Smylie, M. A. and Miretzky, D. (Eds.). (2004). Developing the Teacher Workforce. Reviewed by Laura Goe, Educational Testing Service

Smylie, M. A. and Miretzky, D. (Eds.). (2004). Developing the Teacher Workforce. Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education. Pp. xiv + 438 $39.00     ISBN 0-22676-718-3 Reviewed by Laura Goe Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ. May 12, 2005 For the 103rd Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Mark A. Smylie and Debra Miretzky have assembled an excellent collection of scholarly works on the theme of recruiting, training, and retaining high-quality teachers, i.e., developing the teacher workforce. Topics covered in Part One include teacher preparation, teacher supply, the lack of minority teachers, compensation, professional development, unions, teacher work, the role of districts, and federal and state contributions to the effort to recruit high-quality teachers. In Part Two, commentaries offer additional viewpoints, including the importance of teacher support from a new teacher’s point of view and reshaping district recruiting efforts from a superintendent’s perspective. The book attempts to be comprehensive; however, for many of the individual chapters, there is extensive documentation of the problem but an insufficient focus on the solution from a practical, rather than a theoretical, standpoint. To be fair, the editors note in their introduction that many of the ideas in the book are still “in progress.” Thus, it is to be expected that some of the chapters document and explore problem areas thoroughly but leave me wishing for greater elaboration of how to address these areas. Most importantly, more attention to the implementation and financing of new strategies suggested by these authors for developing the teacher workforce would be welcome. After a brief discussion of these concerns and some suggestions for other perspectives that would complement this work, I offer a summary of each of the chapters in Part One, followed by a brief look at the five commentaries that comprise Part Two. A Note About the Great Divide It should be acknowledged that there is often a chasm that exists between researchers/theorists and the practitioners in the field, including teachers, human resources personnel in district offices, superintendents, federal policymakers, union leaders, and state education officers. While the editors did an excellent service to the education community by assembling a set of articles that cover a wide range of research perspectives, it would have been very interesting to see more practitioners’ commentaries on these issues. Such commentaries would bring some additional focus to the problems and strategies of finding, training, and keeping high-quality teachers. While Part Two of the book offers some practitioners’ viewpoints, they are generally not addressing the research and recommendations in Part One. However, the editors note in their introduction that including commentaries has not been previously done in an NSSE yearbook. Adding commentaries definitely seems to be a step in the right direction towards bridging the great divide between research and practice, but it would be even more effective to have practitioners comment directly on the theories, research, and proposals that were contributed by the teacher workforce development scholars. From Theory to Application Funding. The authors of these works offer many worthwhile recommendations on teacher workforce development from their various perspectives, but they nearly all fail to address how the important changes they suggest would be funded. While education researchers and policymakers serve an important role by analyzing and reflecting on problems in education and then recommending appropriate solutions, it is also crucial that they provide realistic discussions of how to fund such solutions. It is not enough to say that changes are clearly needed and thus the funds must be “found” to support them. For education generally, there are very limited resources to implement innovations. Unless new streams of funding are identified, trade-offs of some type must be offered and discussed, i.e., specifically identifying and eliminating or phasing out one program or approach in order to implement another. An alternative to this replacement approach is justifying the new program or service through the savings that would likely result from putting it into practice. A cost-benefits analysis of suggested approaches would be useful in determining whether a good approach in theory would be feasible in practice (see Levin & McEwan, 2001 for a discussion of cost-benefit analysis). Implementation. There is a need for greater attention to strategies for implementation of the programmatic changes that many of the authors have suggested. For example, several authors suggested coordinated and comprehensive approaches to developing the teacher workforce that would bring policies into greater alignment towards a particular goal. However, alignment of policies at any level—federal, state, district, or school, requires not only a vision but a plan of implementation that can ensure that the vision is actually carried out through coordination of agencies, communication, training sessions, etc. Further, implementation is highly dependent on the “buy-in” of the stakeholders involved--as Milbrey McLaughlin (1987) has argued, it is not always possible for policymakers to dictate what matters at the local level. If the approach to developing the teacher