intensive support not every promising
candidate develops the qualities of a great teacher. We believe
it is better that we incur the cost of that discovery than our
children.
We begin by recruiting diverse, high-achieving, results-
oriented individuals. Only 25 percent of applicants are
accepted into our program and only 77 percent of our residents
go on to become teachers of record in year 2. Forty percent of
departures in the first year are voluntary; the other 60
percent don't meet our rigorous expectations.
UTC's attrition is strategic, intentional, and minimizes
disruption to student learning. We are very proud to say that
we have had almost zero attrition during the school year in 3
years in Washington, D.C., and only two instances in 3 years in
Baltimore. That is an extraordinary rate for new teachers in
these challenging districts.
Participants who meet our bar for practice and coursework
earn a master's degree after 2 years, but full, permanent
certification takes longer. We only approve teachers for full
certification after they have proven their effectiveness
through student achievement gains and observable classroom
practice. It is an intensive process involving multiple
measures but our logic is simple: We believe the best way to
guarantee that new teachers will be effective is to show that
they have been effective.
In our experience, at least three challenges should be
addressed in order to ensure a great teacher every time for
every student. We would encourage policy leaders at all levels
to focus on broadening access to existing federal dollars.
Open up the routing of funds intended for K-12 systems by
allowing districts to partner with institutions of higher ed
and innovative organizations. Opening up access with quality
control safeguards focused on outputs will result in stronger
partnerships for K-12 school systems to improve teacher
preparation.
Next, encouraging environments at the state level that are
more hospitable to alternative cert providers. In order to
foster more innovation in all markets, encourage states to
permit alt cert providers to enter the teacher prep market. The
best legislation will support and not encumber existing
innovation while simultaneously encouraging new innovation.
Last, spotlighting what works, as I heard from a colleague
up here on the panel. Because we haven't any time to waste,
innovation and practice across the sector should be accompanied
by an assessment of what works and what doesn't. The federal
government can be a valuable resource here in evaluating and
providing information on effective practice, partnership models
and design to inform the entire sector and eliminate
duplication of efforts.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify about our model,
and I look forward to fielding questions, if any, on this
important topic.
[The statement of Ms. Hall follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairman Rokita. Well, thank you, Ms. Hall.
Thank you all.
We will now proceed to member questions, and Dr. Foxx and I
are offering to hold off our questioning for a while in order
to accommodate possibly the schedule of other colleagues.
So with that, Mr. Walberg--Chairman Walberg, you are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Walberg. Thank you so much. Appreciate your willingness
to forego the questions to let further down the table go first,
so thanks, though.
I really, really enjoyed hearing from each of the
panelists. Having a daughter-in-law who went through that
experience of first-year teaching out of college--excited to do
it, was put into a full-time substitute position because the
teacher before her had just walked out of the room of a special
needs classroom in the south side of Chicago and never came
back. My daughter-in-law loved that first year of teaching.
Second year, when she was given the class as a full-time
teacher by her principal, she found out the challenges of
teaching that consist of paperwork for both the Chicago Public
School System, Illinois, and No Child Left Behind reporting
requirements. She came to me with tears in her eyes one time
and said, ``Dad, I am not sure I am cut out for teaching.''
I knew that was wrong. Her principal, fortunately, knew
that was wrong and talked her through that year.
So what you are talking about is so important, and
appreciate what you are doing.
Dr. Peske, let me ask you, what part can a building
principal play in teacher success? Are we using principals and
training principals and putting them in a position that is
vital for success of that first-, second-, third-year teacher
to make sure the process goes well?
Ms. Peske. Thank you for your question, Mr. Walberg. It is
terrific.
You may have noticed throughout my testimony I was talking
about educator preparation, so in Massachusetts that includes
teachers and principals. Principals are critically important to
the efficacy of teachers. They are also critically important to
helping the effective teachers stay in those classrooms.
We have a whole turnaround effort in Massachusetts around
some of our lowest-performing schools, and what we see is the
Pied Piper Effect, which is when really effective principals
leave a school to head to one of our turnaround schools their
cohort of effective teachers follows them. So all of the things
that I described this morning apply to our educator preparation
programs, i.e. our principal preparation programs as well as
our teacher preparation programs.
Mr. Walberg. Is the principal model--could I describe it
more as a mentor, coach model as opposed to administrator?
Ms. Peske. Yes, sir. In fact, we also are really focused on
principals as instructional leaders, and so our professional
standards for administrators, which are the standards the
preparation programs use when designing their programs, are the
same exact standards that we use in the evaluation of our
administrators.
So the prep programs are preparing the administrators to go
in under the same standards by which they will be evaluated
once they are actually in districts, and those are much less
focused on kind of the business aspects of schooling, which is
what we had done in the past, and much more focused on
mentoring, sustaining, being an instructional leader within the
school.
Mr. Walberg. Well, I applaud you for that because--
Ms. Peske. Thank you.
Mr. Walberg.--because until we get principals out of their
office filling paper and into the classroom knowing what their
front line is doing and assisting them in that, I don't think
we achieve. So thank you.
Dr. Gist, in your testimony you discussed some of the
reforms Rhode Island has implemented--creative reforms in
improving teacher quality. One appears to be mentoring.
You call it an induction coach--assisting teachers in their
transition in the field. I would assume that that is because
you don't want to waste one full year of students' lives with
an ineffective teacher.
Could you discuss how this process works and its
effectiveness in generating successful teachers?
Ms. Gist. Yes, sir. Thank you, actually, for asking about
beginning teacher induction because it is an incredibly
important part of our education system.
When we think about an educator's career we really look at
the entire pipeline, and one part that occasionally gets
overlooked is that part from the time they leave a preparation
program when they enter that classroom for the very first time.
Obviously excellent principals can assist with that, but an
induction program is really a very intense program that assigns
an experienced teacher coach who is released from his or her
classroom on a full-time basis to be able to spend time in a
variety of different beginning teachers--they have sort of a
cohort of beginning teachers that they are working with.
And they spend time in their classroom; they are a trusted
advisor. They are not there to evaluate; they are there to
provide support and assistance as the beginning teacher goes
through his or her first 2 years.
And so induction, you know, I would agree with my
colleagues about the need for research, but we do have some
areas where we have some research and one of them is in the
importance of supporting our beginning teachers through
programs like induction.
Mr. Walberg. Mr. Chairman, could I ask one concluding
question?
Chairman Rokita. Your time is expired, Chairman.
Mr. Walberg. Okay. Thank you.
Chairman Rokita. Mr. Polis, you are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Polis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Want to address a question to--the first question to Dr.
Peske.
Title II of the Higher Education Act requires states to
identify low-performing schools of education. Surely they are
not all high-performing or the state of the profession today
would clearly be in a better place.
But in your written testimony you mention that to date
Massachusetts has never identified a low-performing preparation
program. Why do you think states might be hesitant to identify
what clearly must exist, which are low-quality preparation
programs, and what can the federal government do to ensure that
states are holding preparation programs accountable and working
on improving the quality?
Ms. Peske. Thank you for your question, Mr. Polis. I did
write that in my written testimony--that we have never
identified a program as low-performing in Massachusetts, I
think mostly because our program review and approval process
was so weak in the past that we didn't have a strong evidence
base from which we could declare a program low-performing.
