In April, Tim Daly penned an incisive three-part series on the trials and tribulations of teacher evaluation reforms. Tim recounted, accurately and candidly, why teacher evaluation reform seemed liked a slam-dunk no-brainer when a major push began circa 2008 and how, ultimately, such efforts mostly fell apart in the face of harsh political headwinds and thorny policy challenges.
Then, in May, Kevin Huffman wrote a reply emphasizing where things went right: in Tennessee, where Huffman was state commissioner and oversaw the implementation of its educator and school leader evaluation system, and in Washington, D.C., where former Chancellor Michelle Rhee led the development of a robust teacher evaluation system known as “IMPACT.” Both Tennessee and D.C. subsequently went on to become national leaders in student achievement gains.
Both are useful additions to the discourse, but both left out how the pre-service system of teacher preparation in university-based programs establishes a culture of mediocrity that makes it difficult for those seeking more accurate and differentiated educator evaluations in schools.
Simply put, when people like Tim Daly, Kevin Huffman, or I come along and say to teachers “we want to evaluate you and such ratings will be meaningful and will differentiate across a spectrum from bad to excellent,” that’s not what they signed up for. Those aren’t the rules they were told they would have to play by. It’s no wonder we all faced so much blowback on test and non-test forms of evaluation alike.
From their earliest experience, those enrolled in traditional teacher prep programs are sent the same message that we lament sending classroom teachers. No matter how they perform, the vast majority of them, and nearly all of the programs in which they are enrolled, will get high grades and glowing reviews. In other words, the same “Widget Effect” that Daly and his peers observed in K–12 schools actually starts years earlier, back when aspiring teachers are in their formative years.
Case in point: In a report titled “Easy A’s and What’s Behind Them,” the National Council on Teacher Quality has documented how teachers-in-training receive significantly higher grades in coursework and are much more likely to graduate with honors than their peers in other university majors. Noted then-NCTQ President Kate Walsh: “Teaching is one of the most difficult and demanding jobs there is. Yet for reasons that are hard to fathom, it appears to be one of the easiest majors both to get into and then to complete.”
I had my own experience with teacher prep’s aversion to differentiation and rigor during the time I served on Capitol Hill. My boss, then-second ranking Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee George Miller, put forth a set of proposals aimed improving teacher preparation. His vehicle was the 1998 reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act (HEA).
The proposal that met the most blowback would require publication, for graduates of each teacher prep program, of program-wide pass rates on state licensing and certification exams. This is standard practice in other fields such as law and medicine. Also under consideration was requiring a minimum pass rate for each program as a condition for receiving federal funds, a parallel version of which some states were then pursuing.[1]
The proposal took everyone by surprise, especially on the left. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article with the headline “Liberal Democrat Is an Unlikely Foe of Teacher-Education Programs.” Miller was quoted: “They are perpetrating a fraud on the public because they are graduating teachers who aren't prepared to teach. And they are also, in some instances, perpetrating a fraud on the people they are enrolling. Because they are suggesting that if you come here, and you graduate, you will be prepared to teach. And the evidence is that is not always true.”
Now-ranking, then-more-junior member of the Education Committee, Representative Bobby Scott (D-VA), expressed a legitimate concern that the provision might disincentivize schools enrolling more lower-achieving candidates, including students of color, but as we pointed out, we were only interested in counting those who had actually been handed a diploma, not everyone enrolled. Schools of education advanced specious arguments about student privacy and faulted the quality of licensing and certification exams without producing any evidence that they were doing anything to improve or replace those same tests.
The requirement that teacher prep programs publish the pass rates of their graduates was ultimately included in the HEA reauthorization bill, minus any provision that tied those pass rates to eligibility for federal funds. The provision was in no way detrimental to the passage of the overall bill. The conference report passed unanimously in the Senate and only got four “no’s” in the House (all Republican).
We thought we were home free. But under heavy pressure, not just from schools of education but from the entire higher education lobby—which didn’t want to set a precedent for postsecondary accountability and had been accused of using teacher prep programs as cash cows that subsidize more prestigious departments on campus—the Clinton Administration completely eviscerated the pass-rate reporting requirement. And they did it in a way that can only be called shameless.
Even though the statute specified that pass rates were to be reported for graduates of teacher preparation programs, the regulations developed by the administration said that pass rates had to be reported only for “program completers,” an entirely new concept in both federal law and higher education practice. And who were these program completers? Only those graduates who had passed the licensing and certification tests. Voilà, virtually every program had a 100 percent pass rate regardless of how many students to whom they had awarded a diploma went on to fail those same exams.
Admittedly, simply looking at pass rates is a limited way of evaluating teacher preparation—hey, we were just trying to break the ice, we just didn’t bring a big enough mallet—so a decade later Congressman Miller, now House Education Committee Chair, via the next HEA reauthorization, helped put into law some more elaborate requirements. Long story short, the Obama Administration spent its entire two terms trying to develop regulations and ultimately failed, leaving it to NCTQ to collect and report—through shoe leather, legal action, and public humiliation—institutional pass rates, at least for those for which it could acquire data. Both of those are stories for another day.
The point here is that aspiring teachers are constantly shown, by those whose responsibility it is to prepare and mentor them, that any process that differentiates knowledge, skills, or performance among individuals or institutions is inherently undesirable. Everyone is doing just great. Anybody can do the job well. No one need be given a bad grade or denied a diploma.
In hindsight, I think it would have been better if we had started with trying to reform teacher preparation before embarking on teacher evaluation. Not that it would have been easy. But it might have made more systemic sense. (For some ideas, see Education Reform Now’s report “Breaking the Cycle of Mediocrity.”) The wins on the science of reading in recent years are encouraging, but there is a lot more fertile ground to be plowed if we can somehow get ourselves up for it.
[1] This also was based on a little-known provision in HEA that foreign medical schools—which are generally considered to be of lower quality than U.S.-based medical schools—meet a minimum 60 percent pass rate among their graduates on medical licensing exams to be eligible for federal funds. You can read more in a 2010 GAO report titled “Education Should Improve Monitoring of Schools That Participate in the Federal Student Loan Program.”
