How Best to Add Value? Strike a Balance between the Individual and the Organization in School Reform

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Collective Practice, Quality Teaching: VUE Number 27, Spring 2010

NOTE: This article is reprinted with permission from EPI briefing paper #249, published by the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., on October 23, 2009.

In the push to recruit and reward the most talented individual teachers, many 
policy-makers and administrators have overlooked the crucial role of the school 
as an organization in enhancing teaching quality.

Two developments in public education converged near the turn of the century to bring rare prominence to the issue of teacher policy. First, several researchers reported with confidence that teachers are the single most important school-level factor in students’ learning. Although schools could not influence the prior experience or socio-economic status of a student, they could decide who the child’s teachers would be, and those decisions would have long-term consequences for 
students’ academic success. Meanwhile, school officials faced the challenge 
of replacing an enormous cohort of retiring veterans with new teachers. 
The demand for teachers in low-income schools was especially great.

Recognizing this pressing need for new, effective teachers, policy-makers and administrators began to adopt strategies for recruiting, hiring, 
supporting, motivating, 
assessing, and compensating 
the best possible individuals. Their efforts succeeded in highlighting for 
the public the importance of teachers. Over the past decade, however, this sharpened focus on the individual teacher has eclipsed the role that the school as an organization can and must play in enhancing the quality and 
effectiveness of teachers and teaching. As a result, teachers are getting less 
support than they should and schools are less successful than they might be.

The following discussion explores this line of argument by first summarizing relevant evidence and then suggesting how schools can increase their professional capacity and instructional success by striking a balance between the attention they give to the individual teacher and the attention they devote to the organization overall.

Findings on the Role 
of Teacher Quality

Between 1997 and 2003, the importance of the teacher’s role in student learning was confirmed by a series of influential studies (Wright, Horn & Sanders 1997; Rockoff 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain 2005; Rowan, Correnti & Miller 2002; McCaffrey 
et al. 2003). Together, these studies demonstrated that the teacher is the most important school-level influence on students’ learning, that some 
teachers are much more effective than others in raising student achievement, and that differences among teachers can be measured using methods called value-added modeling. Further, these studies revealed that relative quality among teachers within schools varies greatly. This finding suggested to some analysts that the school as an organization has little influence on teachers’ effectiveness and, therefore, that the most sensible strategy for improving teaching would be to staff schools with the best possible teaching candidates.

These findings about teacher quality were reported widely and analyzed closely (see, for example, Archer 1999; Olson 2004). Coupled with dramatic changes in the teacher labor market at the time, the findings led officials in many states to rewrite teacher licensing requirements while local school boards and administrators adopted new approaches for staffing their schools.

Rising Demand, 
Falling Supply in the 
Teacher Labor Market

By 2000, an enormous cohort of teachers who had been hired during the late 1960s and early 1970s were beginning to retire, and it was not clear who would replace them. Three decades before, teaching had provided a professional path for women and for men of color when other lines of work were closed to them. Now these groups, who had long made up the ranks of teachers, had access to a wide range of attractive career options; they no longer would enter teaching as a default career. 
The demand for new teachers grew, but the pool of licensed candidates was small and, by some accounts, weak (Corcoran, Evans & Schwab 2004). 
For the first time in history, schools had to compete for talent, and they were unprepared to do so.

Given the new convincing research that a single teacher could dramatically affect a child’s life chances, school officials recognized more than ever the importance of recruiting and hiring promising candidates. But who was most likely to become an effective teacher? Research offered policy-makers and administrators little guidance, beyond suggesting that individuals with higher test scores and greater content knowledge were more likely to be effective in raising students’ test scores. There was no clear evidence that pre-service training in pedagogy or holding of a master’s degree (other than in mathematics) contributed to a teacher’s instructional success. The lack of conclusive research findings about teacher qualifications, coupled with a widely held belief that an individual who masters content knowledge can teach, led policy-makers in many states to substantially reduce entry requirements to teaching.

Meanwhile, Teach for America (TFA), a program placing high-achieving liberal arts graduates in low-income schools, grew steadily in size and influence. TFA intensively recruited strong candidates on prestigious campuses and then carefully chose their corps members through a rigorous selection process. Publicity about TFA and similar programs reinforced the view that schools could be reformed solely by hiring individuals with “the right stuff.” TFA corps members, assigned to some of the nation’s most challenging schools, were expected to succeed largely by virtue of their own personal knowledge and intense dedication to students. They were asked to surmount the obstacles of the schools where they worked, rather than relying on those schools to support their work. Publicity about these teachers’ courage and commitment heightened beliefs that the right individual could singlehandedly succeed with any students.

Competing Theories of Change

This strategy for improving public 
education by relying on carefully 
chosen individuals is consistent with what is often referred to as the “egg-crate” model of schooling. Each teacher instructs his or her own students in a separate classroom and, although classrooms are connected, they remain discrete. The school’s effectiveness is simply the aggregate of these individual teachers’ contributions to students’ learning. This approach depends largely on self-reliant individuals and solo 
performances. However, unless all teachers within a school are highly effective, some students benefit from good instruction, while others are penalized for having been assigned to the “wrong” teacher. Moreover, although teachers may succeed within the walls of a single classroom, a student’s academic career extends throughout the school from class to class and grade to grade. The egg-crate model does nothing to ensure that a student’s experience over time will be consistent, coherent, or successful.

By contrast, an organizational approach to school improvement rests on a deliberately interdependent school organization. Teachers work across classroom and grade-level boundaries to support and extend each other’s efforts. Arguably, the more that a school’s teachers are knowledgeable about all students and coordinate their efforts to meet those students’ needs, the more effective the school will be. This collaborative work among teachers with different levels of skill and different types of experience is designed to 
capitalize on the strengths of some and compensate for the weaknesses of others, thus increasing the overall professional capacity of the school.

An egg-crate school with independent teachers is administratively convenient because the loss of a teacher in one classroom has little practical consequence for teachers in other classrooms. Even though new, promising teachers may stay only for two or three years, proponents argue that those teachers’ contributions to student learning are worth the investment. However, teacher turnover has substantial costs. The Boston Public Schools documented that in 2003 it cost the district $10,547 to replace a first-year teacher, $18,617 to replace a second-year teacher, and $26,687 to replace a third-year teacher on top of the teacher’s salary (Birkeland & Curtis 2006). More important, however, is 
the organizational cost of turnover, for the steady loss of able teachers continuously erodes the instructional capacity of schools.

A school where teachers work 
collaboratively certainly is more 
challenging to develop than one based simply on individuals. Teachers’ roles are differentiated and their responsibilities and relationships are interdependent. Such a school can monitor the progress of individual students over time, thus increasing the prospects for instructional success. Collaborative work can benefit from the combined talents and skills of all teachers, thus reducing the classroom-to-classroom variation in student achievement.