Much in the case when you build a case, and particularly
when you are building a case with bad news for your program,
you want to be able to refer to some evidence to say, ``This is
why we are closing your program down,'' or, ``This is why we
are not approving it.'' In the past we didn't have that
evidentiary base, and we particularly didn't have it around
outcomes--that is, educator outcomes and their impact on
students.
Mr. Polis. And then moving to Title II reporting and
establishing common metrics, what more can the federal
government do to ensure that states have the right metrics to,
in fact, improve the quality of their teacher preparation
programs?
Ms. Peske. Sure. So I will mention a couple.
We are not required to report now on hiring and retention
data. We don't report on evaluation and impact ratings, which
we in Massachusetts have and would be delighted to turn over to
the feds and we think other states should do so as well.
We would like to see requirements for us to report on the
percentage of graduates employed in high-need, low-performing
districts and high-need subject areas. We also would like to be
required to report on how our programs do in terms of their
performance assessments.
Those are a few examples.
Mr. Polis. Thank you.
My next question is for Ms. Hall.
You know, Urban Teacher Center is already doing a great job
improving the quality of teacher preparation, harnessing the
power of innovation to create a new and effective way to
prepare great teachers and principals. That is consistent with
why I introduced with Congressman Petri the GREAT Act, which
encourages the growth and development precisely of these types
of teacher or principal academies.
And I would like to ask how your model encourages
innovation, ensures program quality, and what federal barriers
to your success should we focus on removing?
Ms. Hall. Great. Thank you for asking. And there are lots
of aspects of the GREAT Act that we do support--highly
selective recruiting, clinically based programming, and most of
all, focus on results.
I would say that the way that we are able to be innovative
and to be innovative within the regulations and the rules as
they currently exist can be embodied by other organizations. We
have been able to crack open a program of study and a course
sequence for higher ed master's preparation to prepare teachers
in a way that is clinically based and focused that is entirely
possible for other folks that have the same appetite and same
inclination.
I would say that in terms of what is next for us in terms
of where are there opportunities for expansion either of UTC or
of models like UTC, I will say that initially we were denied
from offering federal student aid to people in our program.
That was an incredible lift for my organization. We had to
go out and we raised $20,000 for every person in our program so
we could turn around and loan it to them. And we are not a bank
and I am not a lender. That is a different committee. And we
had to get out of that business really fast, and it took us 3-
1/2 years to get federal approval to offer loans through our
higher ed partner.
Mr. Polis. Streamlined approval would be one of your
suggestions?
Ms. Hall. Absolutely. Streamlining approval, and then also,
wherever the federal government can provide opportunity for the
organizations to stand in the same way that higher ed does and
partner with K-12 school systems, we see them as our ultimate
customer and we would like to have the same opportunity for
existing federal funds for those partnerships and, frankly, to
be able to do business in more districts and more states. Right
now UTC is blocked from some states from doing business.
Mr. Polis. By the states?
Ms. Hall. By the alt cert requirements in the states.
Mr. Polis. Okay. Is that because they are not uniform
across the states?
Ms. Hall. That is right.
Mr. Polis. Okay. Do you see any federal role in that?
Ms. Hall. I think wherever the federal government can
encourage states to be much more innovative in how they decide
who is allowed to prepare teachers, so I do see a role for the
federal government there. I wouldn't presume to state exactly
what it is.
Mr. Polis. You know, and this is what we see in education,
often it takes the federal government to play a disruptive role
to allow for choice and innovation to occur at the state or
district level, particularly when you have legacy monopoly
providers and it is difficult to introduce change into the
system.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairman Rokita. Thank the gentleman. Gentleman's time is
expired.
Mrs. Brooks, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mrs. Brooks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And welcome, everyone.
My question--I am going to start out with Dr. Singer-
Gabella--is with respect to the partnerships between higher ed
institutions and school districts and how important those are
to ensure that we have the most effective teaching programs
possible. Can you expand a bit on what your partnerships are at
Vanderbilt and other higher ed institutions and really what is
the role that the school district should be playing in ensuring
that those partnerships are so strong?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. In my testimony I talked about the need
for all of us to be able to innovate and be flexible around
these partnerships, and we have spent the past couple of
years--given that the landscape is changing for schools as well
as for education preparation providers, we are trying to
identify what are the needs and match them up.
At the core, really, is saying, what can you do when you
have a group of talented young folks who need to learn about
students, need to learn to develop relationships with students,
who are really attending carefully to the assessment of student
thinking and thinking about how do you link kids with content?
How can we create experiences with the districts?
I pointed to a particular partnership right now that we are
building with--in metro Nashville with a school that happens to
be one that is on the line. It was at risk for state takeover,
and so the principal and the teachers feel compelled but also
really anxious to think differently and out of the box about
what they are doing.
So we have been able to put--in the school we have 10 what
we call--they have called ``learning assistants.'' These are
folks who are essentially reliable members of the school staff
who are working closely with students, who are working closely
with teachers, and they have--those extra bodies have kind of
bought flexibility in staffing arrangements so that there are
teams that are collectively responsible for groups of students,
we can flexibly reassign students in groups to go work with you
because you happen to be really good at paying attention to
student thinking and thinking about what that next step is for
an English-learner in being able to make sense of certain
content. But they may go to Dr. Gist and me because I am
learning from Dr. Gist how it is that I am going to organize a
particular subject--you know, particular content.
But the point is that we are trying to, by--think
creatively and out of the box. What does it look like when you
link talented educators with groups of students, and what can
we do to kind of break--again, I pointed to the egg-crate
model. Can we think differently about how we put adults in the
building to serve learners?
But really specifically for districts, what we are talking
about is matching up expertise around supports for English-
learners, content tutors, mentors. We are talking about
bringing in faculty who are working at the cutting edge of
research and thinking about learning, and can we make those
resources available to schools? And obviously for the schools
of education we are providing opportunities for learners to--
for our folks to be out in the real world working with real
students.
Mrs. Brooks. Dr. Gist, I have a question with respect to
how Rhode Island might be partnering with higher ed
institutions, particularly to help do a better job in our
schools identifying students with special needs, with learning
disabilities, with reading issues, and so forth. Can you
comment at all on what Rhode Island might be doing with respect
to higher ed training for teachers to do a better job with all
those challenges in our schools?
Ms. Gist. Well, I think that in our work with our
institutions of higher education and our alternative programs
one of the things that we want to make sure is that our
educators are prepared to work with every student in our
classroom, and I think that in many ways we have experts in our
institutions of higher education who are partnering with
experts in our school districts to learn from one another about
how to best serve all students, including students with special
needs.
We have many, many teachers in Rhode Island who are dual
certified, so--Christina talked about that in terms of UTC--and
I think that is really important that educators--all educators
come into contact and serve students with special needs, and so
I think having that preparation is very important.
Mrs. Brooks. I certainly appreciate the dual certification
and certainly hope that we can expand that across the country.
Thank you.
I yield back.
Chairman Rokita. I thank the gentlelady.
And Ms. Bonamici is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you to all the panelists. I really appreciate
your years of expertise, and especially thank you for the years
that you have spent teaching. It is critical to have teachers
and former teachers working to strengthen the profession, so
thank you.
