Overview
Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway
Education is fundamentally a human capital enterprise. At the most basic level, the nation’s public schools are given the crucial task of helping provide students with the human capital—the knowledge and skills—required for their success in college or the workplace. And the human capital of the nation’s teachers largely determines whether schools are successful at this endeavor. Unfortunately, there are troubling signs about the quality and distribution of the teachers staffing many of the nation’s classrooms. These signs have far-reaching implications for student learning, economic and social equality, and the growth rate of the U.S. economy as a whole.
Although many skilled professionals are staffing the nation’s classrooms, growing consensus exists among policymakers and researchers that, on the whole, schools are not attracting or retaining the most able teachers, or training them effectively, and that the most needy students are most likely to be hurt as a consequence.
Teachers are the most valuable investment schools make. Not only do teacher salaries represent the largest share of school expenditure, but in many places, where teachers have extensive job protections afforded by tenure, up-front investments in teachers (e.g., recruitment, professional development, and so on) might be better thought of as permanent commitments to pay a teacher’s salary for his or her life in a school district. More important, research clearly shows that teacher quality is the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement. Having one very effective versus one very ineffective teacher can make a difference of more than a year’s growth in a student’s achievement. Having multiple effective teachers versus multiple ineffective teachers can make or break a student’s entire schooling experience. And having a very effective versus a very ineffective teacher workforce can profoundly influence a country’s economic growth trajectory.
This edited volume is about the human capital systems that help determine the quality of the teaching workforce in the nation’s K–12 schools and about how to improve them. The myriad systems that determine the quality of teachers today are too often disconnected, incoherent, and out of step with the market mechanisms that govern the broader labor market. As Sean P. Corcoran notes in chapter 3, “A defining feature of the teaching profession is that its structure, compensation, and entry requirements are a product of another era, in many ways incompatible with the modern labor market for skilled professionals.”
This volume is part of a larger project designed to critically examine what researchers know about the systems that govern human capital in U.S. public schools. The goals are to generate new notions and angles on issues associated with human capital in schools and to stimulate thought about innovative ways to improve these systems. To facilitate these goals, we invited a diverse set of noted scholars to contribute essays on various topics related to human capital. Some of these experts are well-known education policy analysts. Others may be less familiar to those who focus on the U.S. school system, but they offer insights from their areas of expertise, other countries, or other sectors of the U.S. economy. Scholars often back their views with empirical research, but we asked them to go beyond what could be shown empirically and speculate what human capital policy changes might improve the teacher workforce.
The volume is intended to be accessible to a broad audience of policymakers and those who are interested in or concerned about teacher quality. Authors were asked to provide independent input, but the issues they describe and ideas they put forward fit well together. We believe a number of important themes emerge when one looks across the contributions.
The 16 chapters in the volume are organized into three parts. The first focuses on the importance of rethinking our K–12 human capital systems in light of the skill sets that students are likely to need in the future, what we know about the trends in the quality of teachers over time, and what we might learn from looking at other countries or other sectors of the economy.
In chapter 2, Alan S. Blinder discusses the provocative notion that schools should focus far more attention on two very different skill sets that are both likely to be in demand in the labor market of the future. The first is an emphasis on “the development of skills that a computer cannot replicate and that an educated worker in a low-wage country will have a hard time doing nearly as well as an American.” To Blinder, that suggests “emphasizing things like creativity, inventiveness, spontaneity, flexibility, interpersonal relations, and so on—not rote memorization.” The second is vocational education, often encompassing high-end personal services. We agree with Blinder that schools should be structured, as much as is possible, to prepare for the needs of tomorrow’s workforce, and this may require different types of assessments than those typically in place in schools today. At the same time, we would argue that we must not lose sight of the fact that many students today are not even learning the basic skills that would allow them to be successful in college or the labor market. Thus, if anything, Blinder’s analysis suggests that tomorrow’s teachers will need to be even more talented than today’s.
In chapter 3, Sean P. Corcoran provides an overview of the characteristics of recent entrants into the teacher labor market compared with those who entered teaching as far back as the 1960s. He notes that, “For decades, a small and declining fraction of the most cognitively skilled college graduates have chosen to become teachers, while rigorous national standards and school accountability for student performance have pushed demand for teaching talent to an all-time high.” While cognitive skills do not necessarily predict that an individual will make an effective teacher, the broad trends that Corcoran describes are indeed troubling given the likelihood that these individuals would tend to be productive in most walks of life, teaching or otherwise.
