Is the Wake Count school system not getting the best bang for the buck by offering higher pay for teachers who have master's degrees or national board certification?
At Tuesday's school board work session, school administrators presented data showing the majority of Wake's high-performing teachers don't have either a master's degree or national board certification.
"An important point is we pay extra for the board-certified teachers and the advanced-degree teachers receive extra but the high-performing teachers receive nothing," said Superintendent Tony Tata.
David Holdzkom, assistant superintendent for evaluation and research, presented this handout showing Venn diagrams of Wake teachers who are high performing and have those other degrees and certifications.
High performing is determined by assessing the performance of a teacher's students using EVAAS. Depending on whether the students are showing growth on state exams, teachers will get different ratings.
EVAAS isn't used for some elementary teachers due to the combination of the lack of state exams in K-2 and that you can't calculate growth in third grade.
Based on 2009-10 data, Wake had 104 fourth- and fifth-grade math teachers identified by EVAAS as high performing. Of the group, 62 only had a bachelor's degree, 22 also had a master's degree or higher, 13 had national board certification and 7 had all three.
Of the 101 grade 4-5 math teachers with national board certification, only 20 were identified as high performing.
Of the 207 grade 4-5 math teachers with a master's degree or higher, only 29 were identified as high performing.
The handout indicated similar results for middle school and high school teachers.
School board member John Tedesco said that it shows the need to make sure that the best teachers are being matched up with the students who most need the help.
"If I was a parent, I don’t necessarily want a nationally-board certified teacher or the master’s teacher, I’m going to want the one who will help my child grow," Tedesco said.
School board member Anne McLaurin said presenting something like this at the board table would show people that they do talk about academics. She said people may not watch the work session discussions where they discus these kinds of issues.
School board chairman Ron Margiotta responded by saying they may have a public presentation of the data at a regular board meeting.
Whether the board can and will change things remains to be seen. The difference in pay can be large.
For instance, a Wake teacher with 20 years on her license who only has a bachelor's degree would receive a salary of $49,858.90. If that same teacher got national board certification, the salary would be $55,837.40.
A Wake teacher with 20 years of experience on her license and a master's degree would get a salary of $55,089.50. Add in board certification and the salary rises to $61,704.90.
Teachers can also receive an additional $126 per month for an earned advanced certification and an additional $253 per month for a doctorate.
Wake has the most nationally board certified teachers in the nation. That's in large part because the state helps teachers pay for the cost of certification and then boosts their pay 12 percent if they get it.
UPDATE
Click here for a PDF from EDSTAR that explains the EVAAS system.
Click here for a sample EVAAS teacher report.
Click here to view the policy adopted by the state Board of Education.
Comments
Hmm...
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 13:33 — Bob_SconceWith regard to achievement gaps, you make a good point about the numbers, but are missing the main story: When some people talk about the "achievement gap," they don't really mean the performance different; they just mean loosely that lots of black student fail and lots of white students succeed. So, those people are happy when the black students go from failing to succeeding, while the white students go from succeeding to "wildly succeeding," even though the true "gap" may have even gotten larger.
Thanks to SAS and the CROs headquartered here (ex Quintiles), RDU probably has more statistics-literate people per capita than any other place in the world. Think about how horribly the data is interpreted in Winston-Salem.
But even that narrative
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 13:49 — Eric_BBut even that narrative doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Why do we get improvements on EOGs year after year that do not show up when we look at national assessments like the NAEP?
Year-after-year EOG and EOC scores go up until the number crunchers at NC DPI "renorm" the test and make it appear harder and test scores drop dramatically one year. Doesn't this seem strange to you?
It seems strange to me, especially when gaps between white and black students have been constant and improvements on national assessments like the NAEP have been very, very small for NC over the years. Then add in the fact that test scores in WCPSS have dropped relative to state average (WCPSS's lead over the state average has been dropping and for ED and black students we're below state average) and something begins to stink here.
Must Be A Light Hoework Night Eric!
Fri, 05/20/2011 - 21:09 — chaboardLet's talk about it over lunch soon. Been too long.
Well..
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 14:24 — Bob_SconceI'm not familiar with the data, esp. the NAEP data. If your description is accurate, then I agree that it's fishy. Unfortunately, when the numbers matter, there's an incentive to cook the numbers.
The simplest non-fishy
Sun, 05/22/2011 - 20:26 — danofncThe simplest non-fishy explanation is that a lot of emphasis is put on EOC/EOG testing, so teachers probably focus on them. In turn, that focus may cause scores on other tests (that aren't perceived to be as important) to suffer.
We get students who are less well-rounded, but can pass an EOG/EOC.
