Teacher Quality and Urban Schools

1
Teacher Quality and Urban Schools

• Erick Huth
• EDCI 6300
• Tennessee State University
• Summer 2007

2
Introduction

• Teacher quality and sorting of teachers is an
  important issue in urban education.
• Sorting is the process that occurs when certain
  schools consistently attract higher quality
  teachers than other schools.

3
Overview

• Sorting of teachers has a negative impact on
  urban schools in general, especially those with
  students who are poor, minority or non-native
  speakers of English.
• Teacher shortage impacts urban schools more than
  suburban schools.
• NCLB may be contributing to the problem.
• Gimmicks or popular notions of how to solve the
  sorting problem do not generally have any impact.

4
Teacher shortage impacts sorting

• Ingersoll (2003) found that
• The teacher shortage was misidentified as one of
  supply
• More students have been graduating from teacher
  training institutions than actually enter the
  profession.
• The real staffing problem in our schools can be
  described as a revolving door.

5
Teacher Sorting

• Schools and districts with urban, poor, minority,
  and non-native-English-speaking students tended
  to attract less qualified individuals (Murphy,
  DeArmond, and Guin, 2003 Lankford, Loeb, and
  Wyckoff, 2002 Prince, 2003)

6
Teacher Sorting

• Lankford, et al. (2002) investigated the
  relationship between teacher quality and the
  sorting of teachers in the state of New York and
  identified a measure of teacher effectiveness
  using several factors
• The National Teacher Exam (NTE) general knowledge
  exam and the New York State Teachers
  Certification Examination (NYSTCE) liberal arts
  and science exam during their initial attempt,
• The quality of the individuals undergraduate
  university program (as determined by barrens
  college guide), and
• Whether the teacher is fully certified (Lankford,
  et al., 2002).

7
Teacher Sorting

• Lankford, et al. (2002) used similar measures to
  determine the quality of schools and school
  districts (Lankford, et al., 2002)
• However, these factors were looked at the other
  in terms of percentages.
• The percentage of teachers with more than a
  bachelor degree.

8
Teacher Sorting

• Lankford, et al. (2002) that less qualified
  teachers were more common in
• Poor schools,
• Non-white schools,
• Urban schools (especially New York City Schools),
  and
• Schools with high proportions of students who
  were non-native speakers of English.
• However, students who were learning English
  tended to have better qualified teachers than did
  poor and non-white students (Lankford, et al.,
  2002).

9
Urban Teachers and Motivation

• Quartz and the TEP Research Group (2004)
  conducted studied the effectiveness of the Center
  X teacher preparation program at the university
  of California, Los Angeles. Center X prepared
  students to teach in Los Angeles inner-city
  schools to address the shortage of well-qualified
  teachers in the Los Angeles inner-city. They
  found that
• Teachers who remained in urban schools in Los
  Angeles tended to be those who were attracted by
  intrinsic motivation.
• Lankford, et al. (2002) also found that money was
  not a primary motivator for many long-term
  teachers in urban schools.

10
Addressing the Urban Teacher Shortage

• Popular schemes to address teacher shortages in
  urban schools include
• Fast-tracking (i.E., Teach for America
  Laczko-Kerr and Berliner, 2002 , and Teach
  Tennessee).
• Troops to teachers (Ingersoll, 2003).

11
Addressing the Urban Teacher Shortage

• Policy makers often advance pay mechanisms as a
  way to attract and retain highly qualified
  teachers of
• Mathematics,
• Science/technology, or
• To help staff underperforming schools.
• However, research to verify the success of such
  plans has yet to be conducted.

12
No Child Left Behind

• The challenges facing U.S. Urban schools at the
  start of the 21st century are enormous.
• No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has done a lot to
  highlight the differences between urban and
  suburban schools.
• NCLB requires that all districts have highly
  qualified teachers in core subject areas and
  that each state set bench marks by which annual
  yearly progress (AYP) will be measured.
• NCLB provides no additional funding to accomplish
  these lofty goals.
• The end result is that NCLB has branded our urban
  schools as failures and created additional
  disincentives for college graduates to teach in
  urban public schools.

13
No Child Left Behind

• The existing prejudices that some feel toward
  poor, minority, and immigrant students have been
  compounded by NCLBa system that labels such
  students unsuccessful, hard-to-teach, or
  underperforming.
• NCLB also mandates that all students in all
  districts reach proficiency by 2014.
• NCLB has made the already challenging job of
  staffing urban schools, which tend to be poor,
  understaffed, and dilapidated, even more
  difficult.

14
Conclusion

• To solve the problem of staffing our urban
  schools, districts need to look beyond gimmicks
  like bonuses, emergency credentialing, and
  fast-tracking.
• Our urban districts need to identify the
  characteristics of those teachers who
  successfully remain in such schools and develop
  potential teachers from within as Quartz and the
  TEP Research Group (2004) suggested.
• The revolving door of school staffing must be
  closed and reason must be inserted into NCLB if
  the urban child is to have any chance for
  survival in the year 2014.
• Our urban children currently face the prospect of
  being legislated into a permanent underclass by
  No Child Left Behind.
• NCLB is leaving our urban children behind by
  creating a mechanism to label schools as failures
  without providing our districts the resources to
  reverse the teacher quality gap.

