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war of attrition

July 30, 2012

Report: Districts can do more to retain their strongest teachers

by Geoff Decker, at 5:29 pm

In New York City — "District D" — there was virtually no difference in turnover rates based on teacher performance.

Getting rid of weak teachers doesn’t always require massive policy changes. Sometimes all it takes is a nudge, a new study on teacher turnover suggests.

When New York City principals told low-rated teachers that they were deficient, the teachers were three times more likely to leave the school, according to the study, released today by TNTP, a group that advocates for aggressive changes to hiring and firing practices in public schools.

Convincing the best teachers to stay is just as easy as counseling the weak ones out, the study suggests. Top-rated teachers said they were more likely to stay if their principals gave them more constructive feedback and more public recognition for their efforts, but two-thirds of them reported that their principals did not even encourage them to return to their school.

The study is a follow-up to TNTP’s 2009 influential “Widget Effect” report, which urged school districts to revamp teacher evaluations. In the new report, the group focuses on how districts can hold on to teachers determined to be the best. Districts don’t make a special effort to keep those teachers, termed “Irreplaceables” in the report, and when they leave, schools are highly unlikely to hire teachers who are anywhere near as strong, the report concludes.

Some of the report’s findings represent low-cost, easy-to-implement alternatives to some of the other policies TNTP has pushed, including firing teachers who don’t have permanent positions and doing away with seniority-based layoffs.

TNTP researchers examined test score data for 90,000 teachers in four large urban districts and one charter school network. The study then linked performance data to surveys that teachers took to find out what would keep top-scoring teachers in their schools and what could cause low-scoring teachers to leave.

One data set the report used was New York City’s short-lived “value-added” teacher ratings, issued in 2008-2010 to some elementary and middle school teachers. When the ratings went public in February, as work on the report was underway, city officials and their critics alike warned that the volatile scores were not accurate measures of teacher quality.

The study recommends that principals should be evaluated based on turnover among their top-performing teachers, a proposal that is theoretical right now in districts such as New York City that do not have sophisticated evaluation systems in place. The study also recommends that the best teachers should earn more than $100,000 if they are still working in a high-needs urban school after six years.

New York City has never proposed bumping teacher salaries up so fast. But Mayor Bloomberg did propose a bonus plan in January that would give top-rated teachers a $20,000 raise. The city teachers union, which staunchly opposes merit pay for teachers, quickly passed a resolution opposing the proposal.

Today, Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott blamed the teachers union for blocking their retention proposals.

“Unfortunately, the United Federation of Teachers continues to stand in the way of these incentives,” they said. “It’s time for the union to work with us so that our irreplaceable teachers can take full advantage of these and other opportunities.”

UFT President Michael Mulgrew criticized Bloomberg for ignoring some of the report’s other recommendations, such as improving working conditions in high-needs schools. ”It’s a shame that the mayor, who thinks merit pay is the solution to every problem, has chosen to ignore one of this report’s central findings — that ‘poor school cultures and working conditions drive away great teachers,’” he said in a statement.

Mulgrew also criticized the report’s reliance on test scores to identify the best and worst teachers.

TNTP researchers acknowledged that they would have preferred to evaluate teachers on more than just test scores, but that was all they had. TNTP President Tim Daly said he was confident using the ratings because a previous study conducted by the Gates Foundation found a strong link between classroom observations and students’ test score gains.

TNTP was founded by former Washington, D.C., Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a controversial national figure whose efforts to change how teachers are hired and fired has antagonized teachers unions. TNTP, which handles the recruitment and training of the New York City Teaching Fellows, also has a robust research arm that regularly studies the teacher job market across the country.

Overall, the study found that districts typically retain strong and weak teachers at the same rates: Six percentage points separated the average turnover rates among the highest- and lowest rated teachers in the districts studied. In New York City, for instance, schools retained 89 percent of their top performers and 88 percent of their bottom performers during the 2009-2010 school year.

“The real teacher retention crisis is not simply the failure to retain enough teachers; it is the failure to retain the right teachers,” the TNTP researchers wrote.

“It’s tragic we haven’t been doing easy things to ID & retain teaching talent–& inexcusable if we don’t change our ways,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan tweeted today about the study’s findings. Duncan participated in a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., about the study.

Daly said the study’s biggest revelation was that targeted teacher retention could improve with even the slightest feedback from principals.

Daly said that in the early stages of the study, his research team informally polled union officials and policy-makers about what they thought could improve teacher retention. One hypothesis the researchers tossed out was better principal support or feedback.

