A Conference Organized by Northwestern University’s Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences (MPES)
For policymakers, practitioners, and researchers teacher quality is an ever-pressing issue. NCLB has put teacher quality front and center in state and local school district policy conversations. There is good reason for this: the available evidence suggests that student achievement depends at least in part on the quality of the teaching staff. Teacher ability as measured by cognitive test scores, the selectivity of the institutions that a teacher graduated from, and experience is related to student achievement (Hanushek, 1997; Hanushek, Kain, O’Brien, and Rivkin, 2005; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges; 2004). Teacher quality affects student achievement: students taught by teachers who are near the top of the quality distribution learn significantly more than students taught by teachers who are near the bottom of the distribution (Hanushek, 1992). Further, teacher quality varies tremendously within and between schools (Hanushek, Kain, O’Brian, and Rivkin, 2005; Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger, 2006; Nye, Konstantopoulos, and Hedges, 2004). Most troubling is that low achieving and non-white students tend to be taught by the least qualified teachers (Lankford, Loeb, and Wyckoff, 2002).
While the evidence that teachers matter for student achievement is strong, there is little agreement on the dimensions of quality that matter the most and the cost-effectiveness of policies that promote teacher quality. Hence, we are hosting a one-day conference at Northwestern on May 1, 2008 designed to both deepen and broaden the research agenda on teacher quality. The proposed conference will involve four panels, each focusing on a different dimension of teacher quality. Each panel will involve a presentation and paper by a leading scholar in the field that identifies both the state of the field and possible lines of future inquiry followed by a response from another leading scholar in the field. The panels are as follows:
a) “Teacher Effects: What Do We Know, What Do We Need to Learn?” This panel will focus on the evidence on the size of teacher effects and recent evidence on indicators of teacher quality and their relations to student achievement. A critical question for this panel will be what can and cannot be learned from secondary analysis of extant data and what sorts of evidence do we need to push beyond the extant data.
Presenter: Helen Ladd. Discussant: Larry Hedges.
b) “Looking Inside Classrooms: What Do We Know about Quality Teaching?” This panel will review the empirical evidence on what we know about quality teaching. Specifically, it will explore what teachers actually do in classrooms and which aspects of their classroom teaching can be linked to student achievement.
Presenter: Robert Pianta. Discussant: Deborah Ball.
c) “Teacher Labor Markets.” This panel will review evidence on teacher labor markets, laying out what is known about teacher labor markets and the impact of labor market dynamics on the quality of the teachers that different students end up with.
Presenter: Susanna Loeb. Discussant: Derek Neal.
d) “A Policy Proposal to Address the Quality Challenge: Identifying Effective Teachers Using On the Job Performance.” This panel will center on one policy proposal put forth by Gordon, Kane and Staigner involving a policy of teacher hiring and firing based on value-added assessments of teacher quality.
Presenter: Tom Kane. Discussant: Henry Braun.
