How to identify effective teachers who improve student achievement despite diverse student populations and school contexts is an ongoing discussion in public education. The need to show communities and parents how well teachers and schools improve student learning has led districts and states to seek a fair, equitable and valid measure of student growth using student achievement. This study investigated a two stage hierarchical model for estimating teacher effect on student achievement. This measure was entitled a Classroom Effectiveness Index (CEI). Consistency of this model over time, outlier influences in individual CEIs, variance among CEIs across four years, and correlations of second stage student residuals with first stage student residuals were analyzed. The statistical analysis used four years of student residual data from a state-mandated mathematics assessment (n=7086) and a state-mandated reading assessment (n=7572) aggregated by teacher. The study identified the following results. Four years of district grand slopes and grand intercepts were analyzed to show consistent results over time. Repeated measures analyses of grand slopes and intercepts in mathematics were statistically significant at the .01 level. Repeated measures analyses of grand slopes and intercepts in reading were not statistically significant. The analyses indicated consistent results over time for reading but not for mathematics. Data were analyzed to assess outlier effects. Nineteen statistically significant outliers in 15,378 student residuals were identified. However, the impact on individual teachers was extreme in eight of the 19 cases. Further study is indicated. Subsets of teachers in the same assignment at the same school for four consecutive years and for three consecutive years indicated CEIs were stable over time. There were no statistically significant differences in either mathematics or reading. Correlations between Level One student residuals and HLM residuals were statistically significant in reading and in mathematics. This implied that the second stage of the model was consistent for all students. Much is still unknown concerning teacher effect on student achievement, especially when confined to teacher activity within one school year. However, results indicate the utility of using statistical modeling of student achievement within the context of teacher accountability.

This study looked at the way poor-performing public secondary schools in Gauteng Province understand school accountability; their current internal accountability instruments; the way professional development is conducted; and their engagement with the Integrated Quality Management System, the external school accountability system. The intention of the study was to identify possible instruments to mobilise bureaucratic and professional accountability in poor-performing secondary schools. The study was a case study of three poor-performing secondary schools and relied on teachers and principals at these schools to learn their understanding and reactions to the notion of accountability. The study revealed that such schools use bureaucratic instruments (such as attendance registers) to realise accountability and to create structure and routine in their schools. However, where leadership is weak, even these bureaucratic tools such as attendance registers are ineffective. These schools do not take action against non-conformance by teachers and principals. In the schools investigated, accountability was seen as ‘doing your work as you were trained to do during your pre-service training and reporting on learner performance’. The study revealed that, to move towards greater professional accountability in the school sector, a long-term approach is needed that is underscored by ongoing professional development complemented with pressure or performance management. Equally important is the need to build collective power through improving knowledge and skills and motivation for improvement amongst both teachers and school managers.