Corcoran hypothesizes that the decline in teacher quality, as he is measuring it, may be traced largely to changes in the relative salary that women could earn in and outside the teaching profession. As readers will note, the theme that compensation—and incentives more generally—is a key tool in explaining occupational choices arises throughout the volume, in comparing teacher quality both over time and across nations. Not surprisingly, change in teacher compensation emerges as a key educational reform option. But, compensation reform is potentially far more complex than simply debating whether to increase teacher salaries. The structure (the reward system for teacher attributes and different teaching jobs) and the quality of school system selection from the pool of potential teachers are also fundamentally important in determining the quality of the workforce.
Having laid some of the groundwork on teacher quality, chapter 4, by Michael M. DeArmond, Kathryn L. Shaw, and Patrick M. Wright, moves away from a narrow focus on human capital in education to a broader look at human capital in the labor market. These authors describe changes in human resources management in the private sector and what lessons these may hold for education. In particular, they focus on two critical human resource issues: recruitment and selection. DeArmond and colleagues argue that these functions are particularly critical in the case of teachers, where a large body of empirical research suggests that readily quantifiable teacher attributes (e.g., degree level and certification status) appear to poorly predict teacher quality in the classroom.
To understand how good human resource management can improve teacher quality, the authors advocate approaching the issue from two perspectives. First, they “zoom in” to confront what is now largely a “conspiracy of dysfunction” in most school systems and advocate searching, both within and outside public education, for new management practices given that “public education is about twenty years behind the noneducation world when it comes to thinking about human resource management . . . impact on organizations.” Second, they “zoom out” to think about how systems of human resource practices work jointly to affect school and district performance.
One important lesson from the private sector appears to be that the adoption of specific innovative practices often does not lead to productivity benefits. Instead, the research suggests that packages of complementary reforms often make a difference. For example, DeArmond and colleagues cite some of the virtues of local flexibility—for instance, giving schools greater discretion over teacher hiring. But they also caution that this flexibility is only likely to lead to systemic improvements if school systems adopt stronger feedback systems, which at a minimum would typically require greater data collection and analysis, to identify the human capital practices that lead to better teacher quality.
The idea that human resource system reforms often work only when they are implemented as a package or in an environment in which the reform can be supported emerges as a major theme in this volume. In fact, we argue that many reforms that might be efficacious are actually implemented in ways or in environments that do not support their success and thus come to be seen as failures. DeArmond and colleagues’ contribution suggests that, as is the case in the private sector, there are unlikely to be single, silver-bullet human capital reform policies. Yet, packages of reform should be particularly useful in a K–12 environment because the value of innovative human resources is greater in environments that produce more complex products. It’s difficult to imagine a more complex product than the academic and social development of children.
In chapter 5, Dan Goldhaber looks to what lessons might be learned from examining cross-nation differences in the array of human capital systems and policies (what he calls “teacher development systems”) that ultimately influence the quality and qualifications of those who enter the teacher workforce. One should be cautious about drawing strong conclusions from cross-nation comparisons, given different institutional and cultural arrangements. That said, Goldhaber’s review suggests a number of reasons that the teaching profession in the United States is not as desirable as it is in many other industrialized countries. Specifically, Goldhaber’s review suggests that the U.S. system is among the more decentralized among industrialized countries, leading to a narrowing of the teacher pipeline only after prospective teachers have completed their training. As a consequence of these features, the U.S. system as a whole looks to be incoherent and creates “significant political and structural hurdles to crafting cost-effective teacher development policy reforms along the lines of making the U.S. system look more like, for instance, systems in high-achieving Asian countries.” He suggests several divergent strategies to make teaching in the United States more attractive to a broader segment of the workforce, but he notes that these strategies would make the U.S. system even less like most other countries’. Thus, drawing more talented people into teaching in the United States probably requires uniquely American reforms.
Part II of the volume focuses on specific reform ideas that authors believe would lead to improvements in the human capital of the teacher workforce. Many of the reform notions put forth in this volume are not terribly novel if one steps back from K–12 education. In fact, as several authors in the volume describe in their chapters, many of the reforms suggested represent changes that have occurred in the private-sector labor force. That said, the ideas are still likely to be seen within education circles as fairly radical, representing fundamental shifts in the way that individuals enter into the occupation, how many are counseled out of it, and the career paths and workforce and compensation structures for those who remain. Frederick M. Hess leads off in chapter 6 with the following observation:
The existing human capital pipeline in education is the result of more than a century of compromises, incremental adjustments, and calculated moves designed in response to the exigencies of another era. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the teaching profession was designed to match the rapid expansion of schooling. It relied on a captive pool of female labor, treated workers as largely interchangeable, and counted on mostly male principals and superintendents to micromanage the predominantly female teaching workforce. Later, in the mid-20th century, collective bargaining agreements, more-expansive licensure systems, and local and state statutes and regulations were layered atop these arrangements. Today, would-be reformers must recognize that machinery and assumptions that may have been sensible in the past are ill-suited given existing opportunities and challenges—and that merely tweaking familiar models is unlikely to deliver satisfying results.