“I can’t tell you how many times we brought that up and they almost always questioned whether that even makes a difference,” he said.

But Daly said TNTP’s findings should force policy makers to think differently about how they approach the issue.

“The conventional wisdom about what works is frequently wrong,” Daly said.

TNTP Irreplaceables Study — July 30, 2012

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  • Follow the Money

    Who needs gold stars from principals in the form of constructive feedback when you can get golden sledgehammers in the form of value-added measures?

  • http://twitter.com/nycdoenuts nycdoenuts

    Two thoughts, since this is definitely going to be one “those” reports that folks talk about for a while:

    1. This is exactly what so many teachers (and effective, seasoned principals) were asserting as far back as 2009 and into this past APPR debate; That good building leaders know very well how to get rid of subpar teachers and know how to keep the good ones. This report validates this painfully obvious truth: We need to focus the discussion on building -and then trusting- good school leaders. #duh

    2.  I just wanted to stress a point made in the piece: That the idea of evaluating principals based on how well they retain their top performing teachers really is theoretical right now. And why? Because we (all of us really) have no idea whatsoever who the top performing teachers of a school or of a district are in this sense. And why’s that? Because there is no sophisticated evaluation system -like the APPR- currently in place in NYC (which is the city’s fault, by the way not the UFT’s. The UFT actually wants it -badly). 

    And when the APPR finally does go into place, given the LACK of field testing, and LACK opportunity to refine it and given it’s heavy reliance on the as of yet unproven VAM (and that’s putting it mildly) this ‘sophisticated evaluation system’ is going to be so hotly debated and rebuffed -by people from both sides- that not many people may wind up taking it seriously enough to form real discussion around at all. That’s pretty sad, because it means that some urban schools are years away from implementing a few common sense approaches to keeping the good ones.

    And that’s PARTLY due to the polarized atmosphere (that was PARTLY created by TNPT’s ’09 report) that we’re all living with now! But I guess that’s a different topic altogether.

  • Anonymous

    Recognize the talent! Privately, I think, is all it takes. Let the right people feel appreciated on top of being needed by the students.
    Be honest with the ‘weak’ teachers.
    Duh!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Leadership, leadership, leadership.
    Local and wide.
    Reasonability, not dumb ideology, nothing upwards on the sociopath gamut.
    Merit pay is dumb given the context.

  • old teach

    The TNTP should undertake a study of the effects that Michelle Rhees policies while the schools chief in Washington,D.C. has had upon the national cheating scandal that has followed her rise to national fame. Also, please have them publish the list of donors that support their and the efforts of reformers such as Ms Rhee. If they want to really retain the best teachers, then maybe they should study the results that many of the reform minded politicians have had upon school administrations like in New York. How the Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott reorganizations have decimated the stability of the school administrations and placed in charge many a neophyte principal or administrator many who have no clue on how to interact let alone support their instructional staff personnel.
    Also, please report the total number of years that the entire TNTP members have in actual classroom experience.

  • Cyrus

    Stories like this just keep on reminding me of the fact that there will be a massive teacher shortage once the economy gets better. Teachers are already leaving in droves due to value added nonsense, Race to the Top blood money,vindictive Leadership Academy principals, rag-newspaper teacher bashers, union destroying corporate goon organizations, Educators for Excellence scabs, Students First propaganda. The list goes on and on. Teachers have had it with all this garbage. All we want to do is teach and be left alone to do our jobs. It seemed to work fine for over a hundred years. Fact is, for the the first time ever, big time companies and greedy politicians who want to either make a buck or save some big bucks are now sticking their greedy hands into the schools of our country. 

  • Leonie Haimson

    1. See my critique of the TNTP report — and Bloomberg’s use of it — here: http://goo.gl/qtafA
    2. Experts including Jesse Rothstein have convincingly disputed Daly’s claim that the “previous study conducted by the Gates Foundation found a strong link
    between classroom observations and students’ test score gains”; see  here: http://goo.gl/OS9S2

  • U.F.T. is M.I.A.

     Very well stated.

  • Anonymous

    Funded by the Walton Foundation and started by Rhee….that’s all I need to know about this organization. Why read it at all?

  • Teacher

    Good students = Good teacher

    Bad students = Bad teacher

  • anonymous

    Please. I attended public schools in a middle-class suburban community. I was enrolled in all honors classes — most of which served between 15-18 students because they screened for achievement. My classmates and I were motivated and hard-working. This was back in the pre-helicopter parenting era and we were all strivers. I had some amazing teachers and some average teachers and some truly abysmal teachers. I could quote lessons from the best of them verbatim. And I still get angry about some of the really poor-performing teachers I had more than two decades after graduating high school.