Dr. Singer-Gabella, you mentioned three factors that make
it difficult to retain intelligent and committed individuals
into the teaching profession: the absence of a real career path
that allows growth while still teaching, low levels of respect
and compensation, and an imbalance of interests in test scores
that saps motivation. So how can these be overcome? And I know
we could talk about that for a few hours, but if you could
briefly address that because I do have another question as
well.
Ms. Singer-Gabella. I think that we are really just trying
to figure that out. We do feel strongly that--and I think all
of the panelists here would agree that it is critical that we
make sure that people who step into the classroom are ready to
take on the challenges of being in classrooms and that we have
measures to make sure before, you know, before they get out
into that first year and they are teachers of record that they
are able to do so.
But again, I think that we need to be paying--part of this
is an infusion of resources, part of it is making sure that we
are not relying on temporary measures, and that system churn is
really highly problematic. We need to work together to try to
stabilize what is going on in schools.
Ms. Bonamici. And I also encourage all of you to join me in
what I do, and especially when I am in my district, and that is
to highlight the positive things--
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Absolutely.
Ms. Bonamici.--that are happening in our public schools.
Because I have to tell you, there is a lot of public school-
bashing out there that doesn't help motivate people to enter
the teaching profession.
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Right.
Ms. Bonamici. So let's talk about how we can improve, but
also spend a lot of time highlighting all the positive things
that are happening.
Dr. Peske, I have heard a concern about accountability
systems that are used that evaluate teacher preparation
programs, that they may not consider all the goals of teacher
preparation. They are broader than simply increasing students'
academic achievement. Focusing on the whole child--for example,
strengthening students' abilities to collaborate, communicate,
nurturing creativity and curiosity are also important goals,
and today's teachers need to be culturally competent as well, a
skill that can be difficult to measure on a certification test.
So how can we make sure that we are recruiting a diverse
teaching workforce and developing educators who can challenge
students from diverse cultural, ethnic, and linguistic
backgrounds?
Ms. Peske. That is a good question. We start with the goal
for our programs of recruiting a diverse workforce. That is
part of our expectation for them. That is built into our
standards. And then we measure that with data, so we make
accessible to them years' worth of data on the participants in
their programs as well as how those participants do once they
get to the schools.
Additionally, our professional standards for teachers,
which are the standards with which the preparation programs use
to build their program, those are the same standards that we
use for the evaluation of our teachers once they get to the
classroom, and built into those standards are expectations
about meeting the needs of diverse learners.
Ms. Bonamici. Terrific.
I have another question. Dr. Singer-Gabella pointed out,
rightly so, that there is quite a bimodal distribution of
school performance, with schools at one end that are doing well
with respect to achievement, and a significant number of
schools, typically at the lower end of the socioeconomic
spectrum, that aren't doing well.
So I wanted to ask you, Ms. Hall, in your testimony you say
that you treat public schools where your teachers serve as
customers and you partner with district and charter schools
that want to grow their talent and they pay a sizeable fee for
each resident or fellow. So can you address how, then, can your
residents and fellows go into schools that don't have the
resources to pay a sizeable fee and whether you can measure
UTC's success if you are not in a broad range of schools across
the socioeconomic spectrum?
Ms. Hall. Yes. In fact, the large percentage of schools
that we are in have very high farms rates, and what we do is we
spend a lot of time with principals and leaders of those
schools who have a very strong interest in identifying a human
capital solution for that school and thinking differently about
their budget. Our program is Title I and Title II approved, and
oftentimes what we find folks do is they--essentially they are
prioritizing choices and decisions, because folks--these
schools do not get more money but they are making decisions
about whether or not to hire an aide for a classroom, for
example, or to hire a UTC resident, sometimes for less than
what a cost of an aide would be.
We would like to bring down the cost that our schools pay,
but we also think it is important for our schools to have some
skin in the game along with us.
Ms. Bonamici. Terrific.
And I see my time is expired. I yield back. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Chairman Rokita. I thank the gentlelady.
Mr. Guthrie is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Guthrie. I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for being here.
And, Dr. Singer-Gabella, I am from Bowling Green, Kentucky,
so just up the road a little bit, so follow metro--a lot of,
some of our media is there, and appreciate what Peabody does.
And you mentioned the work, in your testimony, of reforming
educator preparation is underway in states and professional
associations, and you also mentioned your work in Tennessee,
which you have already mentioned.
And so as we are taking a--as we are looking at Title II
reauthorization for Higher Education Act, would you give some
recommendations that we should be thinking of that would
encourage you to do this and not hinder you from doing this?
What changes would you like to see, or additions?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. I think there are a couple of things,
and in terms of reporting, we want to be able to have questions
that are going to help us--or we want to be able to use data to
help us ask questions and answer questions that are going to
move the field forward. So compelling questions for us are, you
know, who is entering, on what paths, and how and where are
they being prepared to be successful?
So can we begin to look at basic demographic data? There
are pieces that are already there that I think are incredibly
useful. My colleagues have pointed to other data that would
also be helpful around retention a certain number of years out,
employer--you know, employer outcome data. How are people doing
in terms of their performance? I am not sure--is this where you
are--
Mr. Guthrie. Your suggestions on what we need to--your
expertise what we should be doing to help you is it, so that is
exactly right.
But I know, Dr. Gist, I think you mentioned--I think it was
you--that the Title II burdensome reporting requirements--I
think you mentioned you have--
Ms. Gist. I think several of us mentioned that--
Mr. Guthrie. Okay. Well, I know it came from at least one
of you if not all of you. So what are some examples of what you
think is burdensome, and what would we do different? How would
you want to do it different? It kind of ties into the same
question I just asked.
Or if anybody else wanted to answer that, too, I would be--
Ms. Gist. Yes, sir. Actually, so right now in the current
reporting structure there are over 400 data elements that are--
actually, our preparation programs do most of the gathering and
at the state level we compile that information and send it on
to the federal government. And I think--
Mr. Guthrie. Do you see the federal government--I am sorry
to interrupt--when that goes forward do you hear information
back that helps you, or is it just goes forward and you don't
know what happens to it?
Ms. Gist. No, it is not a very robust process. This is--
Mr. Guthrie. Okay.
Ms. Gist.--you know, and I think that is part of the
concern is that there is a collection of data but it isn't the
data that we need to be using. And so I would agree with the
recommendations that you have heard but I would--I think the
federal role in policy-setting is looking at the what and not
exactly the how.
So I think there are some data elements that are probably
common across programs that might be useful--things like the
GPA or the entrance--some sort of entrance measures for
candidates who are coming into programs. I also think there are
some student outcome measures, because we haven't talked a lot
about that, but you know, one of the most important things we
need to be looking at is whether or not those who are in our
preparation programs are able to move student achievement and
help our students learn.
But I think what we have to use caution about is over-
prescribing exactly how to ask for that information. So what I
would encourage you to consider is asking us in the states to
tell you what it is we are doing to expect that our programs
are setting strong selection criteria, are preparing educators
well, how are they measuring that, and have us tell you the
processes that we are using. And I think through that we are
going to learn more and more about this as we continue to
increase this area of our field.
Mr. Guthrie. I think that is helpful because I worked in
manufacturing. If I needed an operator of a machine to give me
information--record their processes--I got a lot better
information if they knew what I was doing with it because they
knew how it would benefit them when I came back to them to fix
the process.