With that as his backdrop, he pushes us to examine new ways to think about teacher careers, from recruitment and training to staffing and reward structures in teaching. Additionally, he suggests a number of school system workforce structure reforms that would allow teachers to focus greater time on their teaching and specialize far more than they do today. Consistent with these ideas, he makes the implicit case that the current flat hierarchy in teaching be replaced with “finely graded, new hierarchies…The aim should be to create a profession with various roles and specializations” and a professional compensation structure that recognizes the systemic contributions teachers make. Finally, he notes that technology could play a crucial role in helping restructure personnel in ways that allow greater specialization.
Paul T. Hill, in chapter 7, delves more deeply into the use of technology by schools and explores some specific examples of innovative use of technology to deliver instruction. We do not know how effective they are, but Hill’s study of “cyber schools” illustrates the potential for technology to revolutionize the teaching profession, changing not only the skill set of teachers but also potentially the size and composition of the teacher workforce. For example, just as technology breaks down barriers to enable doctors to work across geographic boundaries, one could imagine it being used by multiple remote school systems to share a teacher they could not each employ full time.
Clearly, there are educational limits to the cyber school model; many parents would likely want their children, particularly young children, to be in a more traditional classroom. But Hill suggests that parental preferences are unlikely to limit the use of technology. Rather, the use of technology may threaten school employment or imply differentiated compensation for those with particular skill set. Those resisting change are well equipped, by state laws and funding formulas that favor the status quo in teacher employment, to resist some of the changes that technology could bring. Again, we see the theme emerge that it could require multiple systemic changes to make a particular type of reform successful, so it makes sense to consider packages of complementary reforms.
In chapter 8, by Eric A. Hanushek, the focus changes from how to rethink the roles and structure of the teacher workforce to an examination of which teachers ought to remain in the workforce. Hanushek makes the case for school systems to be far more serious when it comes to evaluating the productivity of teachers and using that information. Specifically, he says they ought to identify poorly performing teachers and systematically “deselect” them from the workforce. He makes the empirically based argument that students would greatly benefit if even a relatively small share of ineffective teachers were removed.1 For example, removal of the least effective 6 to 10 percent of teachers would be predicted over time to increase the performance of U.S. students to a level comparable to that of Canadian students (who score about a half a standard deviation better on international tests).
Clearly, a policy built around teacher deselection would be a radical change to the existing system and would not happen without considerable political will. Thus, it is instructive to consider the potential gains from such a reform. In fact, as Hanushek describes, the economic consequences associated with student achievement improvements are staggering. For example, his calculations suggest that, had teacher deselection policies been put in place in 1989 (when the nation’s governors met and set the goal of having the U.S. education system be first in the world in math and science), the gross domestic product of the United States in 2009 would have been about 1.6 percent larger. Hanushek describes how striking this seemingly small number really is:
In the U.S. economy in 2005, 1.6 percent amounted to $200 billion. That year, total spending on instructional salaries and benefits was just $233 billion. In other words, the increased GDP through improved student achievement would almost immediately cover current teacher salaries and benefits fully—suggesting considerable room to pay for better teachers and to compensate for the higher risk of entering teaching.
Underlying the idea of teacher deselection put forth by Hanushek is the notion that we can make at least some judgments about the quality of teachers based on their students’ test scores. This idea also arises in the context of teacher pay. As authors throughout this volume note, teacher compensation is fundamental to determining the quality of the workforce. So it is no surprise that policymakers debate using pay as a tool to shape the teacher workforce and encourage greater levels of teacher effort. In fact, the idea of shifting traditional teacher salary structures toward a system more reliant on performance measures related to student achievement is very much in vogue. In chapter 9, Steven G. Rivkin describes the idea of using statistical methods to tease out the contribution that teachers make toward student gains on standardized tests and of connecting this teacher “value added” to their pay.
Rivkin carefully lays out the way data can be used to assess teacher effectiveness and the potential statistical complications associated with doing so. He makes it clear that it is not easy to cleanly separate the contribution of teachers from other influences on student achievement growth—for example, families, peers, and the way schools tend to match students and teachers. Although Rivkin concludes that, “despite potential shortcomings, value-added analysis can provide valuable information for evaluating and compensating teachers,” he does not take a strong policy position on whether policymakers should use value added. Instead, he digs into some of the key questions of pay for performance: What is the appropriate comparison group for teachers? Should incentives be targeted toward individuals or groups? Should one use multiple years of data when considering performance? There are, of course, no “right” answers to these questions, but Rivkin’s chapter describes the trade-offs inherent in using one option over another.