Keung ....A Question
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 19:58 — chaboard"Based on 2009-10 data, Wake had 104 fourth- and fifth-grade math teachers identified by EVAAS as high performing"
This phrasing - repeated a couple more times - makes it sound like only one year of student data was used to rate the teachers. I believe the state policy is that at least three years of EVAAS data must be available to judge a teacher rating usable for evaluation purposes:
The “teacher effects” described in EVAAS reports are estimates of the effect of a teacher’s performance on student achievement. If used as a part of a teacher’s comprehensive evaluation, the EVAAS report should include, at the minimum, an average of three (3) years of teacher specific data.
(Source: http://sbepolicy.dpi.state.nc.us/policies/TCS-C-021.asp?pri=04&cat=C&pol=021&acr=TCS )
Can you clarify whether the numbers used in this article and the pdf meet the standard laid out in state policy or is the board looking at far less meaningful and more noisy one year numbers?
If I were reporting the story I would ask for expanded numbers that include the breakdowns for those without a rating, too.
They didn't elaborate
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 21:11 — KeungHui (author)They didn't elaborate Tuesday. But it seemed to be more of a snapshot of how many teachers, using dats from 2009-10, were identified by EVAAS as high performing or had master's degrees or had national board certification. They were using EVAAS for comparison purposes as opposed to evaulating those teachers.
In Other Words...
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 07:57 — chaboard....there's a pretty good chance they were reporting random noise as if it were actual signal.
They were using EVAAS for comparison purposes as opposed to evaulating those teachers.
Not true. They identified teachers as High Performers. That is, by definition, evaluating teachers.
Missing Some Important Data
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 18:06 — sbosleyAren't we missing some very important data to make conclusions? Maybe it just wasn't in the handout, but if there are many, many more teachers in the Wake County system that only have a bachelor's degree then we would expect them to represent a larger percentage of high performing teachers. For each slide, the missing number is the total number of teachers with bachelors degrees. For instance, one can calculate that 32% of teachers that were National Board Certified (including some that were both certified and had Masters degrees) were high performing teachers from the second page ("WCPSS 2009-2010 Middle School Grades 6-7-8 Math Teachers"). We would want to compare that percentage with the percentage of teachers with just bachelor's degrees that are high performing, for example.
I agree that we need to see
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 20:27 — jenmanI agree that we need to see the total number of teachers. But I still think this is a step in the right direction in terns of identifying which teachers are high performing. And hopefully they follow through to then identifying what makes those teachers high performing so they can share it with other teachers.
Yeah, From (An Admittedly Quick) Glance ...
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 20:09 — chaboard.....at the handout there does not appear to be enough information to make ANY meaningful comparisons!! One can calculate the pct of Masters teachers (or the pct of board certified teachers) who were high performing - but there is no information to allow the calculation of corresponding numbers for non-Masters (or non-Certified)!
So you can't even make the most elementary comparison - ie, is a certified teacher is more or less likely than a non-certified teacher to be high performing - from the data in the handout because one of the denominators is completely missing!!
Did my quick glance miss something? Or did this board just demonstrate once again that they are incapable of evaluating anything remotely numerical?
...
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 20:57 — SideburnsThis is an E&R report not a document produced by the Board. Holdzkom should be blamed for any inaccurate or incomplete data.
Not Necessarily
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 08:20 — chaboardAs an analyst myself, I'll point out that the document could very well have thoroughly answer whatever question was asked of the analysts by the board. We don't know what the directive was so we can't thoroughly judge whether there was inaccurate or incomplete data. (Though granted, it sure seems likely).
We can, however, state with absolute certainty based on the Board Member comments that the board members are clearly incapable of drawing valid conclsions from the data they were given and clearly drew conclusions that were not in any way supported by the data.
And frankly -since data comes from multiple sources - the inability of decision makers to process data is a much, much bigger problem than one potentially faulty data source.
as per usual.....
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 21:06 — AngelaWas per usual.....
I think the most important
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 16:38 — jenmanI think the most important thing to come out of this data would be to identify what those high performing teachers are doing right and teaching all of our teachers those methods. So besides making sure that the high performing teachers are teaching the kids who need it most, we make sure that more of our students have access to high performing teachers by empowering all of our teachers to become high performing.
This is a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see how much push back there is from the NCAE. Hopefully Tata and Tedesco can keep the momentum going on this!
Effective Practices
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 22:35 — nriemannI agree. It turns out to be difficult to identify such practices, though. Rick Hanushek has some research on this. Easy to find the highly effective teachers according to value-added metrics, hard to figure out what they are doing that makes them highly effective.
Do you mean Eric Hanushek
Thu, 05/19/2011 - 16:54 — DrActualFactualDo you mean Eric Hanushek (Research Generalizations about using Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality)? (utdallas.edu)?
Wake hasthe most nationally
Wed, 05/18/2011 - 16:36 — CaryCurmudgeonWake hasthe most nationally board certified teachers in the nation. That's in large part because the state helps teachers pay for the cost of certification and then boosts their pay 12 percent if they get it.
Net, we are wasting money. Perhaps the GOP should be looking at this program instead of doing anything that impacts teacher/student ratios. Better yet, use that funding to create a performance-based incentive program.