So I know, Dr. Peske, do you have any--I know you mentioned
that, as well. Do you concur with kind of the same thought
here, or--
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Yes.
Mr. Guthrie. Or Dr. Peske. Both of--any of you can--
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Oh, I am sorry.
Mr. Guthrie. Any of you can answer, yes.
Ms. Singer-Gabella. No, go ahead.
Mr. Guthrie. Any of you.
Chairman Rokita. In 50 seconds.
Ms. Peske. I concur. I do think there is a federal role,
but I concur with the idea that we need fewer measures and more
meaningful ones.
Mr. Guthrie. Okay.
And then I guess I am down to 30 seconds, and I was going
to ask Ms. Hall how she found her students.
How do you recruit and how do you come out with your
students? But you are going to have a very brief answer on
that, I hope.
Ms. Hall. It will be brief.
So we recruit nationally--40 percent come from this region;
60 percent come from outside the region. Forty-four percent of
our incoming class of residents last year were people of color,
so that is a very high focus for our program. We do that by not
only heading to college campuses but we also find that programs
like City Year, Jumpstart, Breakthrough Collaborative are
training folks that already have an appetite for this and have
already worked in settings that are sometimes as challenging as
our schools.
Mr. Guthrie. Well, thank you. Just perfect.
I will yield back.
Chairman Rokita. I thank the gentleman. Gentleman's time is
expired.
Mrs. Davis is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for being here. I missed a little bit of your
testimony here but I think I have a sense of what you all were
saying, and just picking up on some of the comments that have
been made earlier, I had an opportunity to just hear from the
president of the World Bank today talking about--OECD schools
that--schools including--from Finland, South Korea, that have
all ranked so much higher than the U.S. in their PISA scores,
which really reflects students' ability to reason, to problem
solve.
And one of the factors, of course, is that in the schools
that they have been looking at the barrier to getting into
teaching is far higher, they are paid much better, they are
highly esteemed, and that is a situation that I think we all
talk about, we all want more here, and yet it seems somewhat
difficult to have the level of discussion focus as much on some
of those areas as what we are talking about, which is equally
important.
I just wondered about your thoughts on that. As you look to
models here in the United States, when you are obviously
representing a number of them that are strong, where does that
fit? Because the esteem for teachers and what we see sometimes
as low morale really does factor in here. How important do you
think that is?
Ms. Gist. I would be happy to start. Thank you.
It is incredibly important, and I think, you know, when we
look at what happened in Finland, there was actually a very
dramatic change in their expectations for who was entering into
the profession and the way in which they were preparing them.
So we, I think, are all, in our states, launching into this--in
a little bit more of a gradual way--I mean, for us it feels
pretty significant and I know for our programs in Rhode Island,
given how much we are doing, it feels pretty significant, but
when you look at what has happened in countries like Finland it
really was much more dramatic there the way they tackled that.
But I think when we look at what we can learn from what
they did, it certainly is raising the expectations of the
quality of candidates who come into the programs in the first
place. But it is also the depth of the experience that they get
when they are in their preparation program. It is quite
academic, a heavy focus on content.
You know, they really are professionals; they are
practitioner researchers. They are learning not just to
instruct but they are actually becoming professional educators,
and then I think what I see as some of the biggest
differences--and it definitely does change the perception of
the field, which then begins to spiral upward.
Ms. Singer-Gabella. I would agree with all of that. And
then there is also--something that will attract a more diverse
and talented pool is the idea of having a career path ahead of
me so that I know that I have opportunities to learn and to
grow. And so we need to be able to build those into our school
systems, which typically in districts really are very flat
organizations and the way that one progresses is to move out of
the classroom.
So we want to be able to find ways to differentiate roles
for teachers to provide them with opportunities to learn and
grow, and also to be compensated throughout. So in Finland when
one attends a preparation program one does not forego years of
income. One is supported in that process.
Ms. Peske. I will just add quickly, we are using the
accountability policies and our turnaround work as a laboratory
for restructuring the career for teachers in an effort to learn
from what we are doing in our turnaround schools, which are now
under state receivership, in an effort to learn and better
develop the profession.
I would also add, though, it is the responsibility of the
educator preparation program, as far as I am concerned, to
infuse a sense that this profession is the most impactful one
you can enter. So oftentimes I hear preparation programs saying
things like, ``Yes, well we can't really do much. You know, we
do some things and then they get into these schools.'' And to
me, like, what is the point of your program if not to say that,
like, you are helping to prepare these people to make impact?
And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that
Massachusetts is also one of the highest-performing states on
the PISA results in contrast to other nations.
Mrs. Davis. And, Ms. Hall, if you could include as well,
because the turnover--yes, I think you were addressing some
issues--keeping students for at least 4 years.
Ms. Hall. Right.
Mrs. Davis. We still see a lot of turnover for entering
teachers.
Ms. Hall. Right. We are definitely after building better
teachers and also building teachers that are meant to last. It
is why our model is designed with a delivery model that is
longer because it requires a much deeper set of preparation.
I would echo everything that my colleagues up here said,
particularly the need for a career ladder and leadership roles
that keep folks in the classroom in some capacity. But I will
also add to that that the role of principal--we talked about
earlier--is just as important here. As a professional teacher
you want to respect your boss and your peers, and not all
teachers do.
Mrs. Davis. Yes. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Rokita. Thank the gentlelady. Gentlelady's time is
expired.
Mr. Messer is now recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Messer. Thank you. Sorry for not being able to be here
the whole time. I was over in a Foreign Affairs Committee
hearing as well.
I just want to thank you for the important work that you
do. I mean, I think we all know that the number one indicator
of student success will be parental involvement, but there is
no question that the number two indicator of student success is
a high-quality teacher.
Kids that have access to a high-quality teacher have a
chance to learn; those who don't don't. And so thank you for
your important work.
Obviously the stakes for society have changed a lot over
the last several decades. I think one of the challenges we face
in education is that we have to do more. You know, it used to
be just a few decades ago if you left school with the ability
to do basic math and some reading and writing you could get a
high--you know, you could get a decent job, you could build a
life.
In today's world, unless you can learn to learn and be able
to learn throughout your lifetimes, you are going to struggle.
And so we have a higher bar that we all have to reach to get
there.
I think the testimony that I have heard has been
fascinating on this important issue. I want to start with Ms.
Hall.
Two of the key ideas behind your program is to not equate
having a master's degree with effectiveness, and having
teachers prove effectiveness before they get certified. Do you
think the federal requirements like ``highly qualified
teacher'' requirements that focus on credentials are helpful,
and how can more programs embrace the ideas of ensuring
effectiveness before granting teacher certification?
Ms. Hall. Yes. So it is a highly complex question,
obviously, that you have posed.
In our model we are designed so that all the folks in our
program must demonstrate effectiveness as demonstrated in part
by student achievement gains before they are fully certified.
However, folks do come in and under the first 2 years of
teaching they are on a provisional license.
We do support a high minimum standard, if you will, for
handing out provisional licenses, and then I think it becomes
the job of how--where is the concentration? Is there a
disproportionate impact of where these provisional licenses sit
and in which schools?