15
Websites of Interest

• Urban Schools NIUSI Home. http//www.urbanschools.
  org/
• This is the homepage of the National Institute
  for Urban School Improvement which is a
  repository of ideas for urban school districts on
  the use of data to improve education. The site
  also includes a comprehensive description of
  Great Urban Schools.

16
Websites of Interest

• NASBE
• http//www.nasbe.org/
• This is the homepage of the National Association
  of State School Boards which contains a great
  deal of information to help state boards of
  education (and others) improve education. The
  site includes links to its policy journal The
  State Education Standard which published an
  article in the inaugural issue in the winter of
  2000 (http//www.nasbe.org/Standard/1_Winter2000/C
  laycomb.pdf.) that discussed what could be done
  to attract and retain quality teachers in urban
  schools
• Claycomb, C. (2000). High-quality urban school
  teachers What they need to enter and to remain
  in hard-to-staff schools. The State Education
  Standard, 1(1) 17-20. Retrieved on July 31, 2007,
  from http//www.nasbe.org/Standard/1_Winter2000/
  Claycomb.pdf.

17
Websites of Interest

• Council of the Great City Schools
• http//cgcs.org/
• This site is the homepage of the Council of the
  Great City Schools which was founded in 1956 by
  Sergeant Shriver and others to address issues
  common to urban school districts. The website
  contains a great deal of information on trends in
  urban education and information about the council
  including links to the homepages of all 66 school
  districts that are members of the Council of the
  Great City Schools. The site includes
  information on the Councils annual fall
  conference, which has many renowned speakers and
  valuable workshops for urban educators,
  administrators and school board members.

18
Websites of Interest

• Center X
• http//www.centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/
• This is the homepage of the Center X program at
  UCLA. The site describes Center X and advertises
  the programs of Center X at UCLA to prospective
  participants. The two programs highlighted are
  the Teacher Education Program and the Leadership
  Academy. However, the cite includes many useful
  links for urban educators.

19
Websites of Interest

• Preparing Teachers for Urban Schools A View from
  the Field http//www.umanitoba.ca/publications/cj
  eap/articles/cullensinc.html
• This page contains an article that is useful for
  faculties at schools of education who prepare
  college graduates to enter teaching in urban
  schools. The page is on the website of the
  University of Manitoba which hosts the Canadian
  Journal of Educational Administration and Policy.
  
• Erskine-Cullen, E., Sinclair. A. M. (1996).
  Preparing teachers for urban schools A view from
  the field. Canadian Journal of Educational
  Administration and Policy, 6. (Electronic
  version.) Retrieved on July 31, 2007, from
  http//www.umanitoba.ca/ publications/cjeap/articl
  es/cullensinc.html.

20
Websites of Interest

• EDUCATION POLICY ANALYSIS ARCHIVES
• http//epaa.asu.edu/epaa/
• Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA) is an
  online education journal with many interesting
  research articles on the education that can be
  helpful to educators, higher education faculty,
  educational researchers, and policy makers. The
  site contains several articles on the teacher
  shortage, teacher quality, urban education, and
  related topics. The electronic journal is a
  program of the Educational Policy Studies
  Laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe,
  Arizona.

21
REFERENCES

• Ingersoll. R. M. (2003). Is There Really a
  Teacher Shortage? Center for the Study of
  Teaching and Policy, University of Washington.
  Retrieved July 15, 2007, from www.gse.upenn.edu/in
  press/Is20There20Really20a20Teacher
  20Shortage.pdf.
• Lankford, H., Loeb, S., Wyckoff, J. (2002).
  Teacher sorting and the plight of urban schools
  A descriptive analysis. Educational Evaluation
  and Policy Analysis, 24(7), 37-62.
• Laczko-Kerr, I., Berliner, D.C.. (2002,
  September 6). The effectiveness of "Teach for
  America" and other under-certified teachers on
  student academic achievement A case of harmful
  public policy," Education Policy Analysis
  Archives, 10(37). Retrieved July 14, 2007, from
  http//epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n37/.
• Murphy, P., DeArmond, M., Guin, K. (July 31,
  2003). A national crisis or localized problems?
  getting perspective on the scope and scale of the
  teacher shortage. Education Policy Analysis
  Archives, 11(23). Retrieved July 14, 2007 from
  http//epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n23/.
• Prince, C. D. (2003). Higher pay in hard-to-staff
  schools. Lanham, MD University Press of America,
  Inc.
• Quartz, K. H. the TEP Research Group. (2004).
  Too angry to leave Supporting new teachers
  commitment to transform urban schools. Journal of
  Teacher Education, 54, 99-111.

22
Thank You!

• Erick Huth
• EDCI 6300
• Tennessee State University
• Summer 2007