Equitable Distribution: Georgia
Identifying Effective Teachers Policy
Analysis of Georgia's policies
Providing comprehensive reporting may be the state's most important role for ensuring the equitable distribution of teachers among schools. Georgia reports little school-level data that can help support the equitable distribution of teacher talent.
Georgia does not require districts to publicly report aggregate school-level data about teacher performance, nor does the state collect and publicly report most of the other data recommended by NCTQ. Georgia does not provide a school-level teacher-quality index that demonstrates the academic backgrounds of a school's teachers and the ratio of new to veteran teachers. The state also does not report on teacher absenteeism or turnover rates.
The state reports on the percentage of teachers on emergency credentials, the average years of teacher experience and the percentage of highly qualified teachers. Commendably, these data are reported for each school, rather than aggregated by district. When reporting the percentage of highly qualified teachers, the state identifies schools with poverty levels in the high or low quartile.
Recommendations for Georgia
Report school-level teacher effectiveness data. Georgia should make aggregate school-level data about teacher performance—from an evaluation system based on instructional effectiveness—publicly available. Given that Georgia requires teacher evaluations to be based to a significant extent on evidence of student learning (see Goal 3-B), such data about the effectiveness of a school's teachers can shine a light on how equitably teachers are distributed across and within school districts.
Publish other data that facilitate comparisons across schools.
Georgia should collect and report other school-level data that reflect the stability of a school's faculty, including the rates of teacher absenteeism and turnover.
Provide comparative data based on school demographics.
As Georgia does for highly qualified teachers, the state should provide comparative data for schools with similar poverty and minority populations. This would yield a more comprehensive picture of gaps in the equitable distribution of teachers.
State response to our analysis
Georgia asserted that it does have a Project EQ public site that contains every districts' equity plan. Each equity plan covers every equity indicator in Georgia as well as contextual district information, including teacher effectiveness. Georgia added that it does provide an Equity Technical Assistance (ETA) site to districts that provides data about teacher experience ratios. The site will be expanded to include teacher effectiveness ratios and other data once the results of Georgia's statewide common performance measures are completed.
In addition, the state noted that, beginning October 2013, the Professional Standards Commission will annually include percentage of new teachers by school, district and content; percentage of teachers on emergency (waiver) certificates by school and content area; and a three-year average teacher turnover rate by school, district and content area as Academic Quality index factors in its Instructional Capital Planner (ICP). These data are dependent on annual certified personnel reports from the Georgia Department of Education and are annually reported in the ICP during October for the previous academic year.
Georgia also stated that the ICP shows real-time teacher employment by school and district, teaching assignment(s), valid certification fields and status, highly qualified status, an attrition risk factor and other teacher workforce data. The tool provides all appropriate stakeholders with information useful in assessing workforce demand and supply; determining teacher development, support, and retention strategies; and identifying a pool of certified individuals not currently employed in Georgia publicly funded schools.Last word
The Equity Technical Assistance site is only available to education employees and not the general public. The Project EQ site is public but only provides the percentage of highly qualified teachers within a district. While it is clear that Georgia has developed sophisticated data systems that
focus on equity issues, the state should consider expanding its efforts to
provide the public with more data about teacher distribution at the district
and school level.
-
Georgia
Select another topic
Delivering Well Prepared Teachers
- Admission into Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Reading Instruction
- Elementary Teacher Preparation in Mathematics
- Middle School Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation
- Secondary Teacher Preparation in Science
- Special Education Teacher Preparation
- Assessing Professional Knowledge
- Student Teaching
- Teacher Preparation Program Accountability
Expanding the Pool of Teachers
Identifying Effective Teachers
- State Data Systems
- Evaluation of Effectiveness
- Frequency of Evaluations
- Tenure
- Licensure Advancement
- Equitable Distribution
Retaining Effective Teachers
Exiting Ineffective Teachers
Pensions
Research rationale
Distribution data should show more than just teachers' years of experience and highly qualified status.
