Comment by Thomas Toch
[The Federal Role in Teacher Professional Development]
Julia E. Koppich has framed the teacher training issue correctly: Students cannot be expected to master today's higher standards without having teachers capable of teaching the higher standards. It is that simple. [End Page 295]
Koppich also draws attention to the biggest flaw in the federal response to the standards movement--the superficiality of too many Eisenhower-funded programs. More than half of all Eisenhower-sponsored training lasts one day or less. Inevitably, training of such duration tends to have little lasting influence.
To counter such superficiality, a problem that is endemic in teacher professional development, I would argue for the sorts of intensive summer institutes that flourished under the National Defense Education Act of 1958, intensive programs that had a sanguine effect on the quality of math and science instruction in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Furthermore, improving instruction in reading in the elementary grades should be a high priority of the Eisenhower program. I do not take issue with Koppich regarding the importance of subject matter content in staff development. But many elementary school teachers do not know how to teach reading well, even though learning how to read is the cornerstone of elementary education and thus the most important thing that goes on in elementary classrooms. Considerable energy must be put into that fundamental building block of K-12 education.
There is also a larger reality regarding the Eisenhower program. Vast amounts of professional development monies--monies not counted as such--are being frittered away through the single salary schedule. That salary system, pervasive in public education, awards salary increases strictly on the basis of years of experience and college credits beyond the initial degree required for certification. Some 100,000 masters degrees are issued in education each year, most of them to classroom teachers. If those teachers receive a modest $3,000 a year raise for earning their degrees, the cost to taxpayers is about $300 million--or almost as much as the annual congressional appropriation for the Eisenhower program.
The money is not well spent. Nearly half the courses that teachers take on their way to their masters degrees are about school administration, which has nothing to do with what is going on in their classrooms. So, by and large, that money is wasted as a professional development resource. To address this structural problem in public education, Congress could offer financial incentives to several states to uncouple the salary increases from college course credits and link them, instead, to intensive summer institutes.
Congress should also consider expanding the scope of the Eisenhower program to include other teacher-quality initiatives, such as, for example, [End Page 296] signing bonuses to encourage teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools. Congress already has embraced the incentive notion by permitting states to spend up to 5 percent of their Eisenhower monies on financial incentives for teachers to obtain advance licensing through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Another model is the Yale-New Haven Teacher Institute, which has been around for two decades. It brings together New Haven public school teachers with senior Yale faculty in semester-long seminars. The topics of the seminars are proposed by the New Haven public school teachers. The collaborations culminate in curriculum units that are widely used in the New Haven public school system. Another significant payoff of the program is that it has reduced teacher attrition in New Haven. Teacher attrition rates and the consequences of professional development on those rates are an additional way to evaluate the effectiveness of professional development programs, including the Eisenhower program.
As Koppich points out, Congress has sought and largely failed to measure the payoff of the Eisenhower program. Drawing trustworthy cause-and-effect relationships between a teacher training initiative and a state standardized basic skills test scores is, to put it mildly, an inexact science. Many factors influence student achievement. Drawing a straight line from a particular training program to a test score is very difficult. Greater accountability in schools is a primary goal, but basic skills test scores should not be used in ways that are indefensible.
If Congress wants to know whether it is getting its money's worth in the Eisenhower program, it should fund studies that seek to isolate the influence of intensive professional development on student achievement. It should do the same sorts of studies on trends in teacher attrition and other indicators. In the absence of positive results from such studies, Koppich's notion of requiring states to demonstrate achievement gains as a condition for receiving future Eisenhower funding may be premature.
Pennsylvania uses another way of evaluating professional development. It measures the results of Eisenhower-funded programs not on the basis of student achievement, but by the extent to which the programs improve teachers' grasp of their subjects. It tests teachers before and after they enroll in Eisenhower programs, then bases a portion of future program funding on the results. That seems to be a defensible method of accountability. [End Page 297]
Koppich's thoughtful discussion of the Eisenhower experience in California suggests that the movement to raise standards in the nation can be a catalyst to the improvement of teacher staff development. California districts, as Koppich points out, have spent many of their Eisenhower dollars ensuring that teachers have mastered the state's new, more rigorous math and science instructional frameworks. Rigorous state curriculum standards, it seems, give badly needed pedagogical direction to local schools.
