The Best Strategies for Improving What Goes on in Classrooms

From the Marshall Memo #433

In this thoughtful Harvard Educational Review article, Harvard professor Susan Moore Johnson compares two approaches to improving teaching. The first focuses on recruiting strong teachers and holding them accountable for classroom performance and their students’ test scores – a “no excuses” strategy that assumes teachers can do it all. The second focuses on workplace conditions – teachers’ access to expert colleagues and instructional coaching, time with grade-level or subject teams, helpful supervision by knowledgeable principals or peers, and support from a high-functioning school culture that values effective teaching and results. 

There are strong advocates for using the first approach to turning around failing schools – recruiting high-performing teachers through cash incentives and draconian removal of less-effective teachers. Johnson is skeptical that this, by itself, will be effective. “Changing people without changing the context in which they work is not likely to substantially improve the school,” she says, noting that “even an ineffective teacher’s chances for success would be enhanced by a supportive school context.” 

There’s no question that school conditions have a major impact on teachers’ success. According to researchers’ interviews with one group of novice teachers, “Some schools were well-organized, purposeful, and supportive places for teaching and learning,” says Johnson. “Teachers in such schools described how they had been hired in a thorough and informative process that allowed for a rich exchange of information between the candidates and their prospective colleagues and administrators. As candidates, they not only interviewed with the principal but also observed classes, talked with prospective colleagues, and sometimes were asked to teach sample lessons. 

“These schools also ensured that new teachers’ assignments matched their subject knowledge and preparation. They were not expected to teach in two subjects, mixed-grade classes, or to split their time between school buildings. Induction included regular opportunities to observe and work with experienced colleagues… They also were granted periodic release from administrative assignments, such as cafeteria duty, to observe their colleagues teaching. They received regular feedback about their instruction not only from their mentors and supervisors but also from the coordinators of their induction program.”

Other teachers entered dysfunctional, under-resourced schools where they were hired at the last minute, isolated from colleagues, given challenging schedules and students, expected to teach out of their field, were rarely observed, and had few opportunities to observe other teachers. “Few such schools provided an approach to discipline that would promote schoolwide order and a focus on learning,” says Johnson, “leaving individual teachers to manage student behavior one classroom at a time.” It’s hardly surprising that many new teachers are not successful in such schools, and either leave the profession or take the first opportunity to move to higher-functioning schools – often wealthier, whiter communities. “This repeated turnover as teachers seek more supportive environments for teaching and learning takes a high toll on students who attend underperforming, high-minority, high-need schools,” says Johnson. 

But Johnson is skeptical that just focusing on working conditions will turn around schools. What gets results, she believes, is a balanced approach focused on workplace conditions and the hiring process, classroom observation, and student results. 

Many educators and politicians have bought into the idea that students’ value-added test scores should be used to decide individual teachers’ dismissal, tenure, and compensation. Johnson disagrees. “There are well-documented problems with using these statistical methods to make important decisions about individuals,” she says. “They are too unstable and too vulnerable to sources of error to be used in something as important as a teacher’s evaluation.” In addition to psychometric shortcomings, value-added data also fail to take into account other factors that affect classroom performance: teachers’ prior preparation, years of experience, type of assignment, school conditions, the principal’s leadership, classroom resources, opportunities for collaboration with colleagues, and relations with parents. “Although the methods for assessing individual teachers’ value-added accomplishments are statistically sophisticated,” she says, “they are organizationally agnostic and, therefore, insufficient.” 

Johnson has specific criticisms of two other popular ideas: firing the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers and offering merit pay to high performers. “Legislators and the public find such proposals very attractive,” she says, “both because they seem to make sense and because they introduce the precision usually associated with quantitative analysis.” Here are her concerns:

• Swap-out strategies – “The calculus for improving schools by replacing teachers is straightforward,” says Johnson: “substitute a low-scoring, failing teacher with a high-scoring, successful teacher and schools will improve.” This affirms people’s belief in the importance of the individual teacher and builds on research showing the huge difference that consecutive years with good or bad teachers makes for students. The Race to the Top competition puts a premium on districts adopting this approach – despite the absence of evidence that it works. Its biggest shortcoming, says Johnson, is that it doesn’t take into account school conditions, which are a major cause of low achievement.

