Teaching & Leadership: The Need and the Opportunity

Why Focus on Teaching & Leadership?

Recruiting and supporting great teachers (followed by great principals) is the most important thing our schools can do to increase the achievement of American students. In many schools, particularly those with high percentages of students in poverty, chronic shortages of effective teachers and principals, as well as a dearth of systems that strategically identify, support, and reward talent, have contributed to a persistent achievement gap and lagging student performance. This teacher shortage is especially dire in the STEM disciplines, with a projected shortfall of more than 280,000 STEM teachers by 2015.

Research studies have shown that students assigned for three to four consecutive years to top-quartile teachers make significantly greater gains than students with less effective teachers. To close the achievement gap and ensure that all students gain the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in a global economy, we must place an effective teacher in every classroom and an effective principal in every school. In its 2009 report, The Opportunity Equation, the Carnegie-IAS Commission on Mathematics and Science Education emphasized the need to rethink human-capital management with the goal of maximizing STEM learning. The Commission’s recommendations include the following:

• Increasing the supply of well-prepared STEM teachers by improving teacher preparation and recruitment
• Refining professional development and related teacher supports, with an emphasis on STEM teaching
• Reforming school and district human-capital management systems to ensure an effective teacher for every student 

Progress in the Field

 Since the report’s launch, strides have been made in all of these areas. On the preparation/recruitment front, innovative organizations are rethinking what it means to source STEM talent for the districts that need it most. The National Math and Science Initiative is refining and expanding UTeach, a teacher-preparation program that enables undergraduates at Research-1 universities to obtain a secondary teaching certification while earning a STEM degree, with a clearer focus on serving high-need students and schools. Teach for America, whose corps members have proven especially effective at teaching STEM subjects, plans to double its placement and training of secondary-school STEM teachers by 2013. And, through its strategic staffing initiatives, The New Teacher Project is partnering with districts like Baltimore to fill hard-to-staff positions, including teaching jobs in the STEM fields, with better-prepared teachers.

Systems are on the rise to support teachers more effectively once they are in the classroom. Uncommon Schools has developed the Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices, a comprehensive guide that codifies what makes a teacher effective and delivers the information to teachers in an actionable way. Building on initial success and an identified need for content-specific practices, Uncommon Schools plans to develop training modules specifically for STEM.

Finally, the human-capital challenge is being addressed at the system level, with a focus on developing teacher-evaluation systems that differentiate, support, and reward based on performance. D.C. Public Schools has put a new evaluation system in place, IMPACT, which makes student test scores a significant component of teacher evaluations and enables the removal of the most ineffective teachers. The New Teacher Project is planning intensive, multi-year partnerships with at least five districts nationwide to develop comprehensive performance-management systems that differentiate teachers according to effectiveness.

Looking Ahead

 Human capital is an area ripe for innovation, given the high priority placed on it by the federal government through competitions like Race to the Top and the Invest in Innovation fund, not to mention President Obama’s call for 100,000 new STEM teachers over ten years. States and districts are changing legislation to make possible systems that track teachers’ performance and connect them both to their students and to the programs that prepared them. New preparation programs, including residencies that borrow from the medical training model, are emerging around the country. And districts and non-profit partners are thinking about how to nurture excellence among existing teachers.

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