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The city Department of Education is one of five large urban districts that have opened up their email Rolodexes to The New Teacher Project for a study about teacher recruitment and retention. The nonprofit group, which runs the city’s Teaching Fellows programs and studies teacher job markets around the country, sent the voluntary, 30-minute survey to about 68,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers and one large charter school network.

The 50-question survey — which one teacher sent us in a series of screenshots, above — asks teachers what would make them want to work in, or remain in, a high-needs school.

The survey is a first step in TNTP’s efforts to produce a followup to “The Widget Effect,” according Dan Weisberg, a TNTP vice president who used to be the DOE’s chief labor negotiator. The influential 2009 report urged school districts to revamp teacher evaluations based on survey responses of 15,000 teachers from 12 districts across five states (New York City was not among them).

Now, dozens of states, including New York, are in the process of overhauling teacher evaluations. Weisberg said this year’s survey is the next step toward figuring out how to place the most effective teachers in classrooms with the neediest students. (more…)

Teach For America (TFA) alum and Reluctant Disciplinarian author Gary Rubinstein on why TFA should ask Corps Members (CMs) to commit for three years rather than two:

I say this because I know that after two years of teaching, most CMs have become really excellent teachers. (I’m in my 11th year now, and I don’t think I’m that much better than I was in my third year. I taught for 4 years total in Houston.) Right now there are approximately 3,000 CMs in their first year, 3,000 CMs in their second year in their placement sites. … If TFA made the commitment three years, you’d have 3,000 first years, 3,000 second years, and 3,000 third years. This would be 9,000 teachers with 67% of them being ‘very effective.’ … To me, that’s making a good step toward ‘One day all children will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.’

Rubinstein believes adding a year wouldn’t require much in the way of new resources, as most third year CMs wouldn’t require much support. He acknowledges that some applicants might be scared off by the longer commitment, but TFA is so popular right now that the organization should still be able to recruit plenty of motivated college grads. And, he asks, why not offer a choice of a two or three-year commitment, with preferential acceptance for those who choose three years?

A third year might also provide enough stability and experience of making a real difference to keep a larger proportion of teachers in the classroom even longer than three years.

Revolving door by thomasbrandt

Teacher-blogger JD2718 jetted off to New Orleans yesterday for a stint organizing teachers there, but before he left he posted some interesting news on his blog: for the first time, state report cards being released shortly will include teacher turnover data for each school.

“How calculated?” JD2718 asks. “Total teachers who don’t return, divided by total teachers in the new school year. It’s about as simple as it gets.” As a UFT chapter leader, JD2718 is attracted to the data as a way to identify which schools are unpleasant places for teachers to work and then to narrow in on any administrative abuses that might be taking place there. But this information isn’t only useful for teachers — a school that’s unpleasant for teachers is likely to be unpleasant for students and parents as well, in a way that may or may not be reflected in its test scores.

The teacher turnover information that will become available whenever the 2007 school reports are released — they’re months later than usual already — is limited. At least at first, the report cards will document only a one-year turnover snapshot, so it won’t be possible to make inferences about larger trends at individual schools. In addition, there are many perfectly acceptable reasons for teachers to leave their schools, but we won’t be able to tell why teachers have left. And we won’t be able to extract any useful information about new schools that are still scaling up because the total number of teachers in the fall is always larger than in the preceding spring at those schools; the simple formula will fail in these cases.

These limitations shouldn’t stop you from seeking information about teacher turnover at schools where you’re considering enrolling or working. Once you know have a snapshot idea of teacher stability, you can ask for more details to find out the circumstances of each teacher’s departure and whether the year described on the report card is representative of a typical year at the school. Even more promising is what JD2718 notes: once we have multiple years’ worth of teacher turnover data from report cards, we’ll be able to start detecting trends and schools that have persistent turnover — assuming, of course, that the formula used to calculate the teacher turnover rate and the method of collecting the information remains the same over time.