With New Teachers, First Impressions Are Usually Accurate

In this Education Week article, Sarah Sparks reports on a University of Virginia/ Charlottesville study documenting that the most- and least-effective teachers show their colors at the very beginning of their careers. Researchers followed 7,600 incoming New York City math and English language arts teachers who were in fourth- or fifth-grade classrooms from 2000 to 2006. They analyzed data on their students’ test scores, gender, ethnicity, home language, poverty, special-education status, absences, and suspensions, and drew two conclusions:

• The value teachers added to student achievement improved significantly in their first two years in the classroom (see the graphs included in the article at the link below).

• Teachers’ positions in five quintiles of effectiveness rarely changed over five years. “When you look at teachers who in the future are low-performing, very few of those come from the initially highest quintile of performance, and the same is true in the opposite direction,” says Allison Atteberry, the lead author of the study. “We see that even more at the high end: Teachers who are initially highest-performing are by far the most likely to be in the highest quintile in the future.” 

Does this mean principals should fire teachers who aren’t effective after two years? James Wyckoff, one of the study’s authors, thinks not. Tim Sass of Georgia State University has found that most initially low-performing teachers, if they survive, improve to the average level after a few years. 

The problem with the New York City study, says Steven Glazerman of Mathematica Policy Research, is that it looked only at teachers who remained in fourth and fifth grades for five years, missing 95 percent of new teachers – those who moved to different grades, moved to another district, or left the classroom. The amount of teacher mobility and attrition, he says, “makes it very difficult to study them using value-added measures.” 

“Study: Best and Worst Teachers Can Be Flagged Early” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, Mar. 6, 2013 (Vol. 32, #23, p. 6), 

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/03/06/23teacher.h32.html

From the Marshall Memo #476