This thesis provides a trajectory policy analysis of post-1994 appraisal systems in South Africa by capturing the dynamics of these policies between different levels as well as the reasons these policies have changed and evolved in the way they did over the past 10 years. Its aim is to understand why and how various post-1994 South African teacher appraisals were negotiated, formulated and re-negotiated with their different impact on schools, taking into account the various tensions and contestations within appraisal and between stakeholders. The study attempts to make the following claims around issues of appraisal, policy analysis, multi-method research. First, because appraisal policies are socially constructed and politically contested, they are fraught with inevitable socio-educational tensions around the balance between teacher development and accountability, coming from the negotiations between the main stakeholders at various stages of the policy process. Second, because current policy analysis approaches have failed to address the increasingly complex domain and gap of policy-practice in an era dominated by the interplay of conflicting agendas and interests of various policy communities, an eclectic approach to policy analysis is used and recommended. This approach relies mainly on a political analysis, which conceives of policies as both constraining and empowering structures and texts which create space and opportunities for policy agency and leadership. Such political approach has to conceive of three different policy powers to reveal the various tensions and contestations around policies and the conditions of possibilities as well as to unravel how stakeholders interpret and mediate policy processes which are often fragile settlements constantly re-negotiated. This study focuses on the notion of enabling policy leadership and its mediation strategies to reveal how different agencies position themselves and strategize around policy tensions in the hope of strengthening their agendas. This policy leadership is also iv critical in ensuring a sufficiently strong policy settlement between education departments, schools, teacher unions and professional bodies over how to develop teachers and make them accountable for their performance Third, it argues that, despite post-1994 South Africa embarking on an era of stakeholder democracy, various stakeholders were gradually pushed to the margin of education policymaking, leaving teacher unions (because of their privileged position in relation to the ruling party) as the main party with which the department of education consulted and bargained. This exclusion of other stakeholders involved in quality education meant that professional associations were absent even though their input was desperately needed to negotiate how appraisal could feed into the enhancement of teacher professionalism and identities in the post-1994 school system. Finally, this study uses a multi-method research approach, involving formal research instruments as well as various data collection mechanisms involving different forums with stakeholders, such as oral hearings, review teams, seminars, conferences and written evidence over a period of two years to provide a richer form of triangulated data with rather interesting results. This data was analyzed and interpreted to identify patterns of policy contestations, negotiation and mediation strategies which assisted in theorizing further the policymaking processes and politics around appraisal as well as the role and limitations of policy leadership. This multi-layered empirical research work is essential if the complex and fluid positions and strategies adopted in various policy processes over time are to be unraveled.

abstract: ABSTRACT Current federal and state education mandates were developed to make schools accountable for student performance with the rationale that schools, teachers, and students will improve through the administration of high-stakes tests. Public schools are mandated to adhere to three accountability systems: national, state, and local. Additional elements include the recent implementation of the Common Core standards and newly devised state accountability systems that are granted through waivers as an alternative to the accountability mandates in the No Child Left Behind Act NCLB of 2001. Teachers' voices have been noticeably absent from the accountability debates, but as studies show, as primary recipients of accountability sanctions, many teachers withdraw, "burn out," or leave the profession altogether. The present study is based on the premise that teachers are vital to student achievement, and that their perspectives and understandings are therefore a resource for educational reform especially in light of the accountability mandates under NCLB. With that premise as a starting point, this dissertation examines practicing urban teachers' experiences of accountability in culturally and linguistically diverse schools. To fulfill these goals, this qualitative study used individual and focus group interviews and observations with veteran elementary school teachers in an urban Southwestern public school district, to ascertain practices they perceive to be effective. The study's significance lies in informing stakeholders, researchers, and policymakers of practicing teachers' input on accountability mandates in diverse urban schools. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Administration and Supervision 2013

Value-added models are complex statistical formulas that aim to isolate the effect a teacher has on student learning. States and districts across the nation are adopting laws and policies that will evaluate teachers, in part, using the results provided by value-added models. In many states and districts, these evaluations will be used to inform high-stakes decisions about teacher salary and retention. However, value-added models are imperfect tools for assessing teacher effectiveness, and many scholars have argued that they are not appropriate for use in high-stakes decisions. This Article provides a brief history of the use of value-added models in public education and summarizes the major criticisms of using value-added models. In this context, the Article analyzes and evaluates the extent to which substantive due process claims brought by teachers adversely affected by the results of value-added models will be successful. The Article concludes that while the system as a whole is rationally related to the objective of improving the overall effectiveness of the teaching workforce, in certain cases, individual teachers will be able to successfully claim that the results of their value-added model led to a termination that was arbitrary and capricious. Finally, the paper offers some recommendations to states and school districts on how to implement an evaluation system using value-added models to avoid substantive due process violations. / text

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential for using propensity score-based matching methods to estimate teacher contributions to student learning. Value-added models are increasingly used in teacher accountability systems in the United States in spite of ongoing qualms about the validity of teacher quality estimates resulting from those models. Using a large national dataset, teacher effects were estimated for 435 teachers using both value-added and propensity score-based approaches. The two approaches resulted in teacher effect estimates that were moderately correlated, with propensity score-based estimates more highly correlating with the value-added estimates as the matching ratio was increased. For many teachers' students, finding a set of matched control students was impossible unless the set of matching variables was reduced. Results suggest that many teachers have classroom compositions that are unusual, making evaluation of the teachers' impacts on student outcomes problematic. It was also found that, while value-added estimates were relatively insensitive to covariate inclusion choices or method of effect estimation, propensity score-based estimates were somewhat sensitive. Propensity score-based teacher effect estimates offer promise both for better accounting for classroom composition and student background variables and for indicating when a teacher's context is unique with respect to those variables, making the teacher's impact challenging to evaluate.

