Iimproving teaching quality

High-quality teachers have an enormous impact on student achievement. Over the years, schools and districts have looked at a variety of ways to attract better teachers to public schools, especially those serving the poorest students.

Reforms for improving teaching quality have largely centered on two goals: recruiting more talented people into the teaching profession, and raising the stakes and incentives for existing teachers—particularly those in high-poverty schools—to help students thrive and learn.

"But these reforms are likely to disappoint if nothing is done to fundamentally overhaul the way the work of teachers is organized," argues Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva in a new Education Sector report, Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design. Better teaching, she argues, will in the long run come not only from attracting a strong pool of talent and giving them boosts in pay, but from "changing the nature of the job."

The key issues that need to be addressed in reshaping teachers' work, Silva argues, include:

Redesigning how teachers' time is used
Combining and distributing teachers' talent strategically
Making trade-offs to focus resources on what's most important.
Teachers at Work highlights several promising programs that address these issues. Generation Schools in New York City, for example, provides a school model that focuses on the strategic use of people and time.

This school design provides teachers with substantial time for preparation, planning, and evaluation. It also lengthens the school calendar for students—who attend school for 200 days, 20 more than a typical New York City School. Yet the model does not involve extended work time for teachers.

That marks a key difference between the Generation Schools model and other extended time models across the country. Many of these schools, which expand teacher time in order to expand student learning time, are now struggling with teacher burnout or the higher cost of paying teachers for extra hours.

Public Agenda's recent nationwide survey of teachers finds 40 percent of teachers are "disheartened" by their jobs, citing burnout and a lack of a supportive administration among major issues feeding their discontent. Teachers at Work draws on similar findings and lays out a compelling case for why we need to take a new look at the work teachers do in order to elevate the profession.

The report also outlines next steps for state policymakers and local officials who are considering how to make the best use of their most significant investment—the quality of their teaching force.

Teachers at Work comes at a time when teacher quality is receiving renewed attention at all levels. The U.S. Department of Education spends several billion each year on improving teacher quality, and U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan has proposed billions more to improve the effectiveness of all teachers and to ensure that all children get access to effective teachers. The intensity of focus, combined with insights learned from successful models like those outlined in Teachers at Work, offer an extraordinary opportunity to invest in and evaluate new designs that will lift the teaching profession to its deserved status and serve students better than many are today.

"As the student population grows increasingly diverse and the pressure to demonstrate results at the school and district level intensifies, teaching will only become more demanding, increasing the urgency to not just attract a new generation of workers, but to create more effective workplaces to receive and develop them," Silva says.