workforce is perceived as beneficial to some parties at the expense of others (such as teachers), there may be resistance among those that feel shortchanged. Issues Needing Further Consideration Addressing some addition issues would have strengthened the overall impact of the book. First, little was said about policies that impact teacher distribution across schools within districts, and in particular, the policy in many districts that results in an inequitable distribution of resources (teachers). Roza and Hill (2004) have described how teacher salaries are averaged across districts so that hard-to-staff schools that are able to recruit only the most inexperienced teachers end up with considerably fewer dollars per pupil. This essentially results in a transfer of per-pupil dollars from schools serving low-achieving students with high percentages of poor and minority students to schools serving higher-achieving students. Such policies may have a considerable impact on teacher workforce development. Second, there is little discussion of the growing interest in “objective” measures of teacher quality that can be used to identify the “most effective” and “least effective” teachers based on their students’ performance on standardized achievement tests. Currently, teacher evaluation is most often done through direct observation. However, there is much discussion lately about using value-added measures of the type developed by Bill Sanders for teacher evaluation (see Carnevale & Fry, 2000; Sanders & Horn, 1998 for a discussion of value-added as a way to measure teacher effectiveness). However, substantially more debate and inquiry around using these measures is advisabe, particularly when teacher awards and salaries are likely to be attached to the outcomes (see Kupermintz, 2003 for a critique of using value-added measures for teacher evaluation). This is an area of developing the teacher workforce that is likely to receive much more attention as districts and states consider ways to reward teachers based on student performance. It is also an area that some policymakers are putting forward as a mechanism to attract and keep the “best” teachers, i.e., through rewarding them for student gains as measured by value-added scores. Third, more discussion about alternative routes into teaching and their impact on developing the teacher workforce would have been welcome. Some research has suggested that alternative routes may be a good way to ensure adequate numbers of teachers to meet demands in areas that have difficulty attracting teachers (see, for example Feistritzer, 2003). However, the quality of alternative certification programs varies widely within and between states. While such programs may serve as effective means of supplying hard-to-staff schools with teachers, programs that produce poorly prepared teachers may be detrimental to teacher workforce development as these teachers may exit the profession prematurely, thus perpetuating teacher turnover and exacerbating shortages. Fourth, evaluating professional development would have been a useful addition to this discussion. As a former teacher, I can appreciate many teachers’ lament that professional development often fails to address their needs and those of their students. From another perspective, district personnel need a way of evaluating the worth of the professional development they provide for their teachers. There are extensive discussions about professional development in this book, and several authors point out that all professional development is not equally effective. However, it would be worthwhile to include in this discussion the possible role of the existing standards for “good” professional development: the Standards for Staff Development as outlined by the National Staff Development Council (http://www.nsdc.org/standards/index.cfm). Divided into context, process, and content standards, they provide some useful tools for considering the design and implementation of professional development in developing the teacher workforce. These standards could also serve as the basis for developing protocols for evaluating the usefulness of professional development. Fifth, a crucial chapter on diversifying the teacher workforce by Villegas and Lucas does a wonderful job of documenting the importance of recruiting and retaining more minority teachers in America’s increasingly diverse classrooms. However, the book pays too little attention to an important related issue: how to prepare and support the overwhelming majority of teachers who are white, middle-class, and female to effectively teach a diverse student population. Teachers are often ill-prepared to understand and address the needs of their students, and teacher preparation programs vary widely in how they address this problem. Further, this lack of adequate preparation for teaching a diverse student population can ultimately lead to teachers’ dissatisfaction with their jobs (Freeman, Brookhart, & Loadman, 1999). This is an important topic in terms of retention, since an inability to feel that they are positively impacting students’ lives can drive teachers from the classroom. In the next two sections, I will briefly summarize the chapters. Chapter Summaries (Part One) In “Four Myths About America’s Teacher Quality Problem,” Richard M. Ingersoll critiques four notions that are frequently cited as major problems for teacher workforce development: 1) restrictive entry barriers to teaching, 2) inadequate numbers of teachers being produced through traditional training