• Performance-based pay – The theory of change is that monetary rewards will (a) lead current teachers to work harder and improve their practice in hopes of winning a bonus, and 

(b) induce ineffective teachers to leave (since they won’t be getting a bonus) and increase the number of highly effective teachers who enter and stay. Team rewards have shown some positive results, but individual merit pay has had serious problems: value-added data are problematic, says Johnson, and merit pay “does nothing to help motivated teachers solve the instructional challenges they face.” A recent five-year study of merit pay in Nashville, Tennessee found that $10,000 bonuses to teachers made no difference to student achievement. 

Of course most teachers’ pay isn’t where it should be and many salary structures are dysfunctional. But Johnson cites research from Chicago on why teachers decided to leave a school or stay: “The working conditions that mattered most to teachers were those that shaped the social context of teaching and learning in their school – the school culture, the principal’s leadership, and the teachers’ relationships with their colleagues.”

“Notably, across all communities,” Johnson continues, “schools with better work environments for teachers also achieved greater growth in student learning… [S]chools that change students’ lives are more than a collection of independent units, each of which may have a good, mediocre, or poor teacher. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that successful efforts to improve failing schools are deliberately school based. They recognize that, because students move through many classrooms from grade to grade and subject to subject, the curriculum and teachers’ efforts must be coordinated. If a student’s education is to be coherent, then [his or her] her teachers must work in concert. Teams of teachers, rather than collections of teachers, build instructional capacity within a school over time.”

All this leads Johnson to conclude that a school-improvement strategy based on rewarding and penalizing individual teachers for their students’ test scores “fails to capitalize on the potential of some teachers to improve the performance of other teachers and, therefore, will always be limited, since the benefits of greater expertise will be concentrated in individual classrooms rather than extended throughout the school.”

So how does a school ensure that all students have excellent teaching each year? Johnson says it should put its energy into these areas:

• Selection and assignment – “Schools arguably make their most important decisions when they select and assign new teachers,” she says. “Yet, often those decisions are late, poorly informed, and haphazard, especially in large urban districts.” It’s crucial that budget delays, transfer policies, and information glitches give way to a hiring process that selects the best candidates early, assigns them to well-matched classes, and gives them time to get to know colleagues and prepare for the first day of school. 

• Maximizing teamwork – Within a school, there are always variations in teachers’ strengths – for example, an elementary teacher might be highly proficient teaching reading and less skilled in math. One of the best ways to improve instruction is giving teachers common planning time and getting them analyzing student data, reviewing student work, and planning units and lessons together. This way, they capitalize on each others’ strengths and learn from their colleagues. “Peer-induced learning” is especially important for new teachers. “Conversely,” says Johnson, “assessing or rewarding teachers for their individual success may lead them to withdraw from their colleagues and concentrate exclusively on their assigned students, thus undermining, rather than promoting, productive collaboration.” 

• Instructional coaches – When they are well chosen and well trained, coaches can add great value by providing immediate feedback after classroom observations, teaching model lessons, responding to teachers’ individual needs, pushing teacher teams to plan and analyze better, and advising administrators on pedagogical issues. Johnson bemoans the fact that many coaches have been laid off in the current budget crunch.

• Career-based pay – Most beginning pay levels don’t always attract the best and the brightest, says Johnson, and most salary structures reward loyalty and longevity rather than collaboration and expanded roles within schools. She and her colleagues in the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers have proposed a four-tier pay-and-career structure that allows effective teachers to reach higher salaries more quickly and provides extra pay for responsibilities outside one’s classroom. 

Johnson closes with plea to politicians and policymakers who are falling for simplistic, faddish, untested approaches to school improvement: “What we have learned from countries with more successful school systems, such as Finland, Canada, and Singapore, is that achieving success is a complex enterprise that requires sustained effort and substantial investment. Until policymakers and practitioners recognize that complexity and respond to it meaningfully, students – especially those who most depend on public education for their future success – will continue to be unevenly and meagerly served.” 

“Having It Both Ways: Building the Capacity of Individual Teachers and Their Schools” by Susan Moore Johnson in Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2012 (Vol. 82, #1, p. 107-122),

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