Where can we attach either professional development
requirements or coaching and push in support not just for those
teachers so they can move, even coming in with a high minimum
requirement. We don't want to make the bar too high for
teachers to get in, but once they are in we need to support the
heck out of them to make sure they stay because that provides
not only support for them but then also a safety net for the
kids they are teaching.
And then yes, our model--what our belief is is that before
earning full certification that is the point where
effectiveness must be demonstrated.
Mr. Messer. Yes.
And next question would be to Dr. Singer-Gabella and then
maybe to Ms. Hall.
I actually am a Vanderbilt Law School graduate, so I know a
little bit about the Peabody School, and obviously it is a
fantastic place.
I have to admit to you, I was disheartened to hear these
statistics that we had gone and 25 years ago the average
teacher had a 15-year career to today, 1-year. My sister-in-law
is actually a teacher who is 20 years into her career and seems
to be going strong, so she will be moving that number up. I
think it is sort of self-evident that if someone has been there
a year, it creates some real challenges.
My instincts are that federal policy may not be the answer
here, but I would just ask to start with you and--Ms. Hall, and
then any others: What can we do as a society to try to change
the attrition rate?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Again, I think part of it is to
create--is to ensure that teaching is a career that people want
to stay in, that they can continue to learn and grow, that they
see a future in. I think all of us need to convey the
importance of teaching and the critical impact that teaching
makes.
We have got to break away from thinking about teaching as
something that happens with one teacher and 25 children in a
classroom and to begin to think about it as something that
spans the community, that involves relationships with one's
colleagues, with one's children, with one's families, with the
community organizations, and begin to think creatively about
how do we work together to promote a better future for our
youth.
Ms. Hall. And I will just add that I think we need to be
strategic about the teachers that we are keeping. Absolutely we
want folks to not go home for Thanksgiving if they are a first-
year teacher and not come back, because that happens a lot and
it happens in a lot of our urban schools.
But we need to create a climate--an environment that they
want to be in, both with their principles and with their peers.
And again, it has to--more so than money, it has a lot to do
with the quality of preparation that they feel going into the
classroom.
If they are not well prepared they are going to be sort of
taxed and put at their worst every day because they don't know
what they are doing. I think I was one of those folks in my
first year as a teacher.
So a lot of it starts at the front end with better
preparation, and then better opportunity and ways to stay and
keep a foot in the classroom as a teacher.
Ms. Peske. I would just add quickly to that comment that
this underscores the importance of the clinical training so
that folks have lots of experiences in schools, lots of time in
schools, lots of time in different schools, and lots of time in
schools that parallels what they end up doing when they are
hired so they are not surprised by some of the challenges they
will encounter.
Chairman Rokita. Gentleman's time is expired. Thank the
gentleman.
Ms. Wilson is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. Wilson. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thanks to the panel. I have been a lifelong educator
and served as a school teacher and a school principal, and it--
I have a question for all of you, if I can get your perspective
on how you feel about testing--high stakes testing.
It seems that the further along we get in rolling out
teacher evaluation systems the more questions we have regarding
value-added formulas, the impact of individual teachers on
student learning, and the overuse of test scores. Yet the
conventional wisdom seems to be that we need to hold teacher
preparation programs accountable by looking at the test scores
of the K-12 students of program graduates.
Given some of the problems with using children's test
scores to evaluate K-12 teachers, do you have any concerns with
extrapolating such data to teacher preparation programs?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. There are a couple of issues. One is
that we don't--the technology just isn't there yet. If you are
looking at--we have a simultaneous problem of the fact that the
impact of a preparation institution typically washes out within
3 to 5 years, and that is just about the time that the value-
added estimates that are derived from students' test scores
become stable enough.
So for example, we know that in Tennessee the state is
relying on 1-year value-added estimates, meaning that there is
1 year of data for a new teacher that can be used. We know that
you are very likely--that those estimates are extremely
unstable, so that from 1 year you may be rated at the top--in
the top quintile, and then the next year you may be rated in
the bottom.
The second problem is that typically programs don't
graduate enough people in a particular cell--so, for example,
middle school English teachers--we don't graduate enough of
those folks in order to have a sample size that would tell you
that is a reliable estimate of what the program is doing. So I
realize this is moving to become very technical, but the--given
that there is great instability in the measure, that we can't
really rely on that measure to be telling us that--for sure
that that teacher is doing--that that is a reliable estimate
for that teacher.
We can't aggregate back to programs. It becomes very
difficult to be able to use those scores to tie those back to
teachers--to particular programs.
Ms. Gist. I would just add, and first of all I wanted just
to address the beginning part of what you said. I think we do
see in some of our schools and classrooms that there is too
much testing going on. I also think it would be a huge,
unfortunate reaction if we began to believe that tests were bad
or did not give us useful information. They certainly do.
And so the question is, how do we have a comprehensive
system within our schools where our teachers are on a regular
basis collecting information for their own use in the classroom
and in schools, and then how do we do that at a policy level in
a way that is integrated into our school days and not
disruptive to learning but actually supporting learning?
I agree that there are some technical challenges with how
to do this well for programs, which is why I think it is
important for us to do this closer to the state and local
level. We do believe in Rhode Island that it is very important
to look at outcomes and at including state assessments, and so
we are using it but we are proceeding with caution and working
very closely with our school districts and our institutions of
higher education to make sure that we are carrying it out in a
thoughtful and careful way.
Ms. Peske. We are doing something similar in Massachusetts.
I do believe we need to include these student growth measures
as part of a multiple measure system, which is the architecture
of our educator evaluation system. It is built on multiple
measures.
And so we will be including information--we don't call it
value-added but we call it student growth percentiles. That
will be included in program data that we give back to the
programs.
Ms. Hall. And I would be remiss if I didn't address this,
as well. We are a teacher preparation program that does use
student achievement as part of a composite score.
We have gotten smarter about what is fair and what isn't in
terms of using student achievement gains. The way we have
designed our program is that teachers have 3 years to build
their practice as a solo teacher of record, and it is across
those 3 years that we look at student achievement gain.
We look at multiple measures. We are also looking at
classroom observation done by coaching. We evaluate their
professionalism.
So it is no one data point, including a student achievement
data point. And it is using a composite across all 3 years that
creates something that is flexible enough and that can still
recognize--you know, in time data tells a story. There can be a
very weak signal if you don't have a lot of data and you don't
have enough time, but with the safeguard of a 3-year program
and of a composite measure that also heavily weighs clinical
practice and observation and professionalism, in time that
sends a stronger signal around the capability of teaching. That
is our belief.
Chairman Rokita. I thank the gentlelady. Gentlelady's time
is expired.
Chairman Roe is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Roe. Thanks, Chairman. I am sorry for being a little
bit late. I had another engagement this morning.
And it is difficult for me, with two degrees from the
University of Tennessee, to welcome a Vanderbilt, but welcome.
And I want to thank all of you all. I think you have the
most important job in America, which is to educate our youth.
And I started out this Monday morning--Monday at Blountville
Middle School in the eighth grade speaking to their class, and
I saw a great teacher. And they learned the preamble to the
Constitution, and the challenge was three students stood up and
said it in less than 7 seconds. It can be done.
And I could see where education in that classroom was fun.
Students were having fun. It shouldn't be drudgery. You can't
go through years and years of training and have it as drudgery.
