Mobilizing America's Top Teachers

For the past 12 years, Steve Glazerman, PhD’98, has studied how policies affect every aspect of the teaching profession. So when the state superintendent of California public schools asked him point blank in 2006 if there was one thing policymakers need to keep in mind, he had plenty to choose from.

Glazerman could have mentioned the value of targeted recruiting, citing findings from his 2004 study on Teach for America, which found that students in TFA classrooms outperformed their peers in math. Some education researchers may have advocated for better incentives to move good teachers to poor districts or rattled off the seemingly endless facts about how far American children are behind the rest of the world.

Instead, Glazerman shared a subtle, “ but important,” misconception that has irked him and other education researchers for years. As simple as it sounds, he says, education leaders have forgotten the vast difference between measuring student achievement and teacher accountability.“Nobody has forced people to make that distinction,” says Glazerman, who was recently appointed senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, DC.

“Test scores represent everything students know, but what did the teacher do, what did the school do, what came from home influences or peers? Evaluating a teacher’s unique contribution to that growth is a very different and more difficult thing.”

Answering questions like these are at the focal point of a new project that Glazerman is leading called the Talent Transfer Initiative. Developed by a team of researchers at Mathematica in 2008 and funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the program has provided 80 teachers across the country with $10,000 annual pay bumps if they move to struggling schools for two years. By calculating their impact on those classrooms, TTI is among the first of its kind on a number of fronts—few programs have successfully attracted top teachers to desperate schools, and fewer have measured how effective they are once they get there.

But TTI also tries to answer a more fundamental question: Does “value-added assessment,” a popular strategy for identifying high-performing teachers, even work?

This method has been around since the early 1980s. The approach reviews students’ test scores from previous years and projects their expected growth for the next grade. A teacher’s value-added score is based on how many students reach or surpass this expectation.

Until now, little research has been done to evaluate this form of evaluation, which has gained even more popularity in recent years due to general agreement about the failure of No Child Left Behind. “It’s attracted a lot of attention for thoughtful researchers and policymakers who are trying to innovate reform,” Glazerman says.

With seven TTI districts now in their second year, Glazerman’s first report is currently under peer review.

“We’re doing this at a pretty small scale in each district,” he says. “That was on purpose. Depending on the success of these early studies, we could be seeing larger programs like this in the future.”