Value-added models (VAMs) have become widely used in evaluating teacher accountability. The use of these models for high-stakes decisions making has been very controversial due to lack of consistency in classifying teachers as high performing or low performing. There is an abundance of research on the impact of various student level covariates on teacher value-added scores; however, less is known about the impact of teacher-level and school-level covariates. This study uses hierarchical linear modeling to examine the impact of including teacher characteristics, school characteristics, and student demographics aggregated at the school level on elementary mathematics and reading teacher value-added scores. Data for this study was collected from a large school district in north Texas. This study found that across all VAMs fitted, 32% of mathematics teachers and 37% of reading teachers changed quintile ranking for their value-added score at least once across all VAMs, while 55% and 65% of schools changed their quintile ranking of value-added scores based on mathematics and reading achievement, respectively. The results show that failing to control for aggregated student demographics has a large impact on both teacher level and school level value-added scores. Policymakers and administrators using VAM estimates in high-stakes decision-making should include teacher- and school-level covariates in their VAMs.

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of National Board Certified Teachers on student performance on Mississippi’s Subject Area Testing Program (SATP) English II assessment, an end-of-course exam that assesses 10th grade students in Mississippi school districts. The researcher sought to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the SATP English II scores of two groups of students (those taught by National Board Certified Teachers and those who were not). If there was a difference, the researcher sought to determine how the difference could be explained based on selected teacher demographic data (sex, race, highest degree received, years of experience, and National Board Certification status) and selected student demographic data (sex; race; previous scores on the Mississippi Curriculum Test, Second Edition; and free- or reduced-lunch status). The results indicated that students who were taught by National Board Certified Teachers were more likely to have higher SATP English II scores than students who were taught by non-National Board Certified Teachers. Though previous researchers have concluded that teachers’ years of experience and highest degree received play a vital role in the difference in student achievement, this study did not confirm those findings. The results of this study, however, indicated that teacher and student demographic data were potentially important predictors of the language arts standardized test scores. Though these data can be used as predictors, the combined effect of teacher gender, teacher race, and years of experience, along with student race, student gender, student lunch status, and prior Mississippi Curriculum Test, Second Edition Language Arts scores were not found to be statistically significant in this study.

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The education of youth in the United States has become a highly contested subject over the past decades. This thesis argues that one of the earliest institutions American citizens encounter – the public school system – organizes the work of many teachers in ways that reproduce inequality of opportunity for students. Drawing on qualitative data from fourteen in-depth interviews with experienced elementary school teachers in Los Angeles, this thesis illustrates how teachers experience and navigate specific structural barriers to the pursuit of equity in the classroom. Applying social reproductive theory to teacher interviews, this research discovered how, despite rhetorical commitment to equality of opportunity in education student outcomes continue to vary according to the socioeconomic status of the student population. This will help us understand systemic barriers built into the structure of the education system. These barriers operate as obstacles that teachers and students must navigate, in order to achieve success. This thesis argues that teachers should begivenmore flexibility to assess the needs of each specific class and adapt their curriculum and strategies to meet those needs. Unfortunately, in the current test-score driven system, schools with the lowest performing students are the ones whose administrations are under the most pressure to improve the low scores rather than fix the problems associated with low scores. As such, the teachers that need this flexibility the most, are the ones whose administrations keep them on the tightest rein, further reducing their ability to utilize their knowledge and implement effective strategies in the classroom. The result is the self-perpetuating cycle of inequality reproduction that we can see across North America today. / Graduate / 2019-08-13