programs, 3) inadequate preparation and training for teachers, and 4) inappropriate accountability for teachers at the school level. Ingersoll states that these beliefs are incorrect and spends the remainder of the chapter explaining why. He provides convincing arguments to counter these views. Of particular note is his “revolving door” theory, which suggests that the most important issues in developing an adequate supply of teachers is not recruiting and training sufficient numbers of teachers but retaining them in the profession. He concludes by noting that needed changes in the profession must be made “in concert” rather than piecemeal, since the changes he recommends are sufficient only as part of a larger systemic plan. In “Rethinking Teacher Workforce Development: A Strategic Human Resource Management Perspective,” Mark A. Smylie, Debra Miretzky, and Pamela Konkol argue that teacher workforce development must be considered as a function of the organization of schools. They focus on bringing organization and management theory into the discussion on teacher development. The authors critique conventional practices in teacher development on two main fronts: 1) that the current practices are “reactive” instead of “proactive” in terms of development and management of the teacher workforce, i.e., solving immediate problems rather than preventing problems; and 2) that the various practices at different levels of government are unnecessarily uniform and rigid, thus constraining attempts to coordinate them and limiting schools’ and districts’ flexibility, thus hampering efforts to meet changing needs for teachers, schools, and districts. Examining fields outside of education, the authors fields apply organizational and management theory to teacher workforce development, followed by a discussion of the application of such theory within education. The authors conclude by elaborating on their argument for an approach to teacher workforce development that is comprehensive, strategic, and systemic. In “Diversifying the Teacher Workforce: A Retrospective and Prospective Analysis,” Ana María Villegas and Tamara F. Lucas argue that developing a well-prepared teacher workforce must include a focus on ensuring a supply of teachers that is racially and ethnically diverse, and that expanding the definition of teacher quality to include the strengths that minority teachers bring to the classroom is essential in this effort. The authors offer substantial research evidence for the necessity of increasing the diversity of the teacher workforce. Among the reasons for greater diversity they include providing role models for minority children and helping them “build cultural bridges to learning.” Villegas and Lucas also document and discuss the widening gap between the numbers of minority students in the U.S. and the numbers of minority teachers. They then focus on why recruitment efforts have thus far failed to ensure an adequate supply of minority teachers and describe some promising approaches. The authors then move beyond recruitment to address the problems faced by minority teachers in preservice teacher education programs and in the schools where they teach, where they often fail to find the conditions they need to ensure success in the classroom. They conclude by noting that the challenges to recruiting, training, and supporting minority teachers are outweighed by the importance of establishing their presence in the nation’s classrooms. In “Teacher Preparation and the Improvement of Teacher Education,” Virginia Richardson and Dirck Roosevelt outline two goals for enhancing the quality of the teacher workforce through ensuring that new teachers 1) come prepared with the “knowledge, habits of mind, and skills necessary to meet the needs of the students within the particular contexts of the schools in which they teach,” and 2) have “dispositions and ways of thinking” that will provide the foundation for continual improvements in practice. The authors discuss at length two approaches to meet these goals: a regulatory approach (licensing, certification, etc.) and an educative approach (preservice preparation). However, they also include a discussion of how to ensure that these approaches work systematically with other elements such as recruitment, induction programs, professional development, and retention. Finally, they warn against the institution of standards and assessments that standardize “noneducative” practices such as teaching to the test. Rather, they suggest local accountability with allowances for context differences. In “‘Them That’s Got Shall Get’: Understanding Teacher Recruitment, Induction, and Retention,” Suzanne M. Wilson, Courtney Bell, Jodie A. Galosy, and Andrew W. Shouse examine the factors that have influenced teachers’ entry into the profession. They note that research has suggested that teacher shortages are a problem of distribution, not necessarily a lack of qualified teachers, and describe various incentive strategies that have tried to increase retention in high-turnover schools. District hiring practices are also discussed in terms of their role in making it difficult for some districts to adequately staff classrooms. Induction is also discussed as a method of improving retention, but the authors note that questions still remain about which features of induction programs contribute most to new teachers’ success. In addition, the authors describe conflicting views of teaching—as professional work, labor, or vocation--and how those views have shaped policy