    My kids currently attend NYC public schools. They likewise have some good teachers and some bad ones. My older child is in a selective high school and his classes are “streamed” so he takes all his classes with the same cohort of high-achieving students. The same thing was true in his non-selective middle school. Some of the teachers were good, some were mediocre, some were awful. Same kids, same parents, the only difference was the teacher. My younger daughter is in elementary school and her class gets pulled out for science with a teacher who shows videos about 75% of the time. What’s more, he shows the same videos to the same kids in successive years. The kids are bright, motivated, and well-behaved. Is he a good teacher? I can’t say with any certainty that the impact of these differences would be picked up on standardized tests. I can say that I see the impact on my children’s learning and they can themselves identify the difference between good, mediocre, and lousy teachers with complete clarity.

    I work in a public NYC high school with an extremely high-need population. Some kids behave marvelously in one class and are “incorrigible” in another. Some teachers have cut rates well outside the norm for other teachers in the building — and the students who cut their classes show up for everyone else. And student outcomes align pretty strongly with these patterns. Do you not think the teacher might be playing a role here?

    It’s one thing to be critical of this report or proposed reforms to teacher evaluation systems, but can we refrain from pretending that there aren’t meaningful differences among teachers’ when it comes to performance? And this is true even within the same building, working with the same exact kids. Anyone who has children, who works in a school, or whoever attended school knows that all teachers are not created equal. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

  • A.S.Neill

     I went to the same kind of public schools you did, and my daughter has gone to great nyc public schools and never needed a charter school yet. We’ve had a few truly great teachers, most not so great but pretty good, and a few uninspired ones. Every profession has about the same distribution.There already exist means to remove teachers who show videos 75% of the time, and if that is not being done, it is the principal’s fault not the UFT. But the decision cannot be arbitrary as in charter schools.My experience as a teacher is that principals as a rule have low social skills and are a very personally vindictive lot. Absolute power corrupts….Teachers are afforded civil service protections because they are paid out of the public purse. Without these civil service and union protections, the few truly bad teachers would go…along with another 20% who have the wrong skin color, gender preferences, religion, politics, age, or just rub the principal the wrong way. And the next principal will get rid of the next 20%. The attempt to “reform” education by getting rid of teacher protections was the situation over 100 years ago. And it didn’t work then but only lead to corruption. The attempt to destroy public education in the interests of staffing 80,000 “Michelle Rhee” like teachers in nyc public schools is misguided and will lead to tremendous instability in the teaching profession with no net gain in educational progress at best. The attempt to use “data driven” evaluations of teachers is also flawed since research shows high variance and little stability in these scores which means that the models are misspecified. In fact, the whole “reform” movement is ideologically driven by those who would like to tap into the DOE $19 billion budget for private profit or personal gain. The same is true across the country.

  • Kennethgoldberg

    There are some basic principles of organizations that apply to businesses, families, and schools. People function best in rational hierarchies and not so well in dysfunctional hierarchies. It is for that reason that I strongly support the notion that the principal should be the primary person involved in the evaluation of teachers. Systems that diminish the principal’s authority with external evaluations of teachers can pose long term dangers. This principle applies to the home as well which is why I am a critic of homework policy, not that it might not have value, but it can be damaging if it supplants the authority of the parent. http://www.thehomeworktrap.com.

  • Tim

    Terrific post, and may I humbly submit “Anyone who has children, who works in a school, or whoever attended school knows that all teachers are not created equal. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.” as a Chalk It Up/Vox Populi nominee. 

  • retiree729

    You don’t take into account that Principals can orchestrate success and failure. A crony of the principal can get a carefully constructed class of high achievers and well behaved students and a a less sycophantic teacher gets all the lower achievers and students with disruptive behaviors.  Same for ancilliary help such as title one, coaches, etc. Don’t forget who gets supplies and such.  These are all perogatives of the principal.  Getting a U in attendance for example:  Over ten days, you can be subject to a U.  I was out 14 days with pneumonia.  Another teacher went on a  3 week vacation. No U.  Take away the “fudge factor”.

  • NYC ESL Teacher

    Both the public (as per last year’s PDK/Gallup poll) and now
    further research supports the notion that principals have the ability to retain
    great staff by providing useful feedback to teachers. Our focus should now be
    on giving principals the tools and training that they need to effectively
    evaluate their teaching staff. Such training should include best practices in
    teacher evaluation, and how to use the data from those evaluations to
    successfully support teachers. 

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