Local amenities,unobserved quality,and market clearing: Adjusting teacher compensation to provide equal education opportunities

Local school districts differ in their ability to pay for teacher quality, and in the amenities they offer as places to live and work. Market clearing with heterogeneous quality yields geographically varying teacher salary levels that confound scarcity with unobserved differences in quality. The paper discusses identification and estimation of a model of quality-adjusted teacher salaries in local markets with unobserved market-clearing prices. Exogenous variables in the model include community and district characteristics, job characteristics and working conditions, and individual characteristics. We apply the model to estimate the relative cost of providing comparably qualified teachers for urban and rural public schools in the state of Alaska, which has high geographic variation in amenities and local financial resources. The quality-adjusted geographic salary differentials implied by the results suggest much larger compensation differentials for isolated rural schools than most of these school districts can afford under current levels of state support.     

Mathematics teachers’ self-captured video and opportunities for learning

Numerous video-based programs have been developed to support mathematics teachers in reflecting on and examining classrooms interactions without the immediate demands of instruction. An important premise of such work is that teacher learning occurs at the time that the video is viewed and discussed with teachers. Recent advances in technology, however, offer new approaches for the use of video with teachers. We claim that these new technologies provide important opportunities for teacher learning prior to the viewing and discussion of video with colleagues. In particular, we believe that important teacher learning can occur from the activities of (1) capturing video from one’s own classroom and (2) selecting clips to share with others. The goal of this article is to introduce key strategies that three groups of middle and high school mathematics teachers use prior to, during, and after instruction as they engage in this work. We believe that increased attention to these strategies is necessary in order to better understand how to support teacher learning in the context of new digital technologies.     

Negotiating the Inquiry Question: A Comparison of Whole Class and Small Group Strategies in Grade Five Science Classrooms

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of two strategies for negotiating the question for exploration during science inquiry on student achievement and teachers' perceptions. The study is set in the context of the Science Writing Heuristic. The first strategy (small group) consisted of each group of four students negotiating a question for inquiry with the teacher while the second strategy (whole class) consisted of the entire class negotiating a single question for inquiry with the teacher. The study utilized a mixed-method approach. A quasi-experimental repeated measures design was used to determine the effect of strategy on student achievement and semi-structured teacher interviews were used to probe the question of teacher perceptions of the two strategies. Teacher observations were conducted using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) to check for variation in implementation of the two strategies. Iowa Test of Basic Skills Science (ITBSS) (2005 and 2006) and teacher/researcher developed unit exams (pre and post) were used as student achievement measures. No statistically significant differences were found among students in the two treatment groups on the ITBSS or unit exams. RTOP observations suggest that teacher implementation was consistent across the two treatment strategies. Teachers disclosed personal preferences for the two strategies, indicating the whole class treatment was easier to manage (at least at the beginning of the school year) as students gained experience with science inquiry and the associated increased responsibility. Possible mechanisms linking the two strategies, negotiated questions, and student outcomes are discussed.     

Teacher education as academic work: the affordances of a materialist analysis

In this paper we make an argument for paying close attention to the materiality of practice in understanding the work of teacher educators; specifically, the meanings of artefacts used by teacher educators in the course of their daily work. We locate this analysis within a dialectical materialist understanding of the development of human activity, providing examples of artefacts-in-use in initial teacher education and the meanings accorded to these artefacts by the teacher educators we observed and interviewed. Our aim is to make a case for what is afforded epistemologically when researchers pay attention to artefacts from a dialectical materialist viewpoint. In the final part of the paper, we argue that paying attention to how teacher educators engage with artefacts can help us understand the unity of psychological and social processes within dominant approaches to teacher education, as well as providing clues about how adaptation of artefacts can drive cultural change.     

