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Executive Summary of Goldhaber's testimony to the Senate HELP Committee
U.S. Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Fixing No Child Left Behind: Supporting Teachers and School Leaders
One-page Summary
Fixing the flaws in NCLB is important, but we must also recognize that the law’s annual testing requirement made possible a great deal of learning about the importance of the nation’s educators. We know that teachers differ significantly from one another and that these differences have long-term consequences for students’ later academic success. We also know that disadvantaged students tend to have less access to high quality teachers, whether the measure of quality is observable teacher credentials or student-growth. Information about individual educator needs is fundamental for informing teacher and school leader support and for learning what policies and practices improve educator effectiveness. A move away from a requirement of uniform statewide annual year-over-year testing could lead to the elimination of our knowledge of educator effectiveness, its distribution among students, and its responsiveness to different policies and practices.
So what do we know about supporting teachers and leaders?
· The evidence on pathways into the profession suggests that shorter programs with varying selection criteria and a practical teaching curriculum can produce graduates that are, on average, as effective as graduates from traditional college and university teacher-education programs. We do not know the extent to which this finding reflects differences in potential teachers’ backgrounds versus differences in potential educators’ experiences in programs.
· Most research on professional development and monetary incentives for performance suggest that neither approach, used on its own, has systematic benefits for educator effectiveness. The most encouraging evidence about changing the effectiveness of in-service teachers comes from programs that take a more holistic approach, combining comprehensive evaluation with feedback, professional development, and performance incentives.
· There is evidence that teachers making employment choices respond to monetary recruitment and retention incentives. The magnitude of this response is judged by some to be small relative to other working conditions factors that make jobs relatively desirable or undesirable (e.g. principal leadership, collegiality).
What do I recommend in terms of fixing NCLB? Preserving a focus on educational outputs means that any changes to NCLB should also preserve our ability to garner accurate information about the outputs of teachers and school leaders. This requires annual state tests that are comparable across localities in a state. But I also believe significant improvements will require more innovation, and the federal government can play an important role in nudging, not mandating, states and localities to innovate (for instance in the realm of teacher preparation) through competitive grant programs, like the Teacher Incentive Fund, that encourage experimentation with the systems and institutions that govern the teacher pipeline.