And I want to debunk some myths now. I know how terrible
you are, how awful a job you are doing in America, because I
watch the evening news like everybody else. The problem is that
is not the truth, and I wish Mrs. Davis was still here because
I do want to talk about Finland and I want to talk about how
Finland has 5.4 million people and a 4 percent poverty rate.
I read a book recently and I challenge everybody in this
room to read this book--M. Night Shyamalan, ``I Got Schooled.''
You need to read the book because it says this--and he went out
and looked at data, like you all are doing--what are we
actually accomplishing?
And he found out to close the achievement gap if you took
schools in this country that had 10 percent or less poverty--
and poverty is defined as 75 percent and above free and reduced
lunch--and remember, 20 to 22 percent of our schools in this
country meet that definition--we have the highest PISA scores
in the world. No one is even close.
So when you look at this country you have to look at it in
terms of where poverty is and where the real--and it is
really--we are not going to ever close the achievement gap
unless we help improve poverty. So it is a self-fulfilling
prophecy. That was eye-opening to me, that I didn't realize how
well we were doing.
And he went through four of five things that you all have
talked all about, and I just want to bring them up, and I
obviously can't go over the whole book now.
But, Ms. Hall, you brought it out is how you get a good
teacher, because if you don't have a good--it doesn't have to
be Superman or Superwoman in the classroom, just a good
teacher. If you do that, how do you make sure that a teacher
who is not effective is not hired? And I think what you are
doing is making sure they are prepared when they get back.
And one of the chapters in his book is: Mr. Brodinsky,
Report to the Office and Bring Your Suitcase. In other words,
there are just some people that don't need to be teaching. So
that was one thing.
Second thing was a highly effective principal, where a
principal spent 80 percent of their time in the classroom
helping the teacher, not making sure that they are doing wrong,
but improving what they are doing, being there. And I know when
I was in school the only thing I saw Mr. Thompson do as a World
War II Marine was to get us out of the hallways. He was very
effective at that.
And one of the most impressive things in this book to me
was what he wrote about how much you lose--how much a low-
income student loses in the summer in their reading. They lose
as much as 2.8 months, where my children and your children are
going to get read to, they are going to the library, we go to
vacation Bible school, whatever you do in the summer.
During the school year when you guys have them they do just
as well as any other student, so I think we need to be
focusing--and one of my concerns, I think one of the reasons
that the teachers are having such a tough time staying where
they are is they feel like they are being bent into a pretzel
with 400 things you have to send back here to Washington or
whatever and check every box or I am somehow a bad teacher, and
they are not bad teachers. I want our teachers out there to
know in America that most of them are doing a great job; they
are not doing a poor job.
How does the Common Core affect teachers in retention, job
satisfaction, and so forth?
And I guess we are doing it in Tennessee so I will drop
that one in your lap.
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Are you? First, I also have to tell you
that you have a tremendous teacher preparation institution in
U.T., so we--we are very good colleagues.
We are working hard to prepare our teachers, and in fact,
the Common Core is very consistent in terms of the kinds of
outcomes for students is very consistent with the kind of
teaching and learning that we are preparing--trying to prepare
our teachers to do. So obviously there are challenges. The
Common Core is not written for English-learners and so there is
tremendous scaffolding that is--that needs to be done, but I
think it has provided a focus point for many preparation
institutions around setting a high bar for learners and then
thinking about, okay, how are we going to help prepare teachers
to get students to those standards?
Mr. Roe. Have our teachers bought into it in Tennessee
where we are using Common Core--
Ms. Singer-Gabella. My impression is yes, primarily they
have. There are issues in implementation, and we will really
know what is going on when the assessments hit and the rubber
meets the road.
Mr. Roe. Well, I see my time has expired. I really
appreciate what you all are doing in education across this
country. I think you have one of the most important jobs in the
United States, and thank you for being here.
Chairman Rokita. Gentleman's time has expired. I thank the
gentleman.
Mr. Scott is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I am
always intrigued with the idea that that people--that school
boards need instruction from Washington to tell them that
teachers ought to be certified in the subject matter that they
are teaching, as if the school board is looking at a list--a
group of qualified teachers and they look over them and pick
somebody that is not qualified, when the reality is that you
don't have anybody qualified applying for the salary that was
offered.
I guess my question is, has there been an analysis as to
what salary we ought to be offering teachers in order to
attract the skill set that we are looking for?
Ms. Peske. There have been various analyses of teacher
salaries. However, a number of the analyses show that money is
not the only thing that matters. It is certainly important and
it certainly becomes more important to folks after, say, 5
years when they look around and see their other colleagues who
graduated from college making much more money--
Mr. Scott. Well, I mean, if we were hiring doctors we could
put salaries out there at $50,000. We would find some doctors.
I don't think anybody would want to go to one, but I mean, we
could find some doctors.
And there has to be--what are we competing with in terms of
skill set? The people with the skill sets that we are looking
for, what do they make somewhere else compared to teaching?
Ms. Peske. I mean, I can't answer that in terms of--I could
speculate but I wouldn't do that. But again, I would emphasize
that while money is important, a crazy principal will drive you
out faster than a low salary.
Mr. Scott. Right. But I mean, we are talking--people are
making choices all the way through the process. When they go to
college, what do they major in? When they decide career
choices, what choices do they make? And they look at salaries,
and if there is a low salary you are not going to get the best
and the brightest coming into teaching if the salaries are the
worst on the lot.
So my question is, we are competing for talent. You have
got to pay for the talent that you are competing for. What are
people with the skill set that we are looking for--what are
they making compared to teaching?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. First of all, I would agree that there
are other factors besides salary, but my colleagues in
Tennessee at the State Board of Education did an analysis to
look at both starting salaries, which were not altogether
necessarily too different, but then if you look 5 and 10 years
out, looking at the differential in growth, so that someone,
for example, who has a background in mathematics and a
bachelor's degree 10 years out--and I would have to go and get
you the precise figures, but the salaries were pushing toward
$100,000, whereas for 10 years out for a teacher in our state
the salary would be closer to $45,000.
Mr. Scott. And what does this do to your ability to recruit
the best and the brightest in mathematics?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. I think it makes it very challenging.
Mathematics and science, where obviously the options are
greatest, are the areas in which we are having the hardest time
recruiting and keeping good teachers.
Ms. Hall. Pardon me. I was going to add, we are recruiting
science teachers right now and we are recruiting elementary and
reading teachers and English language arts teachers, and math
is where we lose them. They apply to our program, they start an
application, and then they go take jobs that offer $70,000 to
$80,000 starting salaries.
Mr. Scott. Well, how can we reasonably expect to keep--to
recruit and retain the best and the brightest if we are paying
salaries half as much?
Ms. Gist. I don't think you are going to find anyone on
this panel that would disagree with the importance of paying
our great teachers much more than we do now. I think that is
really important.
I do think that--we have talked a little bit about career
ladders, and giving our teachers additional leadership
opportunities and opportunities to take their expertise and
share it with their colleagues, and I think doing that in a way
that allows them to increase their salaries is also a very
positive thing to consider.
But no disagreement about the need to make sure that our
great teachers are better compensated.