The first step in addressing the distribution of teachers is bringing transparency to the issue. States generally report little more than what is required by No Child Left Behind, which highlights years of experience and HQT status. However, while teaching experience matters, the benefits of experience are largely accumulated within the first few years of teaching. School districts that try to equalize experience among all schools are overestimating its impact. There is no reason why a school with many teachers with only three or five years' experience cannot outperform a school with teachers who have an average of more than 10 years' experience.
For this reason, states need to report data that are more informative about a school's teachers. As more states require evaluation systems based primarily on teacher effectiveness (see Goal 3-B), the most important distribution data that state can make available is school-level data about teacher performance. This is not to say that individual teacher ratings should be reported, but school level data would shine an important light on whether all students have access to effective teachers.
In the absence of teacher performance data that reflects evidence of student learning, states can still provide meaningful information by using an index for quantifying important teacher credentials found to correlate with student achievement. A good example of a strong index is the academic capital index developed by the Illinois Education Research Council, incorporating teachers' average SAT or ACT scores; the percentage of teachers failing basic skills licensure test at least once; the percentage of teachers on emergency credentials; average selectivity of teachers' undergraduate colleges and the percentage of new teachers. These factors are complicated, so the state should install a system that translates them into something more easily understood, such as a color-coded matrix indicating a high or low score for a school.
States need to report data at the level of the individual school.
Only by achieving greater stability in the staffing of individual schools can districts achieve the nation's goal of more equitable distribution of teacher quality. A strong reporting system reflecting the index described above, as well as data on teacher attrition, teacher absenteeism and teacher credentials can lend much-needed transparency to those factors that contribute to staffing instability and inequity.
The lack of such data feeds a misconception that all high-poverty schools are similarly unable to retain staff because of their demographics. If collected and disaggregated to the level of the individual school, however, such data could shift the focus of districts and states toward the quality of leadership at the school level and away from the notion that instability and inequity are unavoidable consequences of poverty and race. Variations in staff stability are huge among schools with similar numbers of poor and/or minority children. School culture, largely determined by school leadership, contributes greatly to teacher morale, which in turn affects teacher success and student achievement. By revealing these variations among schools facing the same challenges, school leadership can be held accountable—and rewarded when successful.
Within-district comparisons are crucial in order to control for as many elements specific to a district as possible, such as a collective bargaining agreement (or the district's personnel policies) and the amount of resources.
Equitable Distribution: Supporting Research
For comprehensive review of the literature on teacher quality and distribution, see Jennifer King Rice, "The Impact of Teacher Experience: Examining the Evidence and Policy Implications", Calder Institute, August 2010, Brief 11. For more about how poor and minority children do not get their fair share of high-quality teachers, read L. Feng and T. Sass, "Teacher Quality and Teacher Mobility.", Calder Institute, Working Paper 57, January 2011; T. Sass, J. Hannaway, Z. Xu, D. Figlio, and L. Feng, "Value Added of Teachers in High-Poverty Schools and Lower-Poverty Schools," Calder Institute, Working Paper 52, November 2010; and Education Trust, Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality (Washington, DC: Education Trust, June 6, 2006).
Education Trust also produced an analysis of the first set of state Equity Plans that pointed out the inadequacies of most states' data systems to produce reliable information about teacher qualifications and experience levels in schools disaggregated by poverty and racial composition of schools. Although almost all states were required to resubmit their plans and earned approval for them, many of the shortcomings of state data systems remained. For example, few states are equipped to identify by school, teachers' years of experience, meaning they cannot identify the ratio of new teachers to the full school staff. See Education Trust, Missing the Mark: States' Teacher Equity Plans Fall Short (Washington, DC: Education Trust, August 10, 2006).
For an example of a teacher quality index, see B. White, J. Presley, and K. DeAngelis, Leveling Up: Narrowing the Teacher Academic Capital Gap in Illinois, Illinois Education Research Council, Policy Research Report: IERC 2008-1, 44 p.; http://www.siue.edu/ierc/publications/pdf/IERC2008-1.pdf.
For more about teachers' effectiveness in the early years of teaching, see Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job by R. Gordon, T. Kane, and D. Staiger at: The Hamilton Project, http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/200604hamilton_1.pdf, April 2006; See also Jennifer King Rice, Teacher Quality: Understanding the Effectiveness of Teacher Attributes (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2003).