A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Improving Teacher Accountability
and Incentives

Efforts to create a quality teaching force include new approaches to accountability, designed and implemented through teacher leadership and the participation of large numbers of teachers. Among teachers, parents, and business leaders there is a growing recognition that teachers who are not performing adequately must receive training, mentoring and all other forms of effective assistance as needed and quickly. Teachers who fail to improve, no matter what the reason--poor preparation, burn out, or lack of interest in professionalism--and who are judged incompetent must be counseled out of the profession or dismissed in order to ensure students' success in school.

The new approaches to accountability emphasize early intervention, peer review, and recognition of exemplary teachers who serve as mentors or lead teachers. In districts from Rochester to Seattle, more effective accountability systems are replacing what one union official referred to as "drive-by...checklists."

The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future believes the peer assistance and review systems are successful because they are jointly supervised by boards of teachers and administrators, gauge teacher competence with more useful measures, and emphasize assistance and personal growth rather than punishment. They also reward exemplary teachers by giving them leadership roles that provide extra compensation and opportunities to improve the teaching profession.

According to the Commission, more teachers have received help and more teachers have been dismissed under these new peer review systems than under old systems of accountability. It notes that about one-third of the teachers assigned to peer review in Cincinnati and Toledo, for example, left teaching by the end of the year. In Cincinnati, almost twice as many teacher dismissals resulted from peer reviews as from administrator evaluations.

Accountability for quality, however, is to be double sided. As important as accountability for teachers is the willingness of school boards, district offices, parents and communities to recognize outstanding work by teachers. Until the standards of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards became available, communities had few meaningful standards to guide their recognition of teachers. One of the great contributions of National Board certification is that it opens up opportunities to support teachers who continually seek to grow professionally.

Rochester, New York
Career-In-Teaching Program

At the core of Rochester's Career-In-Teaching Program (CIT) are peer review and assistance, similar to other negotiated accountability systems in Columbus, Cincinnati and Seattle. Peer review, however, is part of a larger plan that affects all teachers in Rochester. CIT established four career development stages--intern, resident, professional and lead teacher. Progress from one to the other depends on peer review.

Interns are beginning teachers who work with a mentor, who is a lead teacher. The lead teacher provides assistance for the first year of teaching, recommending the new teachers for resident status, termination or another year on probationary status. About 8 percent are terminated, but more importantly, the peer assistance has led to the retention of 90 percent of beginning teachers after their first year in the classroom. Before CIT, the problems with first-year teaching and lack of support resulted in a retention rate of only about 60 percent.

After internship, peer review continues under the Performance Appraisal Review for Teachers (PART), an annual evaluation conducted by either a panel of colleagues or an administrator selected by the teacher. Every three years a more intensive summative appraisal is conducted. One of the criteria considered in the appraisals is evidence of student academic performance, a factor that was never included in the old formal systems of evaluation.

If any of these steps indicate a teacher is having a problem, that teacher can voluntarily ask for intervention by a lead teacher. For two semesters the teacher receives expert help and is connected to needed resources throughout the district. The lead teacher reports to the board governing the CIT program on whether the teacher has overcome his/her difficulties and should be retained. Currently, all tenured teachers have gone through the summative appraisal process, and about 75 interventions have taken place. Moreover, teachers can volunteer for professional support from a lead teacher without the appraisal process, a decision made by over 100 teachers a year.

CIT was designed by teachers. About 200 were directly involved in its development. It was their plan that teachers would be appraised by colleagues and that lead teachers, recommended by colleagues and chosen by a board of teachers and administrators, would receive substantial stipends--from 5 to 15 percent of their salaries--for their leadership roles. Lead teachers perform other duties as well, such as curriculum design and project facilitation.

Teachers preferred this rigorous attention to their performance over the lax system without standards that existed before in which more than 96 percent of teachers were evaluated by their supervisors as above average or superior and the rest received satisfactory ratings.

Accountability for All
in Minneapolis, Minnesota

A better system of accountability for teachers had been evolving in the district since 1984 when a joint Labor/Management Task Force on Teacher Professionalism began conducting research and developing a vision for the teacher evaluation process. The Task Force created a Career-In-Teaching program similar to that of other urban districts, and it continued working on ways to make accountability more meaningful.