Mr. Scott. Mr. Chairman, that is the only point I wanted to
make. You know, we can talk around about how you get highly
qualified teachers and train them right and this that and the
other, but if you are not paying them a competitive salary for
the skill set that we are looking for, you are not going to get
the best and the brightest and we are going to always have the
problem.
I yield back.
Chairman Rokita. I thank the gentleman.
Dr. Foxx is recognized for 5 minutes.
Chairwoman Foxx. Thank you.
Congressman Scott, I will tell you I worked in a university
and community college. I think we have it backwards with
salaries in this country. I think we should be paying the
people at the elementary level what we pay college professors
to begin with, because the college professors have the students
that have already been filtered out. Seriously, I have said
this all my life.
There is one other thing which unfortunately is not very
popular on your side of the aisle, and that is differential
pay. We could get the people to come into math and science if
we were willing to pay them what they are worth, but we have
the unions and other groups of people who refuse to allow
differential pay to be done.
There really are answers to it. You all sort of moved
around it, but it can be done. And you are right: It is a
simple thing. But thanks for bringing it up, because I think it
is a really important thing.
You talked about this, and every panel we have had--this is
our 13th panel--every panel we have had says we collect too
much data at the federal level and we don't have information.
And you all have confirmed that again. What I would like to
know very quickly is do you ever get any feedback on all that
data?
You are shaking your heads no. Okay. No. Okay.
So it is useless. We are just wasting a lot of people's
time and money, and I wonder where it is all stored, which is
also another expensive thing. So thank you for answering that.
The next question I would like to ask is you have talked
about teacher preparation programs and effectiveness. Tell us
how you are measuring effectiveness in your programs and in
what happens after the teachers go out.
Dr. Gist?
Ms. Gist. Yes, ma'am. I would be happy to start.
We have recently adopted new standards, as I mentioned
during my testimony, and the process that we are going through
now is the development of our program approval process. And we
are working closely with our partners in higher education as
well as our partners in K-12 in the field to develop that
program approval process.
And it will include everything from the ways in which we
are evaluating the quality through which our preparation
programs are selecting excellent applicants and aspiring
teachers, the way that they prepare them, meaning that we have
certain expectations for them that include making sure that
aspiring teachers have strong content, but also making sure
that they have experiences in the field and making sure that
when they are in the field with students that they are getting
regular feedback on what is happening when they are with
students, so they are not just there to experience it, but when
they are there they are getting--someone is giving them--
observing them and giving them feedback on what is happening.
And then we are also going to be looking at outcomes. So we
are going to be looking at once an aspiring teacher leaves a
preparation program, what is their level of success following
that?
And we are looking at it--looking at that in a number of
different ways. It includes everything from the evaluation that
that teacher gets in the classroom once they are there; it
includes the quality of their placements; it includes a number
of different elements that we have created, and that
information will be available through the report card that we
are developing so that it is completely transparent.
Chairwoman Foxx. Dr. Singer-Gabella?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. I want to point out also, I think that
we need to think about this again as a continuum--as a
trajectory, so that we are talking--most good programs have
benchmarks throughout their preparation. They have screening
points in which they are allowing candidates to move through
based on their performance up to that point.
I had mentioned that before our candidate graduates we are
requiring them to pass the edTPA, which is a really nice,
performance-based measure. It gives us a very nice snapshot of
our candidates' ability to plan, to assess, to think
systematically about data and to provide good feedback.
Once our candidates are taking positions teaching, we
really do take seriously the feedback that we get from
employers and the extent to which they are staying in the
field. So that feels like another important piece.
We are interested, again, in looking at other measures--for
example, student perception data. And then we are paying
attention to persistence in the field.
Chairwoman Foxx. Quickly. The time is almost up.
Ms. Peske. Sure. First I would say, I don't think it is
useless for us to report to you on Title II data. I think if we
had few measures and they were comparable across states we
would learn a great deal about what other states are doing, so
I wouldn't want you to abandon that altogether.
Chairwoman Foxx. Ms. Hall?
Chairman Rokita. Quickly, please?
Ms. Hall. Thank you.
How do we measure for effectiveness? We absolutely look to
how the school principal evaluates our folks, but we also have
our own measures that we look at. As I said, it is across 3
years. You have 3 years to build your practice to make sure it
is--there is a consistency in the data that we are looking at.
It includes eight to 10 clinical observations by one of our
coaches that is observing clinical practice as an input, but a
very important input.
We look at professionalism. Are they a productive member of
the community? Do they take locus of control? Do they take
responsibility for what they are doing and not--or are they
kid-blaming?
And then last, we do use pre-and post-test data.
Chairwoman Foxx. Thank you.
Chairman Rokita. Thank the gentlelady.
Recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Picking up on where Dr. Foxx left off, I would like to give
Dr. Peske a couple seconds to see if she would indicate what
data elements she would keep.
And you don't have to say now, but would you be willing to
put that in the record or even write me a private letter?
Ms. Peske. Certainly. I would be willing to put it in the
record and/or write you a private letter.
Chairman Rokita. Okay.
And how about the other three of you? Would you be willing
to say what elements you would like to keep?
Now, of course you are--is that a yes?
Let that record indicate all the witnesses have agreed to
do such.
Now, if you remember back to Brett Guthrie's questions, he
said, well, it is kind of--what I just asked you to do is a
little bit unfair if you don't know why you are being asked
about all the data elements. You know, maybe you could provide
better data if you know what was being done and why you were
being asked for it.
Have you had any correspondence, have you had any
interaction with the Department of Education or anyone else as
to why they are asking what they are asking?
Dr. Gist?
Ms. Gist. Well first of all, I think that the U.S.
Department of Education has indicated an interest and a
willingness to explore this and to figure out how we can do a
better job. I don't think they have an interest in, the
leadership doesn't have an interest in perpetuating these
reporting structures.
Chairman Rokita. What human would?
Ms. Gist. But I will also say--
Chairman Rokita. Right.
Ms. Gist.--that Title II is not the only area where that
happens. IDEA is another example of where there is a lot of
data collected that isn't necessarily improving performance.
Chairman Rokita. Have they gone down that road? What are we
doing? What can you point to for trying to make this better?
Ms. Gist. I mean, in the two examples that I have given I
don't think it has been--I mean, I think that the status quo
remains in those two examples.
Chairman Rokita. Thank you.
Anyone else want to chime in on that?
Ms. Hall? It is okay if you don't.
Ms. Hall. I think I would like to answer from a
practitioner perspective of what we look at. The data points
that we look at that we think are important are when a teacher
leaves. So retention and attrition are very important, but even
more important is when during the school year does it happen,
because that is going to inform our savviest districts of which
pipelines are the best for them to pull their folks from, and
we think it is a very important indicator.
Chairman Rokita. Anyone else?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Yes. I do think you want to ask the
question about what data are comparable across states, and that
is a really important point, and can we draw on that, and what
are more appropriately gathered at the state level? These
questions of how are certainly things that states, working with
professional associations and institutions, can get into the
weeds to really make sense of what is going on.
Chairman Rokita. Thank you.
Differential pay--I would like your comments on the record.
Dr. Gist?
We will go right down the line. Yes, no, maybe so.
Ms. Gist. Yes, and the question is how and under what
circumstances. Certainly we need to pay physics teachers and
others much more in order to have them and to be able to have a
pool to select from. And I also believe that when done
appropriately that performance should play a role, as well.