In chapter 10, Robert M. Costrell, Richard W. Johnson, and Michael J. Podgursky discuss another important area of teacher compensation: deferred compensation in the form of pensions and retiree health insurance, which fall under the general heading of “retiree benefits.” As they note, only recently have researchers and policymakers have begun to focus on teacher retirement benefits. One reason for this may be that many state retirement systems are greatly underfunded, meaning that serious structural adjustments will need to be made. Regardless, the prior omission of retirement benefits from the policy discussion is problematic, given that retirement benefits constitute a relatively large share of teacher compensation and likely influence teacher behavior. For example, the authors note that the structure of pension systems create powerful incentives for teachers to formally retire when their pension wealth peaks, often in their mid- to late 50s, but that the need for qualified teachers has led many states to allow “double-dipping,” a phenomenon whereby retired teachers can be rehired by school systems while still collecting benefits.
Perhaps more important, this chapter describes the structural changes in pension benefits that have occurred in the private sector and speculates about how these changes influence the attractiveness of teaching as a profession for potential new entrants into the labor market. In particular, the shift from defined-benefit toward defined-contribution retirement plans in the private sector diverges from the continued reliance on defined-benefit plans in teaching. As a consequence, the compensation associated with retirement is likely to be seen by prospective employees as far less flexible, and perhaps less tangible, in teaching than in other sectors of the economy. For example, “many young teachers, who are paying off student loans, starting families, and buying homes, might prefer to receive more of their compensation up front rather than have it diverted into a system that may never benefit them.” Not surprisingly, like Corcoran (chapter 3) and Hess (chapter 6), Costrell, Johnson, and Podgursky advocate changes in teacher retirement benefits to make them more flexible, portable, and more in line with the private sector to be more attractive to potential new teachers.
Part II of the volume closes with a contribution by Jennifer King Rice, who explores the potential to use teacher professional development as a vehicle for improving the human capital of teachers in the workforce. As Rice notes in chapter 11, “public school systems are making substantial investments in these various forms of teacher professional development,” but their investment decisions (i.e., what is purchased with these resources) “are often based on thin, if any, evidence,” and the return on these investments (i.e., what we’re getting back in improved teaching practices and student learning) appear to be “uneven and, in many cases, disappointing.” As she goes on to explain, this finding is not terribly surprising when one considers the incentive structure that governs the professional development offerings that teachers receive. Specifically, she notes that the current system rewards “seat time” rather than improvements in performance, and that the intrinsic rewards of becoming a more effective teacher may not be sufficient to get a large enough number of teachers to choose in-service training that is appropriately rigorous. Although the chapter does not go into great detail on changes to the reward structure, it does suggest that pay for performance could be a more powerful motivator to improve the efficacy of professional development.
In part III, a diverse group of scholars and policymakers react to the ideas put forward in this volume. These authors were asked to read parts I and II and provide feedback not only on the substantive educational merits of the ideas, but also on their political feasibility. Four distinct perspectives are represented. David H. Monk, a noted scholar and dean of the school of education at Penn State University, offers well-grounded commentary on the development of teaching professionals. Joel I. Klein, chancellor of New York City Public Schools since 2002, provides the view of a reformer who instituted major human capital reforms in the nation’s largest school district. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, offers the vantage point of the organization responsible for protecting the interests of teachers, the object of much reform. Andrew J. Rotherham, one of the most insightful political analysts of education, puts parts I and II within the broader frame of education reform.
Like Rotherham, we believe that “American public education faces a human capital crisis”. It is a crisis for the many students who are not receiving an education that will allow them to realize their potential in college or the labor market. Education is potentially the greatest social equalizer in society in the sense that it can and should provide students from disadvantaged backgrounds a means of escaping poverty. As far as inequities in society help drive other problems, which they undoubtedly do, the crisis extends beyond individuals directly affected by poor schooling. In addition, the K–12 education crisis affects all of us by diminishing the growth potential of the economy.
We hope that this volume helps make the case that teacher quality is key for improving our nation’s schools—and, as such, concrete steps are essential to address the human capital shortcomings that influence it. We believe that all the ideas put forth in this volume merit careful consideration. Despite a long history of rhetoric of concern about teacher quality, the nation appears to have made relatively little progress. Although many of the ideas expressed in this volume are untested, we think it unlikely that schools will show anything more than marginal improvements without radical changes in the nation’s human capital policies.
Note
1 Hanushek’s metric of effectiveness is a teacher’s value-added contribution toward student learning (typically measured by performance on standardized tests). The idea of value-added analyses is discussed in greater detail in chapter 8.