around teacher recruitment, induction and retention. They conclude by suggesting that it is important to carefully consider how policies used to hire and support teachers interact with other policies, such as those focused on curriculum, assessment, workplace conditions, school finance, and teacher quality. In “New Visions of Teacher Professional Development,” Judi Randi and Kenneth M. Zeichner raise an important question: whether some staff development actually constrains teachers from taking responsibility for their own learning through defining what teachers need to know and what methods and materials they need to use. They distinguish between a “performance-oriented workforce” where workers are focused on the organization’s productivity and a “professional, learning-oriented workforce” where work is done for the sake of learning. The authors discuss professional development from various perspectives, such as social cognitive theory, adult learning theory, teacher networks, and teacher research. They note that districts tend to provide access to “one size fits all” types of staff development activities focused on a constrained set of organizational priorities, rather than supporting teachers’ individual interests and needs. They emphasize the need for “profession development,” which relies on teachers’ motivation and ability to learn and grow as individuals, rather than professional development, which focuses on greater organizational efficiency. They conclude by describing how schools might build profession development by supporting teachers as they work together to explore the knowledge base of the teaching profession and develop practical applications for their own classrooms. In “Empowering a Profession: Rethinking the Roles of Administrative Evaluation and Instructional Supervision in Improving Teacher Quality,” Edward Pajak and Anjelique Arrington discuss the history of and current state of instructional supervision and administrative evaluation. From this perspective, they offer three strategies that they believe will enhance teacher quality: 1) bringing teacher unions into a partnership to address teacher quality, 2) building a “graduate-level medical” model of teacher preparation to ensure greater academic and pedagogical development, and 3) adopting “opportunity to teach” standards that will focus attention on improved teaching conditions to help retain teachers in the profession. The idea of clinical supervision as a key strategy is put forward, but the authors admit that such models require substantial resource investment. The “opportunity to teach” standards listed in the chapter are intended to ensure that teachers are guaranteed certain working conditions, though the authors do not address the significant costs involved in making such environments standard within schools. In “Teacher Compensation and Teacher Workforce Development,” Carolyn Kelley and Kara Finnigan focus on how teacher compensation can affect teacher quality through the role it plays in attracting, developing, and attaining high-quality teachers. The authors discuss a number of ways in which teacher compensation is currently instituted, including the single salary schedule, merit pay programs, hiring bonuses, career ladder programs, school-based rewards programs, and knowledge and skills based pay systems such as National Board Certification bonuses or rewards. They note that teacher supply is influenced not only by teacher compensation but by the availability of other opportunities that prospective teachers may choose to pursue. Further, they point out that the success of compensation and incentives must be judged not only by whether they attract sufficient numbers of high-quality teachers but by the equitable distribution of teacher quality within districts. Further, they point out that other forms of compensation should also be considered, such as reduced class sizes and teacher loads, more resources and opportunities for professional growth, and more long-term career possibilities. The authors conclude by suggesting that “no single intervention” is likely to make a difference in teacher quality, and that attention must be paid to the many factors that contribute to failing schools. In “Work Redesign that Works for Teachers,” David Mayrowetz and Mark A. Smylie situate their discussion in the teacher workforce rather than confining it to the level of the individual teacher. They focus on the promise of work redesign strategies to impact the work of not only teachers but groups of teachers and entire faculties. The authors explain that work redesign means altering jobs in order to improve both the quality of workers’ experience and their productivity. They also describe the relationship of work redesign to other concepts and models, such as the Job Characteristics Model and participative decision making. Strengths and weakness of potential strategies are outlined, including 1) individual task reassignment which asks individual teachers to take on greater responsibilities; 2) collective task reassignment which brings teachers together in groups to work on tasks; 3) individual task redefinition which seeks to make teachers into systematic, reflective individual researchers, and 4) collective task redefinition which brings teachers into communities of practice for research, leadership, and technical and social development leading to school improvement. The authors conclude that the last category, collective task redefinition, has the greatest potential for contributing to the development