Chairman Rokita. What would be inappropriate? When done
appropriately performance--
Ms. Gist. I think making blanket decisions about--the tools
need to be quality. It needs to be thoughtful and, you know--
Chairman Rokita. Data-driven. Evidence--
Ms. Gist. Quality and multiple measures, not just one set
of data.
Chairman Rokita. Someone has got to do a review, and that--
Ms. Gist. Pardon?
Chairman Rokita. Someone has to do a review. That review
has to be common across employees, that kind of thing?
Ms. Gist. Right. And quality. Consistent--
Chairman Rokita. Quality.
Ms. Gist. Right. So in other words, the tool that you are
using needs to be looking for the right things and it needs to
be implemented well.
Chairman Rokita. Do you have an example?
Ms. Gist. We have just launched into a major effort to put
new evaluation systems into place and we worked very carefully
to look at the research and develop observation guides for
evaluators, principals, and others who are going into
classrooms, and so their tool has to be good, but also they
have to be trained really well and prepared to be able to use
the tool effectively.
Chairman Rokita. Dr. Singer?
Ms. Singer-Gabella. I would agree that the how is really
where we get into trouble, and we wouldn't want to underpay the
folks who are working at the primary level on critical language
development. So it is sort of figuring out, how do we balance--
Chairman Rokita. Well, if they are bad--
Ms. Singer-Gabella. Oh, yes, absolutely. I think no one
disagrees that we want to make sure that people are accountable
for strong performance.
Chairman Rokita. Thank you.
Ms. Peske. Yes, sir, we need differential pay for
differential roles, for differential subjects, for teaching in
various shortage areas, particularly our low-income and low-
performing schools.
Chairman Rokita. Thank you.
Ms. Hall?
Ms. Hall. I wholeheartedly agree. The way we think of it at
UTC is like the operating room. There are probably 10 to 12 to
15 different jobs and levels of expertise that are all
evaluated and paid differently in those operating rooms, and we
think our schools should be the same.
Chairman Rokita. Thank you all.
I will yield back and now recognize Mr. Polis.
Mr. Polis. Thank you.
Before I get to my closing I want to address differential
pay for a moment. There are many school districts across the
country that have implemented generally increased pay for STEM
professionals.
We had a statewide program in Colorado for several years,
increased pay--I believe it was $3,000 supplementary income for
math and science teachers, hard-to-recruit areas. It was a very
popular program. It had to be defunded in the Great Recession,
as a lot of states had to cut their education expenditures.
Certainly I would have interest, and if there are any of my
colleagues across the aisle that would, in a federal pilot
program to support teachers and supplement salaries in STEM
fields, particularly in areas that it is hard to recruit
teachers that serve impoverished kids. That could be a very
high-leverage way to use our limited federal dollars to help
ensure that particularly STEM's teachers are able to work and
support their families in very challenging work environments.
So I think that is an area where hopefully initiatives will
continue to move forward at the local level.
Again, the state level, we did have a program in Colorado,
and I think had the resources been there we probably still
would and it would be something to look into--to federally, as
well.
I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony and for
sharing some really terrific expertise on how school districts,
states, and the federal government and as well as teacher
training institutions can work together to better prepare
teachers so they can thrive in the classroom.
I want to address the professional development piece. The
teacher preparation piece, of course, absolutely critical and
we are talking about actually looking at output-based
indicators. We have had a similar issue with regard to
professional development.
The teacher entering the classroom after preparation is in
no way, shape, or form as fully developed as they will be over
time with professional development. Districts, the federal
government, states all invest in professional development.
How do we also see, or do you have any examples of how this
revolution in data-and outcome-based measurements can also
influence the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs to
improve the quality of teachers in the classroom?
Who would like to address that?'
Dr. Gist?
Ms. Gist. Sure. I think one of the exciting things that has
happened in our roll-out of our new educator evaluation systems
is the connection between that work and professional
development.
We have for too long in our profession had these blanket,
you know, everybody go to a certain building and everyone gets
the same professional development. It may or may not be
something that you need and/or are interested in.
And so, just like we differentiate instruction in our
classrooms for our students, we need to make sure that our
professional educators have access to professional development
and opportunities to grow and learn in areas in which they want
to grow and learn and have been identified as areas in which
they need to grow.
Mr. Polis. And I think for too long decisions have been
made based on, you know, who has the slickest marketing, or
what was trendy at the time. And if we can move to a more data-
based way of making sure districts make data-based decisions
that can improve the quality of teaching.
Dr. Peske, did you want to address--
Ms. Peske. Yes, quickly. We also need to rely on our
effective educators. So now that we have these educator
evaluation systems in place with strong data we need to
identify those educators who are exemplary with data and we
need to learn from them. So rather than bring in all these
vendors to give us professional development, we need to turn to
the teachers who are doing this the best.
Mr. Polis. I look forward to soon introducing the Great
Teachers Leading for Great Schools Act, which will revamp Title
II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to focus on
intensive job-embedded professional development with
transparency and outcome-based indicators.
Really, learning starts with our preparation systems--both
initial preparation as well as professional development.
Teachers need pre-service opportunities to explore new
strategies, the opportunities to work together sharing teaching
strategies, engaging in meaningful and continuous professional
work and development as they proceed through their careers.
Innovation is occurring, as we heard from examples like the
Urban Teacher Center and states like Massachusetts and Rhode
Island, which are putting in place policies that ensure that
teachers, districts, and the public have information about how
to improve schools. We need to give social entrepreneurs and
innovators the ability to innovate in this important field and
ensure that our traditional programs are held accountable and
focus on outputs that actually improve the quality of education
that our next generation of students receive.
I look forward to working with my colleagues to advance
policies that invest in our nation's educators to build a
strong teacher preparation system. I think this hearing is a
very good first start and look forward to working on
legislation regarding some of the ideas that our experts
presented in testimony today.
And I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairman Rokita. I thank the gentleman.
And for the record, I would like to say that I would be
interested in learning more of the gentleman's policies and
language with the idea of partnering with him on different
subjects. I appreciate the offer.
I would like to thank the witnesses again for coming. It
was very enlightening. I learned a lot. There is a method to my
madness about offering to go last--my questioning, and that is
I could listen more and I appreciate that.
In the request I made of you during my 5 minutes of
questioning that you are going to respond to, the specific
request was to list those data elements that you thought were
good to keep in--effective to keep in, but there is a
corollary, perhaps, to that, and that is list for me elements
that aren't being collected that ought to be, in your opinion.
That is just as valuable.
And again, Mr. Guthrie has brought that up in his
questioning but I am not sure for the record that we got really
precise answers or recommendations from you. And I only task
you with this because I think, frankly, your opinion is going
to be--is going to weigh heavily for a lot of us, so I would
encourage you to, in fact, respond.
With that, again, I would like to thank the witnesses for
the testimony as we continue to work through reauthorizations
of the Higher Education Act and of the Student Success Act.
And finding no further business before the committees,
these subcommittees stand adjourned.
[Additional Submissions by Mr. Davis follow:]
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[Additional Submissions by Mr. Hinojosa follow:]
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[Questions submitted for the record and their responses
follow:]
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[Whereupon, at 11:55 a.m., the subcommittees were
adjourned.]
[all]