Teacher Compensation and Teacher Teaming: Sketching the Terrain

Many recent educational reform and school improvement initiatives have asserted the importance of teachers working in groups. However, it is not clear what organizational redesign has occurred to support a shift to team- or group-based work. This article examines one such organizational shift, changes in teacher compensation, that might accompany organizational redesign arranged to support teacher work groups. The article describes a continuum of possible options for teacher compensation in teacher teaming arrangements. Three interrelated aspects of teaming and compensation are considered: the relationship of teaming to teachers' overall work, the investment a school or a district might make to accomplish the teaming in education, and the degree to which the team aims to increase employee self-management and self-governance (Hackman, 1986). Some implications of these options for personnel evaluation are also discussed.     

Median Growth Percentiles (MGPs): Assessment of Intertemporal Stability and Correlations with Observational Scores

While states are no longer required to set up teacher evaluation systems based in significant part on student test scores, quite a few continue to use value-added (VAMs) or student growth percentile (SGP) models for that purpose. In this study, we analyzed three years of teacher data to illustrate the performance of teachers’ median growth percentiles (MGPs)). We found MGP’s consistency over time to be comparable with the existing estimates from the value-added models (VAMs). Additionally, we found that MGPs do not substantively agree with another measure of teacher quality – teachers’ observational scores. These findings suggest that caution should be exercised when teacher’s MGPs, as well as VAMs, are used in teacher evaluation system to make high-stakes decisions such as merit pay, tenure, or teacher contract termination. Our findings about the correlation of MGPs with observational scores support the idea of the multidimensional nature of teacher effectiveness construct.     

The impact of teachers’ unions on educational outcomes: What we know and what we need to learn

In this paper we consider more than three decades of research on teachers' unions in the United States. We focus on unions' role as potential rent-seekers in the K-12 educational landscape, and specifically how teachers' unions impact district and student outcomes. We review important methodological improvements in the identification of union impacts and the measurement of contract restrictiveness that characterize a number of recent studies. We generally find that the preponderance of empirical evidence suggests that teacher unionization and union strength are associated with increases in district expenditures and teacher salaries, particularly salaries for experienced teachers. The evidence for union-related differences in student outcomes is mixed, but suggestive of insignificant or modestly negative union effects. Taken together, these patterns are consistent with a rent-seeking hypothesis. We conclude by discussing other important union activities, most notably in the political arena, and by noting that recent changes in state laws pertaining to teachers and teacher unions may provide context for new directions in scholarship.     

The emotional work of discomfort and vulnerability in multicultural teacher education

This study documents our efforts to implement an ‘ethic of discomfort’ and a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in our undergraduate multicultural teacher education courses. Commitments to these moral imperatives inherently involve emotional work for teacher candidates and teacher educators. Such emotional work, particularly in academia, is often invisible and disincentivized. This study examines the following: (1) grappling with students’ emotional reactions that stem from discomfort, (2) engaging in public emotional discourses, (3) negotiating the political dimensions of teaching diverse students, and (4) remaining emotionally available to students as they work through these ideas in their own lives. The implications of this study address the types of preparation and support teacher educators need to facilitate the transformative potential of a pedagogy and an ethic of discomfort. While pre-service teacher education is considered a safe and productive learning space for students to be discomforted, questions are posed regarding the safety for pre-tenured teacher educators involved in this process. We offer a typology of emotional work from a teacher educator perspective in teaching multicultural education.     

Peer mentoring in the development of beginning secondary science teachers: three case studies

In this study, the researchers examined the effectiveness of a reflective model of peer mentoring in the professional growth of early‐career science teachers. The study was carried out over one academic year with three beginning secondary science teachers. The public school teachers in this study reported that participation in peer mentoring provided a support mechanism through which they developed confidence in risk‐taking and experienced professional growth. Results indicate teachers gained insight into each of the four broad domains of teacher responsibility that were measured, including specific issues relevant to curriculum structure, managing student behavior and classroom safety, utilizing new instructional approaches and negotiating relationships with various stakeholders as part of their professional responsibilities. This study has relevant implications for teacher education and provides a model for peer mentoring that could be considered for implementation as a means of initial support to beginning science teachers.     

Teacher Unionism in Changing Times: Is This the Real “New Unionism”?

