Aligning Teacher Improvement Strategies: A Mixed Method Study of Teaching Reform in Minnesota.

[摘要] Despite consensus that teachers vary considerably in their effectiveness, researchers have had little success identifying strategies to increase teacher quality at scale. Policymakers often call for isolated reforms such as teacher performance bonuses, notwithstanding the poor track record of previous efforts. This dissertation investigates a new generation of human capital programs that combine incentive reform with teacher development. These efforts enjoy support from research within a variety of fields. If teachers do not have the capabilities to improve, revised incentives are unlikely to cause meaningful change, just as increased opportunities to learn will not translate into better instruction if teachers lack incentives to apply concerted effort to this task. However, we know little about how to translate such research into designs for teacher and student learning. I draw on evidence from a program in Minnesota known as Quality Compensation for Teachers or ;;Q Comp.” The program, which began in 2005, includes many features that can be found in several more recent state-level reforms, including requirements for teacher evaluation, pay reform, and teacher-led professional development. The first essay evaluates the impacts of Q Comp on school practices and student achievement, drawing on several sources of quantitative data. While I find that Q Comp caused changes to teacher-reported school practices, I find little evidence that the program produced meaningful improvement in student learning. The second essay considers program implementation at the state level, describing the interactions between the legislature, the union, and the Minnesota Department of Education, which created a program that included relatively effective structural oversight with weak instructional guidance and training. The final essay focuses on district implementation, illustrating how three districts’ design choices around teacher support and development produced programs that differed considerably in their ultimate significance for teachers even as they maintained a rough structural similarity.As a group, these essays explore a series of concerns associated with a new generation of state reform programs. They raise doubts about the likelihood that these programs will lead to large-scale instructional improvement, and they illustrate the difficulty of setting up large-scale human capital systems at the state level.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Education

[关键词] Teacher Policy Reform;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies