DCPS Human Capital Initiatives

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Abstract

Testimony of CALDER Director Jane Hannaway before the D.C. City Council on the human capital initiatives of the District of Columbia's Public Schools, given January 16, 2009. Hannaway describes CALDER's work on teacher quality addressing three main findings: (1) Teachers are the most important school factor that affects student learning, and the variation in effectiveness across teachers is large; (2) The variation in teacher effectiveness is greater within schools than the variation between schools; and (3) The variation in teacher effectiveness, both within and between schools, is a management problem that begs for attention. Hannaway argues at least some of this variation is a civil rights problem that demands policy attention and urges DCPS to continue to pursue new human capital management strategies to ensure teacher quality for all students.

Testimony

Good morning Chairman Gray and members of the District of Columbia Council. Thank you for the opportunity to present testimony on the human capital initiatives of the District of Columbia’s Public Schools. The views I will be expressing are largely based on research conducted in a national research center that I direct – CALDER (National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research) – that is headquartered at The Urban Institute. The work of the CALDER largely focuses on issues associated with teacher quality and teacher labor markets.
I want to make three major points.

1. Teachers matter. They are the most important school factor that affects student learning, and the variation in effectiveness across teachers is huge. The most effective teachers get about three times the academic gains for their students than do the least effective teachers. Indeed, according to some calculations the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers can be closed if disadvantaged students had highly effective teachers for five years.

The large variation is teacher effectiveness is good news. Make no doubt about it. It means that teachers can, indeed, make a huge difference for students. It is only within the last few years that we have been able to get reasonably accurate measures of teacher effects. For too long, many observers believed that schools, and what happened in classrooms, were not important – that family background was the overwhelming determinant of student achievement. According to this view, it would be no wonder that poor minority children did not do well in school. What else would you expect given their backgrounds? And you certainly could not hold teachers or any other school personnel responsible for student achievement. They had no control over what was too often believed to be the relevant input – the family. The destructiveness of such views should be obvious. They feed a culture of low expectations, low effort and limited professional responsibility for student outcomes.

It is a new day. We now have some understanding of the magnitude of effects that teachers can have.

(End of excerpt. The full written testimony is available in PDF format.)

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