This article provides a case study of union change in an environment in which radical school restructuring is taking place, and active strategies to weaken and marginalize organized teachers are being pursued by the state. The case study union is the National Union of Teachers in England. The article explores a number of different strategies open to teacher unions, utilizing a framework provided by Turner (2004). Drawing on data collected at a national level, and in three local authority areas, I argue that the National Union of Teachers’ response to the erosion of collective bargaining is best presented as an amalgam of strategies focused on workplace organizing, political campaigning, and coalition building. The data demonstrate considerable congruence between national and local strategies, although local data reveal considerable challenges in implementation and consequently considerable unevenness in local experiences.     

Credentials Versus Performance: Review of the Teacher Performance Pay Research

In this article we examine the economic case for merit or performance-based pay for K–12 teachers. We review several areas of germane research. The direct evaluation literature on these incentive plans is slender; highly diverse in terms of methodology, targeted populations, and programs evaluated; and primarily focused on short-run motivational effects. It is nonetheless fairly consistent in finding positive program effects. The general personnel literature highlights potentially significant selection effects of employee compensation systems. This is particularly relevant for teaching, because a growing body of production function research points to large, persistent, but idiosyncratic differences in teacher productivity. Thus, along with motivation effects, there is potential for substantial positive long run selection effects from teacher performance pay systems. The evaluation literature is not sufficiently robust to prescribe how systems should be designed (e.g., optimal size of bonuses, mix of individual vs. group incentives). However, it is sufficiently positive to support much more extensive field trials, pilot programs, and policy experiments, combined with careful follow-up evaluation.     

Rent-Seeking through collective bargaining: Teachers unions and education production☆

We explore how teachers unions affect education production by comparing outcomes between districts allocating new tax revenue amidst collective bargaining negotiations and districts allocating tax revenue well before. Districts facing union pressure increase teacher salaries and benefits, spend down reserves, and experience no student achievement gains. Conversely, districts facing less pressure hire more teachers (instead of increasing compensation) and realize significant student achievement gains. We interpret these results as causal evidence of the negative impact of teacher rent seeking on education production, as the timing of district tax elections relative to collective bargaining appears to be as good as random.     

我国中小学教师工资等级研究

我国现行的中小学教师工资等级表存在着等级间重叠度高、高低等级间级差较小、涨幅不合理等问题,难以有效激励教师追求专业水平的提升。本文根据薪酬设计的理论和方法,并结合中小学教师职业发展特点,尝试设计了一个具有以下特点的工资等级表：一是基于教师专业成长的阶段划分了五个工资等级与之相适应,体现教师职业发展的特点;二是根据市场工资线设计了第三个等级的中间值,保证了工资水平的外部竞争力;三是采用等比级差法设计等级间中位值,实现了级差随等级增加而增加;四是遵循新的工资理念,设计了合理的等级间工资重叠区间;五是结合教师职业生涯周期,建立了教师工资的正常增长机制。     

Teacher opinions on performance pay: Evidence from India

The practical viability of performance-based pay programs for teachers depends critically on the extent of support the idea will receive from teachers. We present evidence on teacher opinions with regard to performance-based pay from teacher interviews conducted in the context of an experimental evaluation of a program that provided performance-based bonuses to teachers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We report four main findings in this paper: (1) over 80% of teachers had a favorable opinion about the idea of linking a component of pay to measures of performance, (2) exposure to an actual incentive program increased teacher support for the idea, (3) teacher support declines with age, experience, training, and base pay, and (4) the extent of teachers’ stated ex ante support for performance-linked pay (over a series of mean-preserving spreads of pay) is positively correlated with their ex post performance as measured by estimates of teacher value addition. This suggests that teachers are aware of their own effectiveness and that implementing a performance-linked pay program could not only have broad-based support among teachers but also attract more effective teachers into the teaching profession.     