By 1989 the new Professional Development Process (PDP) was ready to be piloted, and over a five-year period school sites adopted it. All 104 sites now participate. The plan became part of the negotiated teaching contract in 1997, but 3,000 of the 4,000-member teaching staff had already voluntarily chosen to be part of the process.

Each participant in the PDP writes a development plan aligned with district and school goals, especially the curriculum content standards. The plan includes a goal; teacher and student objectives; implementation strategies; and ideas for pursuing professional growth, assessment, and reflection. The teacher selects four to six people who serve as "critical friends" throughout the yearly process. They meet regularly with the teacher to discuss the plan, assess progress toward the goal and help the teacher find resources and do problem solving around instructional and learning issues. Principals are automatic members of the peer review team along with fellow teachers. The team may also include parents, community members or university professors--anyone the teacher believes can help him or her with the plan.

Teachers in the PDP process are expected to pursue all sorts of ways to meet their goals--peer coaching, study groups, action research, videotaping, observations, journals, and the development of professional portfolios. Elementary and secondary teachers even have appropriately worded surveys to use with students, seeking their opinions about the curriculum content, teaching methods and management. (The survey was written by the District-wide Student Government).

Guiding the PDP process are the Standards of Effective Instruction. Teachers, principals and administrators reviewed and synthesized standards from a number of sources, such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the content of the teacher candidate exam developed by the Educational Testing Service (Praxis), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, and various state standards. From these, the group developed standards specifically for Minneapolis' teachers.

For example, if a teacher's PDP plan focuses on improving reading, that teacher could refer to the Standards of Effective Instruction and ask such questions as: "Am I accommodating student differences?" (Standard 1); or, "Am I providing feedback to students and families regarding their learning?" (Standard 3).

If the PDP team agrees that the teacher needs additional help, or if the teacher recognizes the need, a Performance Support Process takes over, providing extensive support for three to six months. At that time, the teacher may return to the PDP plan or move to intensive assistance and the possibility of a recommendation from the Performance Support Process team, the direct-level governing body, that the teacher consider other career options.

The PDP, notes a teacher union document, "moves the teaching profession into the future as it promotes and supports higher standards and professional performance for all." Significantly, the early success of the PDP process in Minneapolis and its enthusiastic support from teachers were deciding factors in the state's decision to mandate a similar peer review process for all teachers in the state.

Recognition of Teachers
in Coventry, Rhode Island

The 400 teachers in the Coventry, Rhode Island school district receive considerable incentives to reach the highest standards of all--certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The Coventry public schools and the Coventry Teachers Alliance entered into a contractual agreement with the following provisions:

• The district will pay the certification fee each year for up to seven years;
• The district will support the certification process by providing up to five professional development days to teachers applying for Board certification and by loaning applicants materials and equipment such as video cameras, editing equipment and computers;
• Six district-approved credits will be granted toward the advanced increment schedule for teachers who complete the Board assessment process but who do not acquire certification; and
• Board-certified teachers will qualify for the next higher advanced increment level above his/her current level.

The agreement goes further by building on the leadership potential of teachers who have been formally recognized as highly accomplished. The Coventry schools plan to use Board-certified teachers in various highly responsible roles to improve teaching and learning in the district. These teachers will serve as mentors, lead teachers who will replace department chairs and provide curriculum development and team leadership within schools, teacher facilitators who serve as unofficial vice-principals in the elementary schools, and staff for the planned professional development center.

Such leadership, says the superintendent, will extend the influence of the Board's standards to all teachers in the system. Five teachers have completed the Board's certification process, and an additional six are in the pipeline. Over a 10-year period, the district could build a cadre of 60-70 teachers who have participated in a rigorous assessment based on high standards.

Characteristics of Promising
Teacher Accountability Programs

• Promising teacher preparation and certification efforts exist along the continuum of a teaching career to eliminate incompetent teaching and to assure proper assignment and support of teachers.
• Teachers initiate and play major roles in the design and implementation of peer review systems.
• Intervention occurs early and quickly to deal with burned out or incompetent teachers and provides mentoring and resources for improvement to occur.
• Accountability policies emphasize that responsibility for a quality teaching force must be shared and must include recognition for accomplishments.

If you understand how the world is going to work tomorrow and you have any concern about the integrity and the richness of the human spirit in every child, then all of us must join hands to help educators succeed in giving all those children the tomorrows they deserve.

[Improving Professional Development Practices]

[Endnotes]