of the teacher workforce. In “School- and District-Level Leadership for Teacher Workforce Development: Enhancing Teacher Learning and Capacity,” M. Bruce King focuses on the critical importance of leadership for both teacher development and for capacity building in schools, since educational leaders’ beliefs and actions impact teaching practices. School’s leaders can strengthen teachers through working with them to create shared student learning targets and goals and to ensure alignment of those goals with professional development activities. Program coherence, which is key to teacher learning within schools, is manifested as sustained, coordinated, clear, and directed learning goals which are fostered by activities, programs, and policies within the school. The author describes two schools that exhibited the qualities of leadership and program coherence that lead to greater collaboration and reflection among teachers, and then focuses on the role of the district in providing appropriate professional development and using “redefined leadership roles” to guide programmatic decision-making. For instance, districts encouraged principals to be instructional leaders rather than mere administrators, and fostered teacher leadership. King concludes by affirming that a strong professional community requires that leadership and knowledge be distributed across the organization. In “Teacher Unions and the Teaching Workforce: Mismatch or Vital Contribution?” Nina Bascia offers a description of how teacher unions support efforts to improve the teacher workforce through recruitment, retention, teacher preparation, and professional development. She contends that unions are uniquely positioned to play a role in enhancing teacher quality. The author also challenges the perception of teacher unions’ concerns about working conditions as self-interested, noting that successfully attracting and retaining teachers requires attention to these fundamental conditions. She also offers examples of the way in which teacher unions provide professional development opportunities and services. The author concludes that teacher unions are directly involved in teacher recruitment and retention through their role in advocating for the conditions that will make teaching more attractive. Further, she noted that unions must learn to redefine their work in terms of the contributions they make to education rather than how they are often perceived--as supporters of a narrow set of teacher interests and concerns. In “Lessons for Policy Design and Implementation: Examining State and Federal Efforts to Improve Teacher Quality,” Margaret Plecki and Hilary Loeb argue that addressing teacher workforce development should not be limited to the characteristics of individual teachers (quality of the teacher) but should include classroom instruction and features such as curriculum and materials (quality of teaching) as well as the quality of working conditions such as the student/teacher ratio, classroom assignments, the availability of resources, the quality of leadership within the school, and professional development opportunities (quality of support for teachers’ work). The authors contend that policies that address all three of these concerns will contribute to greater programmatic coherence and effectiveness. Analyzing state policy revealed that most policy efforts have attended only to the individual teacher attributes. They further found a lack of sustained policy focus, inadequate resources to support policies, and a failure to sufficiently address equity issues. They discuss the conceptual frameworks they have introduced in conjunction with an analysis of Title II of NCLB. They conclude that because of an emphasis on the “limited use of proxy variables to measure teacher quality,” NCLB and the notion of “scientifically based research” are essentially at odds with the broader view of quality outlined above. Commentaries (Part Two) The contributors to these commentaries represent the practice side of the great divide between research and practice. That is not to say that they are not researchers, too, and some of them may be considered as such. However, the viewpoints they bring to their commentaries are those of practitioners in various positions. They are brief—a few pages each, and discuss specific problems associated with teacher workforce development that their expertise qualifies them to address. In “Ongoing Teacher Support: A Critical Component of Classroom Success,” Anthony G. Vandarakis describes his alternative path to the classroom, leaving a corporate career for a Chicago classroom during a time of teacher shortages. He discusses recruitment, induction, mentoring, retention, and professional development from a new teacher’s point of view. In “To Professionalize or Not to Professionalize? Higher Education and the Teacher Workforce Cunundrum,” Mary Hatwood Futrell and Janet Craig Heddesheimer offer a view from the policy perspective of what it means to redefine the teaching profession, particularly in terms of selecting, preparing, and hiring the “best” teacher candidates. They define “best” to include the results of multiple measures (sometimes called dispositions), not just subject matter knowledge. They include a discussion of how the collaboration between districts and universities around Professional Development Schools is important for developing better-prepared teachers. In “Obstacles and Opportunities: Teacher Workforce Development amid Changes in Public Funding,” Thomas W. Payzant, superintendent