Listen To Your Teachers

By SUSAN WAY-SMITH
President & CEO, L.A. Educational Partnership

Several recent studies underline the reality that state and federal reform measures can only create a framework for educational improvement, but fall short in delivering improved teaching and learning. Education occurs in the classroom between a teacher and students. It's time to include classroom teachers in the debate about what will support teacher innovation and effectiveness.

In the opening chapter of Policy Analysis for California Education's report, Crucial Issues in California Education 2000: Are the Reform Pieces Fitting Together? David Ruenzel questions whether reform legislation enacted over the past twenty years in California have motivated classroom teachers to implement more effective teaching practices in the classroom.

While California has sought to create dramatic education reform, Ruenzel points out familiar problems in implementation. There was an over-reliance on the Stanford 9 test as a single measure of accountability and lack of alignment between the Stanford 9 and the state's academic standards.

How can we capture what reforms are being carried out by teachers in their classrooms? What Matters Most: Improving Student Achievement, a report compiled by the National Teacher Policy Institute (NTPI) provides a way. Established in 1996, NTPI is a teachers' network to connect educational policy with actual classroom practice.

Over the past two years, K-12 classroom teachers, designated by NTPI as fellows, have conducted action research in their classrooms to help identify issues affecting student achievement and how these relate to standards. A Los Angeles teacher did research on how collaboration between experienced and new teachers within a teacher network affected new teachers' understanding and use of state language-arts standards in their classroom practice. More than half of the teachers in this primary school are emergency credentialed and have taught for less than three years - a common situation in LA's urban schools.

The teachers who participated in the school's teacher network stayed in teaching, improved their professional practices and were better able to implement standards-based instruction in their classrooms. Teachers who did not participate left teaching at the end of the year.

Research done by the NTPI teachers on a variety of topics can inform public policy. It is also important for teachers to learn how to analyze data from both formal and informal assessments to improve student achievement and teaching practices.

A recent study by Public Agenda asked what new teachers had to say about their profession. The study, A Sense of Calling: Who Teaches and Why, found that new teachers are not disillusioned, as is commonly believed. Instead, it found the overwhelming majority of new teachers are doing work they love to do. They are motivated and committed to their jobs, in contrast to their nonteaching classmates who did not have the same sense of direction in selecting their starting jobs.

The new teachers were asked what they thought would improve teacher quality. Surprisingly, increasing teacher salaries came in fourth in a list of responses. The top response measure in improving teacher quality is reducing class size, with 86% calling it "very effective." 59% of new teachers said that teacher quality would improve if secondary teachers majored in the subject they teach. And there is strong support for increasing professional development opportunities for teachers - with 57% of new teachers endorsing it as "very effective" at improving teaching.

We need to hear more classroom teachers' voices in the education reform debate. These reports are only a start. Policymakers must draw on the daily experience of classroom teachers to create effective education legislation. Teachers know what will support teacher innovation and effectiveness.

	Related Links The Test Doesn't Tell All: How Teachers Know That Their Students are Learning (Education Week) Contact Susan Way-Smith at way-smith@laep.org

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