UPDATES

08.21.2008

Improving Teacher Quality in Utah

The Utah Foundation just released a research brief on improving teacher quality in Utah.  The report summarizes the latest research on improving teacher quality and provides a host of data on student performance and teacher pay.

Factors that improve teacher quality:

• Teaching experience up to 5 years
• Subject matter mastery for secondary subjects (particularly science and math)
• Academic ability (teacher scores on achievement tests, quality of undergraduate institution)
• Well-designed professional development

Factors that don't improve teacher quality:

• Teaching experience beyond 5 years
• Graduate courses
• Traditional teacher certification requirements

Unfortunately, most of a teacher's salary is dependent on the factors that have the smallest effect, if any, on teacher quality and student performance.

The Utah Foundation recommends the following to improve teacher quality in Utah:

"States are experimenting with many ways to improve teacher quality. Utah is utilizing some of these methods, including differential pay for math and science teachers as well as experimenting with performance pay. Utah should consider additional promising reforms to improve teacher quality, such as additional measures to hold teacher preparation programs accountable for quality, more rigorous evaluation of teachers on the job, and incentives to draw teachers to hard-to-staff schools."

 

The report also discusses Value-Added Modeling, which is a statistical technique that uses multiplie years of student test score data to estimate the effects of individual teachers on student performance.

The Utah Foundation thinks Value-Added Modeling "may be useful in identifying the very best and very worst teachers, which could be useful for weeding out bad teachers."  PCE would like to see Value-Added Modeling used in Utah to make sure our most effective teachers are paid more.

Read the entire report>>