of the Boston Public Schools and formerly superintendent of San Diego Unified School District and other districts, describes the challenges of hiring adequate numbers of qualified teachers to meet the needs of a large urban district. Even though the Boston teacher contract was revised in 2000 to create a timetable that made it easier to hire new teachers, state budget cuts threw the hiring process into disarray. But Payzant points out that there are district-level practices that can help prevent hiring crises, particularly an effective applicant tracking system. He also describes innovative practices such as a teacher pipeline program and a program that provides teacher candidates with preparation to teach in Boston Public Schools while earning a dual certification in special education and a subject area. In “Building the Teacher Workforce Bench for the Future: An Agenda for Funders, Paul Goren of the Spencer Foundation contends that human resource operations are essentially reactive rather than proactive in ensuring that sufficient numbers of qualified teachers are hired to meet the districts’ needs. He believes that funders can work with universities and school system to both address immediate needs for teachers and to develop a plan for workforce development that would include 1) documentation of classroom needs, 2) a variety of ways to meet training requirements, 3) mentoring and ongoing staff development as well as assistance with problem solving, and 4) developing schools into centers of learning for both students and adults. In “Teacher Unions: Building a Profession, Improving Our Schools,” Deborah Lynch, President of the Chicago Teachers Union, wants to change the perception that unions are self-interested and stand in the way of needed reforms. She argues that unions are essential to developing the teacher workforce for a number of reasons: 1) professional working conditions are key to recruiting and retaining the best teachers; 2) teacher unions have supported and helped develop mentoring and induction programs; 3) the work of improving schools is often done with unions as partners; 4) supporting legislation that gives teachers a voice in school-level decisions making, decreasing class sizes for poor children in primary grades, and advocating for full funding for federal and state mandates that impact teachers. Conclusion There is a pressing need for attention to many of the issues raised in this book, and the authors have done an admirable job of describing and discussing many of the key issues that stand in the way of teacher workforce development. I hope that subsequent volumes will report on work that is currently being done in this area at the level of teacher preparation programs, districts, and schools. A volume focused on describing the design, implementation, funding, and evaluation (including outcomes measures) of programs and practices designed to hire, retain, and develop a strong teacher workforce would be a valuable addition to this ongoing discussion. References Carnevale, A. P., & Fry, R. A. (2000). Crossing the great divide: can we achieve equity when Generation Y goes to college? Princeton, NJ: ETS. Feistritzer, E. (2003). Alternative Certification: A State-by-State Analysis 2003. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Information. Freeman, D. J., Brookhart, S. M., & Loadman, W. E. (1999). Realities of Teaching in Racially/Ethnically Diverse Schools: Feedback From Entry-Level Teachers. Urban Education, 34(1), 89-114. Kupermintz, H. (2003). Teacher effects and teacher effectiveness: a validity investigation of the Tennessee value added assessment system. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 25(3), 287-298. Levin, H. M., & McEwan, P. J. (2001). Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Methods and Applications (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. McLaughlin, M. W. (1987). Learning from Experience: Lessons from Policy Implementation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 9(2), 171-178. Roza, M., & Hill, P. T. (2004). How Within-District Spending Inequities Help Some Schools to Fail. In D. Ravitch (Ed.), Brookings Papers on Education Policy (pp. 201-228). Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Sanders, W. L., & Horn, S. P. (1998). Research Findings from the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) Database: Implications for Educational Evaluation and Research. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 12(3), 247-256. About the Reviewer Laura Goe is an Associate Research Scientist in Research and Development at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley’s Policy, Organizations, Measurement, & Evaluation program in the Graduate School of Education. She earned her M.S. from the University of Memphis in Educational Leadership and Policy and her B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in Language and Learning Theory in Social Context. Prior to attending Berkeley, Dr. Goe was a 7th grade English teacher in the Memphis, Tennessee public school system, where she taught language arts and writing in North Memphis. She also taught 7th and 8th grade special education in a rural school in Tunica, Mississippi. Dr. Goe’s current research efforts at ETS focus on value-added measurement, teacher quality, teacher preparation, teacher induction, professional development, the social benefits of education, rural education issues, Native American education, resource allocation in schools and districts, and mixed-methods evaluation.