What does the teacher do?: Constructivist pedagogies and prospective teachers’ beliefs about the role of a teacher

The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received, mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk, explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas. Increasingly, teacher educators ask new teachers to learn how to elicit and then use students’ existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. While the role a teacher plays in developing or shaping students’ thinking via constructivist pedagogies is obvious to teacher educators who advocate such strategies, the case of Taylor, a prospective English teacher, suggests that the role a teacher plays when using these strategies may not be at all clear to prospective teachers. Rather than understanding constructivist pedagogies as techniques for thinking with learners, for teaching them, Tayor saw these strategies as ends in themselves. Faced with models of constructivist pedagogies, Taylor concluded that the teacher's role ends when she has activated learners, invited them to talk, successfully engaged their participation. This article describes how she reached this conclusion and explores the ways in which constructivist pedagogies can lead prospective teachers to project a thin vision of their role as a teacher.     

新时期初中英语阅读理解教学的策略分析

新时期教育的发展,使教师对教学形式与教学过程更加重视。以初中英语教学为例,在阅读理解教学的课堂教学过程中,教师的教学目标是培养学生的阅读学习策略,进而使学生的英语综合能力得到提升和发展。本文将对此部分内容进行分析,并提供相应策略,以供参考。     

Finding a third space in teacher education: creating an urban teacher residency

This paper describes an urban teacher residency program, the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency, a collaborative endeavor between the Newark, New Jersey Public Schools and Montclair State University, built on a decades-long partnership. The authors see the conceptual work of developing this program as creating a “third space” in teacher education. We detail the ways in which we conceptualize epistemology and clinical practice in teacher education, and changes in the roles of the community, and P-12 teachers that occur in a third space. Providing an account of our messy and nonlinear process demonstrates the struggles of creating new spaces for teacher education. We believe the theory that informs our work, the challenges we face, and the strategies for meeting those challenges illustrate the tenuous and ever-evolving nature of doing work in the “third space.”     

美国教师工资和激励机制改革的历史发展

美国19世纪以来教师待遇的发展历史:教师工资制度从"膳宿工资制"到"等级工资制"再到"单一工资制度"演变。甄别绩效工资制、职务工资制和其他相关改革。在重视教师个体成就与全面重视教师群体绩效、重视教师教龄和学历与重视教学能力和效果间寻找一种平衡点,以建立既体现社会发展需求又体现教师劳动特点的工资制度。     

Scaffolding Student Understanding in Small-Group Work: Students’ Uptake of Teacher Support in Subsequent Small-Group Interaction

Providing contingent or adaptive support (i.e., scaffolding) is effective. Yet it is unclear how it promotes students’ learning. In this mixed-methods study, we investigated to what extent the effect of contingent support for students’ learning is mediated by the extent to which students take up teachers’ support in subsequent small-group work. We define contingent support as support that contains adapted levels of teacher control or regulation based on the learner’s level of understanding. To explore the research question, we analyzed all interactions from 35 lessons of 7 secondary social studies teachers and 7 small groups of students. Logistic multilevel mediation analyses showed that the likelihood of students formulating accurate answers during small-group work was higher when students applied the teacher’s support in subsequent small-group work (as opposed to ignoring that support). However, the contingency of a teacher’s support did not affect students’ uptake or the accuracy of their answers. Additional qualitative analyses showed that students’ uptake of contingent support was sometimes hampered by untimely fading of the support. Moreover, we found that contingent support that was then gradually faded was the most effective in fostering students’ uptake of a teacher’s support.     

Crossing the boundaries of imagination: The role of a public library exhibition in global learning for student teachers and teacher educators

In this paper, we utilise the theoretical concept of ‘boundary crossing’ to explore how, as Australian university teacher educators, we worked with library curators and a class of student teachers to mount a public exhibition of their group work. We consider how the students crossed ‘boundaries of imagination’ in symbolic representation and critical analysis by creating artistic installations to express global education themes. We reflect on what we, the university educators, learned about crossing institutional and pedagogical boundaries to mutually facilitate new learning. We argue for the importance of shared public pedagogy as offering new avenues for teacher education and of connecting with local communities.